MOTOR VEHICLES (PERIODIC PAYMENTS) AMENDMENT BILL

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading (resumed on motion).

The Hon. I.F. EVANS (Davenport) (19:30): I understand from the whip that I am the lead speaker on this issue. We are debating the Motor Vehicles (Periodic Payments) Amendment Bill 2013. As luck would have it, the member for Bragg has made a substantial contribution before the tea break on this particular issue and broadly covered most of the issues, so I will not have to hold the house long on this. Some people think there are two bills but my understanding is that there is one bill dealing with basically the same issue but it deals with stamp duty and motor registration.

Essentially, this bill simply sets out a process for the government to provide an option for the long suffering motorists to pay registration for certain vehicles on a monthly basis. The reason I say 'certain vehicles' is that it will not apply, as I understand it, to heavy vehicle transport, taxis or vehicles that need inspection before registration, which essentially means unroadworthy vehicles and the like. The government has worked out a scheme. As I understand this scheme, they will pay in advance for a monthly registration, so the February payment is for registration for the month of March, and that carries on through the registration period.

I am assuming that the way this will be set up is that you will sign an authority for a variable amount so that you do not have to sign an authority each year but rather you sign one authority that says Her Majesty's government can plunder your account for whatever the 12-month registration fee and stamp duty requirement is, divided into 12 weekly portions, plus an administration fee as set by the budget of the day. Essentially one signature at the start of the process will offer that authority to the government of the day until you either sell the vehicle or dispose of the vehicle through accident or other means or wish to change your mind because of cash flow reasons or moving interstate or whatever.

This is a bill that the opposition supports. We see it as some logic to this particular measure. The government advises that there is a protection process in place in relation to what happens if there is not enough money in the account and then the owner of the vehicle becomes unwittingly unregistered and therefore uninsured.

While I will not go through the whole process for the house, as I recall it, it was along the lines of getting an SMS, an email, and three days later that process is repeated and then closer to the cut-off date there might be a letter sent and, if all of that does not work, then the vehicle becomes unregistered. So, as I understand it, there will be four or five goes of trying to contact the owner of the vehicle.

As I understand it, the process will also cover the lifetime support scheme levy when that levy comes into place after the next election, when the government has legislated to rapidly increase the cost of vehicles to the unsuspecting South Australian public by the introduction of an average $105 levy on various motor vehicles.

The reality is that we think this is a commonsense measure. We trust that the government's process works. We are not going to sit here and analyse the process to death; all the private sector has these periodic payments and there is a process that works. We see no reason why the government cannot do this. There was some discussion in the party room about whether you could pay by billpay, whether the car registration could be paid by billpay. Perhaps the minister, in his response to the second reading contributions, can clarify whether there is the ability to pay by billpay and if not why not, and whether there is a process in place to go down that path, and, again, if not why not.

This is a totally voluntary scheme. From memory, and my briefing notes tell me, the government has modelled it on about a 15 per cent acceptance rate. I think it will be a lot more than 15 per cent; I suspect it will be well north of 50 per cent who will sign up to this within a couple of years, because the reality is that these days people want convenience. Most people who have a car are always going to have it registered and insured, and they realise that they have no control over how much the government charges them.

The reality is that the government is going to charge what the government is going to charge, so I think a lot of people will just sign up and take the punishment, and take it on a monthly basis rather than a 12-monthly or a three-monthly basis. So the opposition supports the principle of this bill. As I said, we trust that the government has the process right, but if it has not got the process right it can expect to be—

The SPEAKER: Surely the member for Davenport is not winding up?

The Hon. I.F. EVANS: Mr Speaker, it is hard to wind up when I am getting interjections from the Chair. I realise that your partner in crime is probably chatting away there and distracting you on other matters, but it is unusual for a member to be heckled from the Chair. Normally that would probably attract a 10-minute sin bin for others, but not tonight. But I am going to wind up, in a spirit of bipartisanship, because I have never been one to hold the house unduly—unless Michael Wright was the minister, of course.

The Hon. M.J. Wright: Five hours 28.

The Hon. I.F. EVANS: It was five hours and 28 minutes, and a joyful speech to read and give. So, with those few comments, we look forward to the passage of this bill. The opposition has no need for a third reading, unless some of my colleagues have questions. However, some of my colleagues do wish to make a contribution on this matter.

Mr PEDERICK (Hammond) (19:38): I rise tonight to speak to the Motor Vehicles (Periodic Payments) Amendment Bill 2013. I note that leading up to this we saw the change, back in 2011, when the Labor government abolished the six and nine month payment options for registration and cancelled registration stickers. I think both these things caused some issues out there in the electorate. Certainly, people were happy to use the various options that were presented to them for periodic payment, but those options were taken away from them.

