Page 2426 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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Greenhouse gas reduction projects - Ministerial statement, 2 November 1989.
I move:
That the Assembly takes notes of the paper.
Debate (on motion by Mr Humphries) adjourned.
MOTOR TRAFFIC (AMENDMENT) BILL (NO. 4) 1989
Debate resumed from 28 September 1989, on motion by Mrs Grassby:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR STEFANIAK (3.49): Firstly, I am sorry I did not bring my four-by-two, or 107 millimetres by about 53. At any rate, in many ways - apart from one substantial matter which I will raise later in my speech and which my colleague Mrs Nolan will follow on with - I am very pleased to see this Bill introduced. As a person who was once in charge of parking prosecutions and who has been actively involved with a lot of people in the parking enforcement branch, including the parking inspectors, and in giving them lessons in evidence and things like that, I am pleased to see a simplification of this very difficult problem.
From the various briefings that we have had, I appreciate that about 119,000 parking prosecutions are sent through Canberra each year, about a quarter of which - 30,000 or so - relate to people from outside the Territory. Certainly, from my experience, about a third of those would end up in court. Quite often I would, in fact, be doing lists of about 200 parking prosecutions in court, which took up a fair amount of time for the parking branch, the staff, and the magistrate, and we would often have two or three people attending.
This system has been introduced in New South Wales, and the idea of the ultimate sanction being the loss of a person's licence or the non-renewal of a person's car registration has a lot of merit. It certainly improved the situation in New South Wales in relation to parking infringements. Accordingly, we certainly have no problem with that. I think that is going to be very beneficial to the ACT. We will see a large increase in prompt payment of these particular infringements; we will simplify the system and ensure that valuable court time is not wasted on minor matters. People who still feel aggrieved can, of course, defend their matters.
A person who goes to court and loses, no matter how good the excuse, if he or she does not have a defence, the defence will have to pay the infringement. But I suppose the counter argument to that is that it is decriminalised
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