Page 4511 - Week 15 - Thursday, 22 November 1990
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First of all, let me look at a hypothetical situation. I will then look at a real life situation. The hypothetical situation could be, let us say, that someone parks in a loading zone at midnight in Bunda Street and gets booked. Someone else comes along after that and removes the ticket. The person then drives the vehicle home. Just before Christmas that person leaves on a couple of months tour around Australia. While the person is away, a letter arrives reminding them that they have received a parking infringement notice that they have not paid. It sits in the letter box. Sometime later they receive a notification stating that if they do not pay that - and another $20 - within so many days their vehicle registration is going to be cancelled.
Meanwhile, they are happily touring around Australia, and do not know that either of these letters has arrived. Unfortunately, while driving up towards the Gold Coast, it starts to rain, and they skid on an oily patch and run into a Rolls Royce, which is tipped over a cliff. The Rolls Royce is written off. It is worth $150,000. They think, "Well, that is a terrible thing to happen but, luckily, no-one was injured and the damage is, of course, covered because we are insured". When they get back to Canberra they find out that their vehicle registration has been cancelled and, indeed, their property liability insurance is invalidated because they were driving, unknowingly, a vehicle that had its registration cancelled. Certainly, when the vehicle registration is cancelled it does not cancel the personal liability; injury to someone is still covered, but property damage from your own insurance is not covered. That is one major anomaly that has been created by what we have done, and that needs to be corrected, and corrected soon, before all these people leave for their Christmas holidays.
There are any number of scenarios where that situation could happen. Last weekend, someone in Sydney told me that he went along to renew his licence and was told that it had been cancelled six months previously. He said, "Well, I did not know anything about that". He has had an address for years. They had the right address, but he simply did not get any mail. He said that he does remember seeing a report which acknowledged that quite a lot of mail does go astray. I think we certainly understand that that is a possibility, no matter how common.
We need to do something. We need to make sure that the person gets notice. Perhaps, it could be by certified mail, or it should be in person, unless there is any other method. Certainly, it should be one or the other. At the very least, it should be certified mail. This brings me onto another matter that was of great concern to me when I initially found out that I had lost half my life. It had actually been, I thought at the time, taken away by the Motor Vehicle Registry. For 44 years I had been under the false impression that I was born in 1946. I discovered my
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