Charity’s fury at Westfield

By Rebecca Fraser
A KEYSBOROUGH-based Wheelchair Foundation has slammed the operators of Westfield Fountain Gate for the appalling treatment of two disabled shoppers.
Australian Wheelchair Foundation’s Victorian branch secretary, Sharon Mammone, said they had registered their disgust with Westfield after the men were stopped from taking two wheelchairs owned by the centre from a main door to the car park.
The brothers, from Euston, near Mildura, both have muscular dystrophy.
One man was forced to crawl five metres to a car when security staff refused to let them take the wheelchairs outside the centre.
Ms Mammone said the organisation had written a letter to Ross and Tony Costa, who are both in their early 40s, to express their disgust at the incident and praised them for having the courage to share their experience with the public.
“We have written a letter to the individuals stating how disgusted we are with the ridiculous protocol and expressed our sympathy for the indignity they had to suffer,” she said.
“We are pretty appalled.
“We [the Wheelchair Foundation] are off to Fiji on Thursday to distribute wheelchairs over there, and this is the sort of thing you expect from a Third World country.
“To find this ignorance in our own country is very disappointing.
“I was just dumbfounded when I heard.”
Ms Mammone said Westfield had told the foundation that their policy would change.
But the humiliation that the incident had caused could not be easily fixed, she said.
“This shows that a lot more work needs to be done to make people aware,” she said.
“They needed the chair to access the shop and the shop facilities.
“Isn’t it then obvious that they needed the chairs to get from the door to the car?
“People’s dignity has been stripped away. Imagine being subjected to crawl to your car. How humiliating is that?”
Ms Mammone is also on the board of the Australian National Wheelchair Foundation and her husband, Vincent Mammone, is chairman of the Victorian branch.
The organisation operates from the Mammones’ company, Via Trans, in Keysborough, which receives and distributes wheelchairs in Victoria.
She said the organisation aimed to improve disabled people’s dignity and their sense of self-worth, and show disabled people that they were a valuable part of their community.
“Just because they are less able does not make them less valuable,” she said.
“I am really grateful for the courage these individuals have showed by bringing this to the attention of the media.
“I don’t know where this policy would have originated from and I am amazed that things like this are still happening in our society. I shop there myself and you just have to put yourself in their situation,” she said.
The Victorian branch has helped send wheelchairs to Samoa and other countries in the Pacific and Asia, as well as across Australia, including servicing Indigenous communities.