Page 134 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 12 February 2020
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With respect to some of the issues that we have with this motion today, firstly, as I have already mentioned, there is the call for action “to explore the feasibility of” this proposal. It is unnecessary procrastination and it is a waste of time. We should just get on with implementing this period of grace. Secondly, it shows the disingenuous actions of the government. In an election year, the government proposes to dangle a shiny bauble, hopefully to a grateful public, while at the same time the same government has been gouging this hapless electorate with excessive and massively increasing parking fines for years.
In 2017 parking patrol vans were introduced. These are vans equipped with infra-red cameras to scan licence plates, to track how long cars have been in parking zones. According to a report by the ABC in October 2019, this technology saw revenue from the patrol vans alone jump from $1.6 million to more than $4 million in 12 months, in 2019—a 26 per cent increase in revenue. There will be no 10-minute periods of grace for fines collected by a van. In the 2019-20 budget, the amounts projected to be raised by parking fees have gone from $19.492 million in the 2018-19 year to an estimate in 2022-23 of $22.258 million.
The Chief Minister is on record as saying, quite correctly, that parking fines are “voluntary”. It is the action of the individual driver that leads to the parking fine. He said that it’s only revenue raising if people park illegally. That is true. But think about those people who have been pinged at their school fetes right across Canberra by the parking vans circling school fetes on weekends, fining mums and dads who are supporting their local schools. I know I have received a lot of correspondence about this, and I am sure other members have as well.
No-one wants unsafe parking. No-one wants people to be parking in other people’s driveways. But where do you expect people to park, and how do you expect them to get to their local school on a weekend to support their school fete? It does seem extremely opportunistic.
This government has parking vans at sports fields on weekends, fining mums and dads who are taking their kids to organised sport to participate in healthy outdoor sport. These children who are attending sport on the weekend are highly dependent on their parents driving them to sport, especially those living in the farther parts of the city. It is hard for parents to get their kids to sport without using a car, except for those lucky ones who might have an oval just down the road from where they live. But most organised sport moves around. Football matches et cetera move around throughout Canberra; they are not always at the same location. So even if you live near an oval, you may have to drive to another sportsground.
These families are time poor. They are stretched. If they have more than one child, for example, they are probably driving their kids to a couple of different sporting events at different locations. When they get there, they drive around trying to find a car park, and when they do make the decision to park, perhaps on a nature strip somewhere near the oval, they then come back to find they have been pinged with a parking fine.
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