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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1148 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

I think the access fee to roadwork is either something the minister has made up on the run or something he has dragged out of some other publication and he has not checked it out, because it does not apply to the construction of the registration fee that we have here. In fact it is not a concept which has been shared with anybody in the community. I challenge the minister to wander with me through the streets of Civic and we will ask people what they think. We will ask, "Do you think this is an access to our roads fee, or do you think we should be paying for the amount of road use that we get?" I suspect that the answer will be the latter in every case.

Mr Berry put it fairly well too, I think. You should be able to put your car in the shed for a certain length of time per year because you cannot afford to run it, and when you go to renew that registration within that 12 months period, and 12 months is not a long time, you should not have to pay for the time that you have had it in the garage. What would happen, Mr Speaker, for example, if all of your rates bills, your electricity bills, your school fees and all that sort of thing came in at the one hit and that is the month that you bought a new car? You would want to register it for six months and then kick it off. Fine. That is available now under the current system.

What if you could not afford to do it so you just wanted it to sit there? You would have to go through the whole process again later, and then, when you did do it later, you would have to pay for not using it. It just does not make any sense to me that I can leave my car sitting in the garage for 11 months because I cannot afford to renew it and then, when I go along to renew it, some character says to me, "By the way, you have to pay for the 11 months that you have had it sitting in the garage." I say, "Well, excuse me, why do you think I didn't do it earlier than this? It was because I couldn't afford to do it. What do you want me to do?"

Cosmetic changes between now and May will not help in the slightest, Mr Speaker. I have this horrible thought that if we left it at that while the minister went off and tried to check it out we would come back with somebody having to go to the motor vehicle registry and say, "Excuse me, I'm a super poor person and I can't afford to do this," and then have to lay their soul bare to some bureaucrat and say, "Look, I just can't afford this." How embarrassing and humiliating would that be, Mr Speaker? I would not want to do it and I would not want anybody I know to have to do it. In fact I would not want anybody I don't know to have to do that. I think that is appalling, and that is the only choice that people have had under this current arrangement.

I would urge members to support Mr Berry's amendment.

MR RUGENDYKE (11.50): Mr Speaker, I first wrote to the Urban Services Minister seeking information about the revamped motor vehicle registration process on 11 January this year. I was concerned that the government was sending out registration stickers before they were paid for, and the insurance risks associated with rogue drivers electing to use their vehicles with unpaid labels on their windscreens. That is relevant to this debate, Mr Speaker, in that in Mr Smyth's reply he admitted that there was some risk that people may attach the label to their vehicle without payment, but the experience in New South Wales and Victoria, where the system is already in place, revealed that there is quite a low incidence of unregistered vehicles on the road.

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