Page 1510 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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other family members have left, so they can decide who to nominate as the driver for a traffic offence. I am advised it is also not uncommon for the office to receive declarations from young provisional drivers nominating one of their parents as the person who was driving their child’s vehicle—complete with P-plates—at speed through a red light at 4 am on a Saturday or Sunday morning near a popular venue for young people, despite the fact that the parent has several other cars registered in their name and a blemish-free driving history stretching over 30 years. Some parents may even consider that “taking the points” for their offspring is a loving thing to do, not realising that by doing so they are condoning unsafe driving habits that could result in an accident that causes permanent harm or death to their child or someone else.
There is also a concern that some corporations are failing to identify the driver involved in demerit points offences and are paying the infringement notice penalty in the name of the corporation, thereby enabling those drivers to evade the demerit points associated with the offence. On at least 1,500 occasions last year, corporations in the ACT failed to identify the drivers involved in demerit points offences.
This problem is not isolated to the ACT. In the Herald Sun newspaper of 23 December 2011 it was reported that in Victoria up to 50,000 drivers a year exploit the corporate-penalty loophole to avoid demerit points. New South Wales has also identified the failure of corporations to nominate the driver of vehicles involved in camera-detected offences as a problem. It has recently introduced amendments to its legislation to increase the penalties for corporations that fail to do so and has imposed more stringent requirements for corporations to provide information to authorities to assist them to identify and locate the driver involved in an offence.
This bill amends the scheme in the road transport legislation and, in particular, provisions in part 3 of the Road Transport (General) Act 1999 for issuing, serving and enforcing infringement notices in relation to offences under the road transport legislation. In particular, the bill will include new powers in relation to statutory declarations about offences for which an infringement notice has been issued. These powers are intended to reduce the scope for making incomplete or false statutory declarations.
Under the new scheme, if the responsible person for a registrable vehicle was not in possession or control of that vehicle when the offence was committed the bill imposes an obligation on the responsible person to take all reasonable steps to assist the administering authority to identify and locate the person who was in possession or control of the vehicle at that time. The concept of all reasonable steps is defined in the bill and includes the completion of an infringement notice declaration in the prescribed form, as well as the provision of other information or assistance that may be required by the administering authority.
The obligation to take all reasonable steps is intended to encourage the responsible person for the vehicle to be honest, timely and accurate in completing the infringement notice declarations in relation to infringement notices. The obligation to take all reasonable steps is designed to discourage people from making false declarations either to avoid incurring demerit points against their licence or failing to make a declaration and thereby incurring points that should have been allocated to another person to enable that other person to avoid incurring those demerit points.
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