Why are all have our own sticker to bare

Last Sunday, I took my mother to church and committed many sins.

First I parked illegally, in a School Bus Only spot. Does it compound the sin if you’re rehearsing your excuses before you even get out of the car? There are no school buses on Sundays; it was the only spot to get my mobility-restricted mother into the church; the organist, whose music we had come to hear, had told us to park there. None strictly a lie, but none a fully compelling truth either, not least so close to the eye of God.

But we had a trump card: the space, though designated for buses, was marked what I like to call “disability blue”, and we had The Sticker.

Mum has one of the 417,000 mobility stickers currently issued in NSW. For her it is permanent, for me just for a day, and its empowerment was quickly going to my head. Sunday was Pentecost, when the apostles were filled with the Holy Spirit and, in the earlier Judaic version, Moses had received the commandments. Today they might opt for the blessing of The Sticker.

So righteous was I feeling, not even the archbishop could compete. When my attention flagged during the service, I read emails and an interesting article, in violation of St Mary’s Cathedral’s no-mobile-device rule. Afterwards, I wandered unwittingly between praying congregants and their statues, and between tourists and their selfie-shooting cameras. What can I say? I had Sticker hubris.

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For lunch, The Sticker and I drove the wrong way into a car park (“Sorry, couldn’t find the entrance”) and jumped the long cafe queue to order (“Sorry, didn’t know the system”). The Sticker had taken over. Every time it and I broke a rule, I felt like I was saving $581 and one demerit point. Hallelujah! The Sticker, used while caring for a beloved elder, gives you a cloak of righteousness. It doesn’t matter how many Bad Guy things you do; you are demonstrably the Good Guy.

Abuse of mobility parking permits, a crime deserving its own place in hell, is growing. An NRMA and Spinal Cord Injuries Australia report found that in 2020/21 (a COVID-affected year), 12,992 fines were issued in NSW for illegal use of disabled parking spaces. This is only part of the story. With the number of issued permits rising by 60 per cent since 2007 so that 8 per cent of all drivers have one, councils have lagged in providing enough parking spaces, leaving genuine Sticker-holders competing with not only each other but also the thousands of abusers, for fewer spaces.

The Australian Disability Parking Wall of Shame Facebook group, membership 13,000, posts photos of cars parked in blue spaces without permits. It shames cars with fake and expired mobility stickers. (You’d be surprised by how many of the cheats are dumb enough to drive cars with company logos, and by how many also park across two spaces.) It also shames people who harass permit-holding parkers who don’t have a visible disability.