Page 1909 - Week 05 - Thursday, 3 May 2012
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Clearly, for these corporations a greater incentive is required. This bill therefore includes vehicle-based sanctions, which will apply where a corporation fails on more than one occasion to take all reasonable steps to assist the administering authority to identify and locate the driver of a demerit points offence involving a vehicle registered to that corporation.
The amendments will have the effect of suspending the right of anybody to drive that vehicle while the suspension remains in force. The suspension will be lifted if the corporation provides the relevant information, or after six months, whichever happens first.
These amendments will have a delayed commencement to enable the necessary system changes to be made and for an awareness campaign to run.
The recently passed amendments in New South Wales include provisions that enable the authorities, including prosecutors, to obtain more detailed information from people who complete infringement notice declarations.
The territory’s bill also recognises the need to clarify the administering authority’s powers to obtain information from people who make declarations. It explains the requirements for making a valid infringement notice declaration and explains how the responsible person for a vehicle discharges his or her obligation to “take all reasonable steps” to assist the authority to identify and locate the person who was in possession or control of the vehicle when the offence was committed.
The obligation to take all reasonable steps is a mechanism for promoting the completion of statutory declarations for infringement notice offences in a way that is honest, timely and accurate. It is intended to secure the active cooperation of the responsible person for a registered vehicle with the administering authority. The responsible person is required not only to fill out all the required details in the approved form, but to do so in a way that can be reasonably understood. The responsible person must also respond to any further correspondence from the administering authority within 14 days, for example where the authority needs to clarify a matter raised in a declaration.
If the responsible person for a vehicle makes an infringement notice declaration that is not accepted, or elects not to make a declaration but disputes liability in court on the basis that another person was in possession or control of the vehicle when the offence was alleged to have been committed, there is a rebuttable presumption that the responsible person was in fact in possession or control of the vehicle at the time. The responsible person has a legal onus of rebutting this presumption, on the basis that he or she is best placed to adduce evidence about the persons who had access to the vehicle and their own whereabouts at the time of the alleged offence.
The government considers that this presumption is inherently reasonable. If the responsible person has chosen to register themselves as the operator of a vehicle, the effect is that this person is already on the public record as the person who owns or uses the vehicle.
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