Australia seems to lag behind the rest of the world in disability policy, and this particular case is no exception. Currently, Qantas’ policy is to seat the customer who requires extra space next to an empty seat if there is one available. And if there isn’t? Tough cookie – someone’s going to be invading someone else’s space. Virgin Australia goes one step further backward in stating that they don’t even have a policy for dealing with this scenario.

But what does the person sitting in the adjacent seat think about this? According to a recent poll by travel website Skyscanner, 76% of travellers believe in the concept of a “fat tax” – that is, that overweight people should be forced to pay for a second seat if they are unable to fit in one alone.

As people are undoubtedly getting bigger and bigger, are airline seats accommodating this increase with wider and wider seats? Or, is it the reverse – with profit margins getting tighter for the airline industry, is there a reluctance to provide wider seats, on the basis that it may mean less tickets sold?

Most economy class seats are 17 inches, or 43.18 cm wide. A quick measure of my own proportions, as a relatively narrow male with a 34 inch waist shows that my approximate width is 36cm. But that’s certainly at the lower end of the scale. I recall, while working in the public hospital system as a physiotherapist, measuring at least one obese patient who had a hip width of 78cm. A recent study states that Australian women are evolving to be heavier over time, as well as shorter. That’s a very specific population, but if we had some (easily obtainable!) anthromopetric data about hip width over time, I’m sure we’d find it was expanding.

So it’s clear that the seat sizes on planes don’t necessarily suit a great deal of body shapes. But what about the attitudes of fellow travellers? When did we all become so callous and unsympathetic?

It’s not a huge stretch to link some of those attitudes to the hands-off approach of the Howard administration to issues like childhood obesity. See, John Howard believed that it wasn’t the responsibility of the government to regulate advertising for unhealthy foods during kid’s shows. By doing so, we were in danger of engendering a “nanny state.”

This conveniently allowed him to neglect the whole issue of childhood obesity. If you don’t recognise that it’s (at least partially) the government’s responsibility, you don’t have to worry about formulating policy for it.

The unfortunate corollary of this attitude is that by shifting the focus solely onto those who are obese, we relieve ourselves of all our responsibilities. We no longer have to change our attitudes towards people who are obese and overweight, let alone the size of our plane seats.

TV shows like The Biggest Loser provide us with the illusion that everybody, with a bit of determination, and a healthy dose of public shame (Exhibit A: Dance Your Ass Off) can lose large amounts of weight. But what about those who genuinely can’t? Those with thyroid deficiencies, hormonal imbalances, Prader-Willi Syndrome? Is it simply acceptable for those who aren’t obese to say: “These are the conditions of travel, if you don’t fit into them, you should cough up more cash”?

Still not sure? Here’s another example. On trains throughout Sydney, wheelchair users access trains via a portable ramp, which needs to be pulled out and put in place by platform staff. This usually causes a delay of a couple of minutes, but I’m sure if you polled their fellow commuters, you’d find that the overwhelming majority of people wouldn’t mind. Would it be fair to charge these people a premium for the extra services that they’re receiving? Aren’t they also inconveniencing their fellow commuters?

One of the wisest suggestions that I’ve heard about this topic has been to issue obese people with cards, given to them via their GPs. Such a system would work similarly to disabled parking. It would enable them to sit in specific seats designed for them, and eventually, this would become so ingrained that it would become the social norm.

However, such a system is extremely complex and would require a lot more planning and consideration before it could be implemented. Before this happens, we need to get a little better at being empathetic, and little worse at pointing the finger. We need to realise that changing attitudes is as important, if not more important, than changing airplane seats.

]]> http://www.keepnbusy.com/2010/03/09/the-obesity-dilemma-is-society-the-biggest-loser/feed/ 0 http://www.keepnbusy.com/2009/10/17/everybody-slow-down-take-a-deep-breath-and-think/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=everybody-slow-down-take-a-deep-breath-and-think http://www.keepnbusy.com/2009/10/17/everybody-slow-down-take-a-deep-breath-and-think/#comments Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:03:46 +0000 Weh http://www.keepnbusy.com/?p=106

It’s time we all stopped running around and slowed down for a bit. It’s time that we realised that having pride in the end result often means taking a few more steps to get there. It’s time that our media and our politicians realised that being faster isn’t necessarily being more efficient.

I’m not a huge fan of mainstream media these days. Check out the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald website (a once reputable news source) and you’ll find stories of celebrity scandal, and innocuous events that are written to invoke a reaction, but don’t actually contain any content. A noticeable exception to this has been the ABC News website – which has been responsible for producing factual and interesting news stories for some time now. But even they are not innocent of the desire to produce fast and punchy news stories.

I’ve been following some of their latest stories on the latest media sensation that is Twitter. Boy, when the media gets a sniff of something that is considered in vogue, they do hang onto it with both hands. Recent stories on this most popular of topics have included Prime Minister Kevin Rudd tweeting for advice on whether to see Julie and Julia, and a bunch of Twitter users complaining that their iPhone alarms don’t work. Still, this isn’t as bad as the doyen of trashy Twitter stories that the Sydney Morning Herald supplied us with: Kevin Rudd tweeting about eating a biscuit. Apologies for the atrocious pun, but I’d hardly consider that a cracker of a information worth spending time on.

Twitter is an interesting and foreign topic to many, no doubt, but is this really the best manner in which to cover it? How about the various ways in which politicians use Twitter – some effectively to increase interaction with the community, others to produce token efforts that they are in touch with technology and youth (no fingers pointed, Uncle Kevin)? How about a story about whether Twitter and other social media is improving our inter-personal relationships or lessening them?

Garnered by my dismay at reading these stories, I wondered to myself: “What could be the possible reasons of this onslaught of poorly planned and rushed stories?”

I’m sure there are many reasons but I can think of two off the top of my head:

1. The lack of sub-editors is leading to less control over what kind of stories are being published

2. The 24 hour news cycle is driving an increased push for quicker and more regular stories, but not necessarily more informative stories.

The second point is worth expanding on. You may recall recently the recent trials of Dennis Ferguson, a convicted paedophile who had been relocated from Queensland to a quiet, family suburb in Sydney’s North West, only to have vehement and vindictive local residents in uproar over his placement. This is an entirely fascinating topic in itself, but in the week or so that this story was big news, no less than 7 news articles over the space of 24 hours was published by ABC News. Now really, can there be that many developments over a 24 hour period that justifies 7 separate articles?

Even worse than this was the response to this dilemma from the NSW State Government, who conveniently changed a previous law which stated that they were unable to relocate criminals such as Ferguson. This can only be described as a knee-jerk reaction to the Housing Minister David Borger’s previous statements that Ferguson would be quickly relocated, only to find out that, bugger – I don’t have the legislative power to do that.

So what we have is media overproducing stories, a housing minister rushing out a statement that he could not actually back up in practice, and a State Government making policy on the run to compensate for this frenzied activity.

The question remains – is this rush of ADHD-like behaviour in media and government a product of society’s demands for a quick response, or is society being influenced and conditioned by media and the government to act this way? In reality, it’s probably a little bit of both.

Unfortunately, rushing around and trying to produce results before they are ready can only lead to one thing, and that is disaster. We need politicians who are able to provide foresight further than the next election, and media who don’t act like excited little schoolkids passing on the most recent bit of gossip.