Page 6150 - Week 19 - Tuesday, 17 December 1991
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MR CONNOLLY: Mr Jensen says that you wait until you get an acknowledgment. All you have to do then is not send the acknowledgment. Parking fines are a joke in this town, or they were a joke until this provision was introduced because people would not pay. That concept is hard to grasp for most members of this Assembly because we are all responsible people - we on this side of this house certainly are, and I will credit many members of the Opposition with being responsible. I am sure it would not occur to members of this Assembly to treat a parking or speeding fine with contempt.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Connolly, I think you should withdraw the "are not responsible", because, even though you are saying it in a frivolous tone, that does not come across in the printed word. I am just asking you to withdraw the imputation that some of the members in this chamber are not responsible.
MR CONNOLLY: I mean no imputation, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: I realise that.
MR CONNOLLY: To the extent that you read one there, I withdraw it. The point that I am making is that it would not occur to members of this Assembly not to pay fines, as would be the case with most members of the community. Most members of the community pay their fines, but a proportion did not.
Mr Kaine: Most of us try not to get any.
MR CONNOLLY: Indeed. As Mr Kaine says, most of us try not to get them. But a proportion of the community did not and would not pay them. As Mr Stefaniak said, there is a massive backlog of unpaid speeding fines because people treat the system with contempt. There was a massive backlog of unpaid parking fines because people treated it with contempt. Following the introduction of the sanction of loss of registration for non-payment of parking fines, the rate of non-payment has dropped dramatically.
This sanction for failure to pay speeding fines is realistic; gaol was not really seen as a realistic sanction. The police, quite properly, were not devoting scarce resources to running around this town issuing warrants for arrest for unpaid speeding tickets. They, quite properly, had better things to do. Meanwhile, people treated the system as a joke, and a vast sum of money was building up by way of unpaid fines. This is a realistic sanction which will require people to pay fines. We will carefully monitor the operation of it.
I will give Mr Collaery the statistics that he sought on the number of cancellations and the number of times that there have been complaints about non-awareness of cancellations.
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