Page 2436 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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pay their fines before they incur that administration charge. The administration charge, of course, is an eminently sensible idea. I think, once again, Mr Stefaniak has recognised the value of imposing a charge - no problem for anyone. But we all agree that, of the tickets that are issued - I think it is in order of 120,000 per year - only about one-third of people at the moment currently pay their fines within the appropriate time. The remaining 80,000 people wait for a reminder notice to come to them before they then go and pay. Of the 80,000 who get the reminder notice, I believe in the order of 79,000 actually go and pay their fines, if my understanding of the figures is correct. I believe at the end of the day only about 1,000 or 1,200 people per annum actually go to court to contest a parking fine. Clearly, people are using the reminder notice system as an extension of time on the payment of the fine.
Once again, I think it is worth while thinking about the situation that, of those 80,000 people per annum who get a reminder notice, quite a number would be "double-ups". Out of the 80,000 second notices that go out - I do not know, and I am just guesstimating figures - I would not be at all surprised if at least 40,000 people get two notices per year, or perhaps even 20,000 people get four notices per year.
Those notices cost money to produce and issue. We are all familiar with the costs. We have been briefed on this by members of the department. Basically, the accepted cost of issuing a reminder notice to the public for a parking infringement seems to come out at $13 or $14. That is not an insubstantial amount of money when one considers the current situation of 80,000 of those second notices going out. We are talking about something in the order of a million dollars worth of public expense. As I said, it will be interesting to see whether that public expense is being borne by all the ratepayers and taxpayers of the ACT to provide probably a small core of offenders basically with additional time to pay. I just do not think that is fair.
As I said, the situation remains that a parking infringement notice is a fine; it is not an account. The concept of sending someone a notice to pay a fine, to me, is not socially fair. As we go through the amendments that Mr Stefaniak and I have proposed, I think people will see that the amendment to extend the time within which people can pay their fine - from 14 days to 21 days - is eminently sensible here in the ACT. Most people in the ACT still work on a fortnightly pay system; that means that any person who receives a ticket has at least two fortnightly paydays in which to budget to pay the fine.
I suppose one could argue that it should be extended to 28 days. I genuinely believe that, if we do extend the period to 28 days, the situation will be that most people will tend to forget about the fine. It will be something that
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