Service SA

Mr WILLIAMS (MacKillop) (15:24): Today, I want to talk about red tape and some nonsense that occurs within our bureaucracy. I specifically want to talk about motor registration. I have had a couple of experiences in recent weeks which I think border on the ridiculous that I want to bring to the attention of the house. As members know, I own a farm in the South-East, and I recently bought a second-hand truck. I went into a Service SA agency to transfer the registration of the truck into my name.

I bought the truck in an online sale and was unable to get a signature from the seller to transfer the registration papers into my name. That did not create a real problem and we were able to get around that, but when I went into Service SA to fill out the appropriate forms, I was given a form and they said I had to put in all of the specifications of the truck. I said to them, 'This is the numberplate. You already have that information. The truck has been registered in South Australia. It is not a new truck; it is around 20 years old, and you have had this information for 20 years. Why do you not just change the name of the registered owner?' I gave them proof of ownership, receipts and all of that sort of thing. But no, I had to have all of the details, so I went home.

My son is a lot smarter at these things than I am. He went onto the internet and looked up the manufacturer of the truck and got all the specifications, and we filled out the form. The only problem was that the manufacturer specifications were cab chassis, so I had to fill out, amongst other things, the tare weight. I did not know the weight of the tray that was on the truck, so I guessed that weight—

Mr Treloar: Which is what most people would do.

Mr WILLIAMS: It is what most people would do. I went in, and fortunately I struck somebody in the motor registration office in Mount Gambier who was most helpful. The lady there helped me with a number of things. When she got to the tare weight that I had put down, she was looking at the original registration details of this registered vehicle on the computer screen and said, 'I will just change that.' I had put 8.8 tonnes and it was supposed to be 8.6, so she very kindly changed that for me. I was appreciative of that, but the point I want to make is: the whole thing is a nonsense.

I had to attend a government office on two occasions, and I had to undertake a fair bit of work to get the details when the department already had all the information. But it gets worse. A week or two after that, my son purchased two brand-new motorbikes for use on our farm. They were both Yamahas, and the nearest Yamaha dealership to the lower South-East was in Hamilton, Victoria. So, he went over and took delivery of the two motorbikes and brought them home with all the relevant paperwork.

He then went into the motor registration office in Mount Gambier and obviously did not get the same person that I did a week or so before, because he later said to me that the person he struck obviously had no intention of being helpful. They told him that he had to have proof of ownership of the bikes—which he thought he had, because he had just purchased them—and the chassis numbers and engine numbers verified, notwithstanding they were new machines.

My son then rang the dealer in Hamilton about a particular form he had to have filled out and he was told that the dealer had never heard of the form. It turned out, at the end of the day, he had to attend the local police station in Millicent and got a very cooperative lady there who helped him. She had to actually cite the chassis number and engine number on both of these motorbikes and fill out a form, and charged him around $50 per motorbike—brand-new motorbikes—before he could go back to the motor registration office in Mount Gambier.

We only live 50 kilometres from Mount Gambier, but my son told me that from the point when he left home to register these two bikes to when he had them both registered and arrived home it cost him a day and a half. A day and a half was dedicated to that one task, after having spent some hours driving to Hamilton to pick them up. When we talk about red tape and the impost on doing business in this state, this is the sort of problem that those of us who run small and medium businesses face on a daily basis. I will talk privately with the minister about this, but I would urge the government to look at these sorts of matters and undo the red tape that is burdening business operations in this state.