Page 1905 - Week 05 - Thursday, 3 May 2012

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Running a business, and often the administration of running a business, creates more headaches than do the actual production of a good or the delivery of a service. Operating a fleet can be difficult, and I hope enforcing agencies are aware and do take reasonable steps. An example I have used in the past is of a ute on a construction site being used by various builders and labourers on any given day, perhaps go to a hardware store or go to the depot; it is very difficult to keep a log of such uses. Although it is required that a log be kept, the reality is that it is going to be difficult to keep a log of such instances and I hope the JACS directorate is aware of just how difficult that can be in some situations.

In summary, while we do have some reservations about the impact on corporations, we broadly support the intent of the amendments contained in the legislation and as such we will be supporting the bill today.

MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (10.32): The Greens will support the Road Transport (General) Amendment Bill. It makes two key changes to the enforcement of infringement notices for offences under the road transport legislation. I would like to thank Mr Corbell’s office and the officials from the directorate for the helpful briefings they provided to my office on this bill.

The first change concerns the situation where a person responsible for a vehicle declares they were not the driver at the time an offence was committed. The changes in this bill oblige such a 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 the time of the offence. The intention is to prevent people making false declarations about the identity of the driver thereby allowing the person who committed the offence to avoid the penalty.

I am informed by the department that the expectation is that this would primarily apply to traffic camera offences, given that those are the offences where the identity of the driver is unknown. The ACT Traffic Camera Office suspects that five per cent to 10 per cent of statutory declarations in these matters are false. I also understand that there have been a number of false declarations made by taxi drivers, and these have been proven because the drivers’ identities can be traced through network logs of drivers.

This appears to be a reasonable requirement designed to stop people using the declaration system to escape responsibility for traffic offences thereby also reducing the efficacy of our traffic laws and decreasing safety on our roads.

The requirement to take reasonable steps to identify the driver does not appear to be onerous. From my discussions with the directorate I understand that in practice the person will complete an infringement notice declaration and an approved form. The person will need to respond in a timely fashion, within 14 days. This is to overcome a problem that apparently occurs already where a person makes an incomplete or inconsistent statutory declaration and they are contacted to provide more information but do not respond. This provision provides a legal basis for rejecting declarations that are not properly completed.


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