There was also the issue of taking away stickers. I understand that was something like a $4 million to $5 million budget saving, but it certainly makes it difficult for people who have several vehicles. In some cases, especially with farm businesses and larger farm businesses, and then you get into other businesses around the state, it may range into many vehicles.

It is not uncommon for a family to have two vehicles for the household, just as a family. For a small farming operation, you might have somewhere between five and 10 vehicles, and that could include several tractors for which registration is applicable, as well as vehicles registered on farm registration.

I am going on memory now, and I am assuming it still goes on, but I remember that I had a 6WD ex-Vietnam War international army truck as my seeding truck. It came out of New South Wales where it used to be a fire truck, and we put a seed and super bin on the back. We had that registered only to go through the property we owned and a property we leased at Tintinara. We went through the process and that was all fine; it worked brilliantly, actually.

When you look at the amount of vehicles people can have—I remember when it came in that farmers had to register their tractors. There was a lot of angst in the community about this because, in modern farming systems, you generally have to have at least three tractors on the go, whether they are involved in the actual seeding operations, or spraying and other operations that go on with the farm, including harvest and haymaking, etc. This caused some angst.

As I said, on a small property you may have five to 10 vehicles, and on bigger properties it is not uncommon for there to be up to 30 vehicles registered. The whole idea of scrapping the sticker debate, especially in light of just your cars and utility vehicles used around the property, can become problematic, especially with the latest round of fine increases in the budget, with fines exceeding $1,000 if you are not driving a registered vehicle and you get pulled over.

In regards to this legislation, I think it is a good idea to have the monthly payment option. We see plenty of registration fees now exceeding $500 per annum for a vehicle, and some are well above that. It just gives people the option to budget their payments appropriately, because in this day and age, with the high cost of living, it is very difficult to come up with that amount of money in one hit.

I certainly think it would have been a good idea to introduce this option at the time that the government took away the option of having the registration stickers so that the public had the ability to use this monthly payment option—obviously, as the member for Davenport indicated, on a voluntary basis; people apply for it and can take up the option.

What we saw happen when the registration stickers were taken away, we had people travelling interstate, and there were issues with people just across the border—my electorate joins the Victorian border (it does at the moment; it will not at the election)—but people just go over the border and are pulled over for allegedly not having a registered vehicle.

This caused many, many problems for many, many people just going about their normal day-to-day business, and it took a long, long time for other jurisdictions to get the idea that we were not using the registration stickers. People could easily see—with the colour of the sticker, they soon realised the month that the car was registered and could tell it was a legally registered vehicle.

As the member for Bragg and the member for Davenport (as the lead speaker) have indicated, we are supporting this bill. I think it is very sensible and I think the modelling is probably a little bit light on in saying only 15 per cent of the population are going to apply for this. I think a lot of people will budget to spread the costs over 12 months, whether they have one vehicle, two vehicles or whether they have multiple vehicles that they can register under this proposal—for all the vehicles that they need to register—and it will bring better financial management issues into the realm for families and businesses so that they can manage their expenses a lot better.

I say this in light of our being the highest taxed state in this country, and anything we can do to at least spread the pain will help people pay their bills on time. As I have indicated, the Liberal opposition supports the bill but we note that there will be administrative charges when paying monthly and that, under the proposed direct debit scheme, each payment will incur a $2 administrative charge so that, obviously, if you move from annual payment to this payment, it will be $24 per year compared to $7 per year. In saying that, we certainly support the bill. I support the bill but it should have come into place at the time of the removal of registration stickers to save $4 million or $5 million which would have made life a lot easier for South Australian families.

Mr WHETSTONE (Chaffey) (19:46): I rise in support of the Motor Vehicles (Periodic Payments) Amendment Bill. I thank the department for their brief that they presented last week to the deputy leader and me, and it shone a light on a few of the issues that we had at the table. Obviously this is going to help the people who are struggling with day-to-day payment of bills and those who are struggling with the cost of living, but it is an initiative that will not only help those struggling to pay those bills but it is also getting money more quickly into the government coffers.

So if people pay for a registration upfront, and they pay their fees that come with it, they have their registration for 12 months. It is a positive cash flow exercise for the government to have that money coming in every month. One thing I have noticed with the people who are struggling with the everyday cost of living is that—and I have not actually had the opportunity to look at the numbers—the number of people who are driving around in unregistered cars is quite astonishing.

An honourable member: 58,000 fines apparently.

Mr WHETSTONE: 58,000 fines—it is a huge revenue raising exercise and I do not see that this monthly payment system is going to decrease the number of unregistered cars on our roads. I do think it will perhaps help the honest people and those who can afford it, but it will not help the people who cannot afford to register a car or those who are flouting the law and continue to drive an unregistered car, whether it is because it has a defect on it or whether it is because it is a car that they do not drive very often.

