Wheelchair access halts treetop trek

Plans for a walkway high in the forest of Westland National Park have stalled over a requirement to provide access for wheelchair users.

South Island tribe Ngai Tahu is behind the $2 million treetop venture, a more than 300m-long looped walk, 14m high and against a backdrop of the Southern Alps' Franz Josef village.

Ngai Tahu Tourism acting general manager Rick Tau said providing electric or mechanical lifts to get disabled people up and over sets of steps built into the walkway would add more than $100,000 to the cost of the project.

"It could put the kibosh it," he said.

More than $50,000 had already been spent on design and planning. Electric lifts would require a power supply, and self-operated mechanical lifts could be a problem if people were severely disabled, Mr Tau said.

The tribe had asked the Department of Building and Housing for an exemption under the Building Act, but was turned down.

It's not the first time Ngai Tahu's tourism ventures had come up against disability laws, Mr Tau said.

"Some of it is idiotic. We have lodges that take two days' walking to get to, yet we have to provide wheelchair access to toilets."

But Auckland University of Technology tourism professor Simon Milne said access for disabled tourists was a growing issue worldwide. "If New Zealand doesn't keep up, that will be a losing factor for us. We will have more people with disabilities in future."

National's newly appointed political correctness eliminator, Wayne Mapp, said many of the South Island's most popular walking tracks were accessible only to the able-bodied.

"Going for a forest walk is in the nature of a discretionary activity, so you have to ask, where is the balance?

"If it got to the point the whole project became unviable, then I think that becomes unreasonable."

Building and Housing said the walkway did not qualify for a waiver because it was deemed a new building the public had access to, and therefore had to provide for the disabled.