Page 6145 - Week 19 - Tuesday, 17 December 1991
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inspectorate to follow up on cancelled registrations so that people whose insurances are invalidated as a result of this know about it. I believe that we are not dealing with cupidity; we are not necessarily dealing with people who are cheating; their children might have copped a parking fine and not told them. A whole range of issues are arising at the moment; there are very serious concerns about the default problems in non-payment of parking fines.
I believe that the Attorney should make some comment today, if possible, about what is going to happen over the Christmas break when people travel interstate with unregistered vehicles. That is the more profound implication, particularly for those with whom they collide, tragically; then you have to sue the nominal defendant or go through under the disastrous compensation schemes that have been introduced in Victoria and New South Wales in recent years. It is a momentous disaster, occasionally, for ACT people to be found in an accident involving personal injuries, particularly, with an unregistered vehicle through oversight or through a third party involvement, there having been a failure by an accountant to send on the notice or failure by a child of the registered vehicle owner.
Those matters are of concern. Daily, one hears of people finding that their cars have been officially deregistered for the past four or five months. We have heard this refrain before in the Assembly. I believe that we are entitled to hear something further about it from the Attorney before the Christmas-new year holiday season when so many people will travel interstate, a proportion of whose vehicles, no doubt, are unregistered. I believe that the Attorney should inform us how many vehicles in the past, say, six months have had their registrations cancelled as a result of fine defaults and how many of those registrations have been restored. If there is a net difference, and if it is significant, we must think of the safety, not only of the drivers and their passengers and families but also of any people who come into contact, tragically, with such an unregistered vehicle.
MR MOORE (10.50): Mr Speaker, I rise to support the Bills. I had prepared my speech along similar lines to that of Mr Collaery. I would disagree with him about the approaches that he said were made daily. When the original system was introduced, with reference to parking fines, there were daily approaches on the matter, and it was an issue that I raised at the time with the then Minister for Urban Services, Mr Craig Duby. He made his officers available to me to explain what the teething problems had been and how they were going about ensuring that people had a reasonable opportunity to know that their vehicles were going to be deregistered or their licences removed.
These Bills extend that system and enable the non-payment of traffic infringement notices to be enforced by the same method - by the cancellation of licences or registration or the suspension of the right to drive in the ACT. Currently
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