I know in some of the regional centres that a lot of cars driven on country roads are unregistered. Again, listening to what the member for Hammond had to say about the registration stickers or decals, they were not only a great indicator for the owner that their car was or was not registered but for the police or the authorities they were also a visual indicator of whether a car's registration was or was not current, depending on the colour.

Again, the sticker issue has been an ongoing issue. I continually get people, albeit a declining number, coming into my office complaining about the inconvenience and the cost of unregistered vehicles. Everyone is not out there deliberately not registering cars. It is an oversight by some people.

I presume there are a lot of pensioners who are struggling with the cost of living and those pensioners are the people that this will potentially help. But do those pensioners have mobile phones? Do they have electronic funds transfer into their accounts? Some might presume yes in today's modern world, but if you look around at a lot of the humble pensioners, the humble aged taxpayer, they do not have those facilities. In a lot of instances they are old school and they are doing things in the old, conventional way.

This periodic payment probably will not help a lot of those people. In saying that, I think that there is a benefit in this periodic payment being endorsed by this side of the house and supporting the government with what it is wanting to achieve. Mr Speaker, I presume it will not help you with your pushbike registration, but it will help those who are looking to offset their cash flow and help their cost-of-living pressures.

The Hon. M.F. O'BRIEN (Napier—Minister for Finance, Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety) (19:51): I will just make a few brief comments. In relation to the member for Chaffey—a well-thought-through series of propositions. I am disinclined to agree with him in terms of the number of unregistered vehicles on the road.

This measure, first and foremost, is a measure intended to address cost-of-living pressures for low income earners. It is a Labor Party measure, and my view is that it will reduce the number of unregistered vehicles on our roads.

We know that 60 per cent of South Australians go for three months' registration. I think that is an indication of the fact that registering a vehicle is a bit of a financial strain. So if we allow them to pay on a monthly basis, I believe that a lot of people who do not have the financial wherewithal to register on a three-monthly basis will get their affairs in order and avail themselves of the opportunity to pay by the month.

I am hoping that this measure will reduce the number of unregistered vehicles on our roads. That, in conjunction with the number of cameras that we are introducing and the technology that they have in place to read numberplates and immediately identify an unregistered vehicle, I think is going to be a great driver in reducing not only the number of unregistered but the uninsured in the sense of not having third party bodily insurance.

I am quite impressed with the comments made by the member for Hammond. He pointed out that it would have been a good thing if we could have introduced this measure concurrently with the cessation of windscreen labels. The government and the individuals sitting to my left in the box have probably been working on this for 14 to 18 months. It is a measure that not only had to be addressed in a legislative sense, but we also had to make sure that we had the technology in place and the interface with the banking system to ensure that this operated without a glitch, because if we were to get this wrong and we had literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of unregistered motor vehicles on the road in respect of compulsory third party bodily injury, we could have been in real strife. So it has taken us a little while.

The member for Hammond makes, I think, a legitimate comment; but we just wanted to make sure that when we go live with this it is glitch-free, everyone is registered and everyone is insured. I have got to say, I thought the member for Davenport's contribution was knowledgeable, well-informed, he was on top of the topic, and he made a very positive contribution to the debate. He asked me about billpay. I have checked it out, and I have been advised that the way that billpay operates is that you have to go into the system and make the payment; you cannot set it up for automatic monthly debit. Unfortunately, billpay will not operate, but we believe that with credit card access and access to bank accounts to draw down a bank account we have pretty well covered all of the sensible options.

Both the member for Davenport and the member for Hammond suggested the take-up will be in excess of 50 per cent. I have that feeling myself. I think this is going to be an extremely popular measure with the South Australian motoring public. We have been conservative and we have gone for the 15 per cent. We did not want to find ourselves in a position where we were embarrassed in terms of not being able to meet the parameters that we have injected into the budget.

I have got to concur with the member for Davenport and the member for Hammond: I think this is going to be a very, very popular measure with the South Australian public, and it could well be that within a matter of years we will be moving to 80 or 90 per cent. It is the way that most people like to organise their financial affairs. They do it with most insurance; they do it with a whole range of bill obligations. It is the way that most families organise their affairs. It removes that significant impost that comes in once a quarter or once a year. It makes for a far better way of managing your finances, and its take-up, I think, is going to be very much on the high side. Again, I congratulate all members of the opposition, including the member for Bragg, who always makes a very, very positive contribution to the debate, for their support for this measure.

Bill read a second time.

Third Reading

The Hon. M.F. O'BRIEN (Napier—Minister for Finance, Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety) (19:58): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.