By Luke Costin in Sydney

Every so often, small business owners south of Sydney begin their day cleaning up human faeces.

It’s an odorous reminder of Port Kembla’s dire need for a main street public toilet.

“It’s a fairly regular basis,” local chamber of commerce president Greg Rodgers tells AAP.

“When businesses are asking me how things are progressing with getting a toilet, they say they’re having ongoing issues, sometimes multiple times a week – people urinating, defecating in the public areas.”

Those desperate for relief can ask the pub or restaurants – or walk two kilometres to the beach if it’s both daylight and surf lifesaving season.

But it’s hardly an option for all abilities or all hours, hampering dozens of new businesses and families helping revive the industrial town.

“Are people going to say ‘we’ll check out this new area – shame, I have to pee in the park’?” Mr Rodgers wonders.

The six-year battle for a public loo in Port Kembla illustrates Australia’s inconsistent lavatory landscape, with accessibility, safety and availability varying widely.

Standards do not address existing social norms – such as parenting and gender – nor are they able to reflect the gamut of human experience, or even respond to the variety of wheelchair users, a recent Churchill fellow found.

Standards also do not apply to existing buildings, leaving people resorting to dank decades-old facilities or holding on in hope of something better down the road.

“With very few exceptions, they’re not very well designed,” said design expert Christian Tietz.

“The general look and feel is really one of bare necessity and extremely function focused.

“It’s really sort of addressing the lowest common denominator.”

But it shouldn’t be so, the senior lecturer in UNSW’s Faculty of the Built Environment says.

Toilets set the tone for public behaviour, expectations and conduct, he says.

Facilities that show respect and offer an opportunity to refresh and revive will result in people carrying that through their other interactions with a town.

“But if I go in somewhere and it’s got blue lighting, it doesn’t work, and I feel like I’m being treated like a criminal… then that sets the tone for that locality and I come out feeling accordingly,” Dr Tietz says

“The toilet is a place where you can make an impression – it’s also place where we are more or less equal, right?”

He rejects counter arguments based on cost and vandalism, saying loos could be durable, highly frequented and visually appealing.

Australia’s 23,000 public and private public bathrooms could be even more, with power points to charge phones, benches to rest and external wash basins for non-toileting matters such as rinsing fruit.

Increasing interaction with the facilities would also promote personal safety, he said.

Dr Tietz’s recognition that loos can be more than just places for ones and twos is well supported.

Visionary architects in one Tokyo district recently led the redesign of 17 accessible public bathrooms, resulting in rooms shaped like a spacecraft and another like a squid in a wider octopus park.

Sydney’s Inner City Legal Centre in October called on NSW to recognise public toilets as an essential private space that allows for changing clothes after exercise or spilling food, cleaning children and nappies or as “wind-down” spaces.

The Australian College of Road Safety meanwhile suggests improvements to highway rest area public toilets could enhance initiatives to ensure motorists take regular rest breaks.

It notes some rest areas lack public toilets and those that do have them may discourage use due to a lack of flushing toilets or potable water.

Women truck drivers also face difficulty accessing equitable facilities, as do the 5.5 million Australians with a disability.

Sanitary bins are not compulsory in men’s toilets, the Country Women’s Association points out, compromising the dignity and ability of older men to manage their health needs while using public spaces.

And any women attending a large event knows queuing for bathrooms is an experience far more infrequent for men.

One answer meets many of those concerns however – universal design principles in bathrooms.

They’re designed for everyone, with single cubicles with a basin, a full-height door that opens out on to public space as well as change facilities.

Medical doctor Amanda Cohn led the charge to revamp her regional city’s restrooms to factor in universal design principles and is investigating the potential for wider rollout.

The Albury-based MP is chairing a NSW inquiry into public toilets encompassing topics of design, minimum standards and international best practice.

“(With universal design) you’re designing out the old-fashioned narrow, winding corridor where there’s a hidden, shared space – that’s really where a lot of the inaccessibility and the danger of public toilets comes from,” she said.

“For a surprising number of people, the provision of public toilets actually impacts their decisions about whether or not to visit a town or go to an event.

“It actually impacts people’s participation in community life.

“And for people whose lives are impacted by this every day, this inquiry is a really incredible opportunity for their voices to be heard.”

Those include the voices of people with disabilities or chronic medical conditions, people who are trans or gender diverse and parents with young children.

One member of the public has also demanded an end to the “prison look” in some older facilities.

“Those cold metal seats make taking a potty-trained child to the park horrible,” one submission says.

The inquiry, which is receiving submissions until December 2, will also examine maintenance.

That touches a concern some people have raised to previous inquiries about using non-gender-segregated bathrooms.

Albury City Council noted its 10-year public toilet strategy and redevelopment drive had increased maintenance costs by up to $100,000 per year.

But shouldering those costs had been prioritised, the council said.

It’s an argument Greg Rodgers hopes the local government for Port Kembla can also get behind as he underlines the benefit a best-practice toilet would deliver community and business.

“Costs shouldn’t be an issue – we shouldn’t have to expect the pub to be the only available option,” he says.

“There are so many things that branch from having a good access to a toilet.”