Watch this (parking) space Author: Nickola Cable Date: 17/10/2008 Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
A DISTURBING new trend has emerged in my shopping centre. Next to the disabled parking spots and the senior citizens' ones, a row of prime parking positions has been reserved for "parents with prams". Parents with prams! You're kidding me, right? No, says the car park attendant, it's serious.
Designer prams (weighing in at nine kilograms and about a metre long) are so difficult to get out of the latest seven-seat four-wheel-drive, special treatment is required. I gaze, mystified, at the row of enormous vehicles parked in their oversized prime spots. If birth rates are about 1.8 babies for each woman, perhaps these behemoth vehicles have been acquired merely to accommodate the latest gargantuan pram?
Surely not. There can't be many new families in this country keen to spend just shy of $2000 on a pram with more safety features and engineering enhancements than your average Volvo? Or don't they realise that an off-road pram will need an off-road car?
To accommodate this excess, our nanny state must start nannying the nannies. It doesn't stop with the parking spaces either. I don't begrudge the $5000 baby bonus and I see the bigger picture behind the $1000 Christmas bonus just announced (after all, someone has to pay for those prams and the petrol for those cars) but the parking spots have pushed me over the edge.
I should disclose my conflict here. I don't have a baby (or a pram) and I drive a fuel-efficient, two-door car.
And this year I'll be saving up to buy Christmas presents for friends and family without government assistance.
It looks like I'll be lugging those gifts around an overcrowded car park and wrestling them into my car. As I'm struggling, I can feel good that I've paid the taxes to ease the lives of the new parents, their prams, their Christmas shopping and their all-terrain vehicles. Or not.
Nope. This Christmas, I'll be parking in the "parents with prams" premier parking spot and I'll enjoy it. What's more, I'll keep doing it until they pay me a bonus for using a car no larger than I actually need. Or maybe just set aside a spot for "wage-slaves working 50-or-more hours a week". This space is reserved for people who work long and hard - at home or in the workplace.
Readers are invited to send 450 words on what makes their blood boil to heckler@smh.com.au. Include your daytime phone details.