Page 1511 - Week 04 - Thursday, 29 March 2012
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The bill also contains new provisions—new division 3.3A—to encourage corporations to identify the drivers of vehicles involved in offences that carry demerit points, to enable the demerit points for those offences to be recorded against the driver licence record for the person who actually committed the offence. Corporations that fail, on two or more occasions, to take all reasonable steps to assist the administering authority to identify the driver of a vehicle registered to the corporation that is involved in an offence will be advised that registration sanctions will be applied to the corporation’s vehicle, or another vehicle owned by the corporation if the corporation has disposed of its interest in the vehicle involved in the relevant offences.
The sanction will apply whether or not the corporation pays the infringement penalty. This is an important point. The government’s objective is not to secure payment of the penalty but the identification of the driver involved in the offence so that the demerit points for the offence can be allocated. The government has previously tried to encourage corporations to nominate drivers for camera-detected offences by setting the corporate penalty rate at five times the rate that applies to individual drivers, but a substantial number of corporations are failing to do so. It appears that for some corporations financial incentives are not enough of a deterrent.
The vehicle registration sanction will remain in place for the earlier of six months or until the corporation takes the “reasonable steps”. That period of six months has been chosen because it is the vehicle-based equivalent of the maximum period of a demerit point licence suspension. The intention is to discourage the practice whereby a director or other staff member of a corporation is able to hide behind the corporate identity to avoid having demerit points recorded against his or her licence.
The amendments in the bill also ensure that the infringement notice scheme provisions and the demerit point scheme provisions are aligned and that any associated demerit points for an offence are recorded in the register of demerit points at the appropriate time after the infringement notice for the offence has been served under the act.
The bill omits a provision in the existing act that purported to impose criminal liability on the responsible person for a vehicle, even where the responsible person did not actually commit the offence. This provision is considered to be inconsistent with human rights and with criminal law principles. Instead, the bill inserts new section 53AA which provides that in a prosecution for an infringement notice offence involving a registrable vehicle there is a rebuttable presumption that the responsible person for the vehicle was in possession or control of that vehicle when the offence was committed. This approach is more consistent with human rights and principles of criminal law and procedure.
The bill removes the current provisions that state that service on one of the responsible persons for a vehicle is deemed to be service on all the other responsible persons for a vehicle to also make it more consistent with our human rights jurisdiction. Section 22(2)(a) of the Human Rights Act 2004 states that everyone charged with a criminal offence has the right to be told promptly and in detail, in a language that he or she understands, about the nature and reason for the charge.
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