By CAMERON LUCADOU-WELLS
A PENSIONER deliberately abandoned during a community bus shopping trip may have earned ultimate victory against Greater Dandenong Council.
Tomorrow night, councillors will vote on a report recommending to overturn a ban on shopping jeeps for the pensioner trips.
In a stunning turnaround, the council may also offer free jeeps to pensioners using the service.
The limit on shopping bags will be lifted from one to two per passenger.
The eight-month review was sparked by Dandenong North pensioner Grace Willans, who took the council to the Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission over the ban and her treatment by a community bus driver last year.
On October 5, the bus collected her and her jeep from home and dropped her off at Waverley Gardens shopping centre.
But on the return leg, the driver told her no such jeeps were allowed — and she could not board the bus.
Ms Willans, 82, and legally blind, asked a shop owner to direct her to a taxi rank, where she rang and waited two hours for a cab.
Last week, she was reluctant to claim victory until she sees the council’s jeeps on the 11-seater community bus.
She said she’s since received plaudits for her Rosa Parks-like (US civil activist) stand.
“Two old ladies on the bus gave me a kiss and a hug and said they’d been waiting for this for a long time. ‘When are we going to get our jeeps?’ they said.”
Ms Willans, who had used the service with a jeep for six months before the incident, wants to know who ordered the jeep ban in the first place — “whoever did it was sitting on their brains”.
In February, Greater Dandenong community services director Mark Doubleday told the Journal that jeeps were banned because of occupational health and safety.
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