Sailor Russell Phillips is unbeatable on water – but on land, there are all kinds of obstacles to his wheelchair.

OPINION: I had one of those conversations this week, the ones where you learn something huge, and then are ashamed you didn't already know it.

It came courtesy of a close friend and former flatmate, and her husband, in New Zealand for a sailing regatta. We had dinner and a lot of laughs in a ground floor restaurant with wide-opening doors. That last bit is important because Russell uses a wheelchair; a former naval officer, he ruined his spine in a motorbike accident 30 years ago.

When I first met him he could walk a bit, and he stood for the ceremony at their lovely wedding; but his condition has gradually worsened and so now, he sits for everything.

CHRIS McKEEN / STUFF Alison Mau had one of those conversations this week, the ones where you learn something huge.

Russell and Roomie (I've called my friend that since we were 20 and I'm not stopping now) travel regularly, all over the world, for inclusive sailing competitions. The craft they sail are "universally designed" – more on that later – and there were wheelchair users, and vision impaired, some elderly competitors and one woman with cerebral palsy who controlled the boat with her feet. Watching from shore they look no different at all, from any other sailors.

It's back on dry land where the problems start. Getting to and from the regattas, and all the bits in between – well, that's an issue. As we ate, Russell and Roomie told me what it's like to travel as a "wheelie" (their term).

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SUPPLIED Despite injuring his spine in a bike accident, Russell Phillips stood for his wedding to Roomie. Ali, left, was a guest.

It starts when you search for hotel rooms online. There are usually no filters for accessibility, so you have to phone the hotel direct and ask, and then you pay a "superior" rate for a room that is rarely superior, most of them being next to the lift with a view of the car park/air-conditioning units. My friends have been told they are priced this way to "recoup the costs" of installing accessible bathrooms.

At the airport check-in, Russell is generally ignored while staff direct questions to his wife:

"Can he walk to his seat? Will he need assistance getting off? This is all while Russell is sitting right there and is perfectly capable of answering but there's an assumption that it's more than just his legs, that doesn't work," Roomie says, bemused.

123RF Just 25 per cent of disabled Kiwis are in paid work.

Landing in New Zealand this visit, the plane seat's armrest didn't fold out so Russell had to climb over to exit; the aisle chair they brought for disembarking had a flat tyre and a missing footplate, so Russell had to hold his leg in his hands so that it wouldn't drag on the ground and get caught under the chair.

"Once at the hotel in the 'accessible' room, the cups and plates are in an unreachable cupboard and you can't reach the kettle with those ridiculously short cords, either."

On it goes – if you can find a restaurant without steps to climb, the tables are generally too low for a wheelchair to fit underneath, disabled toilets often have heavy, inward-opening doors instead of sliders, and pedal bins. Pedal bins!

SUPPLIED A triumphant Russell Phillips with wife Roomie, after winning 2017 Victorian Disabled Sailor of the Year.

I love these people, so hearing all of this made me very angry, but somehow we were still laughing about the absurdity of it all. They know they're fortunate to be able to do so much travel. Russell is not a whinger – he spends his life looking after the welfare of the veterans at his local RSA in Melbourne. They would just like to be able to do simple things in the way the rest of us do.

As New Zealand's Disability Rights Commissioner Paula Tesoriero puts it, enough of this and you have to laugh, because otherwise you'd cry.

She takes me back to basics: there are two models of disability. Number one, the medical model that is focused on the impairment, and number two, the social model that states a person is disabled not by their impairment but by the environment in which they live. If you take those barriers away, they can live, work, and travel in the same way people without disabilities do.

The latter makes so much sense, and is where universal design comes in: the concept of designing spaces or things so they're usable by everyone regardless of their age, status or ability.

We need to adopt this concept much more broadly, even if purely for the sake of our bottom line. Just 25 per cent of disabled Kiwis are in paid work. A report by the NZ Institute of Economic Research in 2017 found that solving the accessibility barriers to employment would give us a net productivity gain of $862 million in GDP.

Essentially, Tesoriero says, the more easily people are able to spend, the more businesses earn, the better we all are.

If, like me, you hadn't really thought about this in the context of the everyday before, try this; tomorrow, notice the pavements you walk along to work. Are they uneven? Is there space for powered wheelchairs on the bus or train you take?

What about audio features for the vision impaired or video for the hearing impaired? How many mobility taxis do you see in the rush hour traffic alongside your car? Are the buildings you enter and exit all day long really set up for everyone? (we're not just talking about a ramp or electric doors here.)

Next year New Zealand will be examined by the United Nations, to judge how well we comply with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. There's a list of key issues like housing, education, employment and access that our Government will have to respond to. Disabled rights advocates are hoping this will give us the kick up the backside as we need to do so much better than we are right now.