MOTOR VEHICLES (DISQUALIFICATION) AMENDMENT BILL

Committee Stage

In committee.

(Continued from 16 October 2012.)

Clause 1.

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY: I move:

Page 2, line 3—Delete '(Disqualification)' and substitute '(Miscellaneous)'

This amendment is, in a sense, a test of the four amendments that we have. I think it is probably best that I explain the nature of this amendment and the subsequent ones because, while I will move the others, I suspect this will be a test to see whether we have support for them. I will just make a brief explanation of these proposed amendments. Firstly, in our amendment to clause 1, we are simply seeking to remove the word 'disqualification' from the title and substitute it with 'miscellaneous'. This is because the bill itself does not automatically disqualify drivers from having committed offences under that relevant provision.

The second amendment will be to insert new clause 3A. If a person is charged or given an expiation notice, the Commissioner of Police or a person can make an application to the registrar that compels the registrar to provide a certificate specifying whether or not a renewal notice has been issued to the registered owner. We are seeking to enable somebody to have proof that they were issued a renewal notice.

Our third amendment seeks to insert subsection (6d) which provides that if an offence has been committed within 30 days of the registration expiring, the person can rely on the two new defences that the registrar did not issue a renewal notice at least 14 days before the registration expiry date and that the driver did not know the vehicle was unregistered. Finally, the insertion of new clause 26A by amendment No. 2 means that the registrar must issue a renewal notice at least 14 days before the registration expires.

In summary, our amendments fill gaps in the proposed bill and seek to further strengthen the bill and I remind the chamber that, if the amendments are not passed, there will not be an extra level of protection for motor vehicle owners. New defences will not be available and motor vehicle owners will not be aware that their motor vehicle registration has expired. Therefore I urge all members to think carefully about voting against these amendments, because we think they do give motor vehicle owners just that little bit of extra protection if their registration expires without their knowledge.

The CHAIR: The Hon. Mr Ridgway, you have moved your first amendment, but spoken to both?

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY: Basically, yes.

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: The government opposes this amendment. For many years the registrar has sent renewal notices about six weeks before the registration is due to expire, even though there is no legislative requirement to do so. In addition to the renewal notice, Service SA has developed a registration application for smart phones which can remind you of the registration renewal date, and it will shortly offer registered owners the option of an additional reminder by email or SMS two weeks before registration is due to expire. The registrar also sends a reminder notice two weeks after registration has expired.

There is a perception in the community that the removal of registration labels has increased the number of people inadvertently letting their registration expire and then getting expiation notices for driving unregistered or uninsured. In fact, the number of light vehicle owners who pay the registration after the actual date of expiry has not increased. The percentage has actually decreased by a small amount. This indicates that owners have adjusted to the absence of labels. They are using the reminder options provided by the government. As well, some organisations offer reminder labels to their members, and there is nothing to stop owners placing their own label in the vehicle to remind themselves of the registration expiry date.

The amendments would apply to both light and heavy vehicles, despite the fact that heavy vehicles still display registration labels and the driver has no excuse for not being aware that the vehicle was unregistered. The government believes the amendments would increase costs, complicate the administration of the registration system and enforcement of registration offences, and undermine the longstanding responsibility of vehicle owners to ensure that if their vehicle is to be used on the road it is registered.

The onus must be on owners to comply, just as they are obliged to ensure that their vehicle is roadworthy and their driver's licence is current. The government is not aware of any systemic issues with registration renewals not being sent that would necessitate this amendment. There are many reasons outside the government's control that mean the owners may not receive a reminder notice, for example, failure to notify the registrar of a change of address, failure to lodge the registration transfer application when purchasing a vehicle, or failure by Australia Post to deliver. An obligation to send a notice would not remedy these problems.

The registrar's longstanding practice is to assist people by issuing renewal notices for such things as driver's licences, vehicle registration trade plates and motor driving instructor licences, but there is no legislative requirement to do so and failure to issue notices does not negate the initial requirement to be registered or hold a licence.

In the case of demerit points, when the registrar is required to give a person notice when they reach a certain number of points, under section 98B(1) of the Motor Vehicles Act, the legislation specifically states that failure to do so does not affect the person's demerit point record or the consequences of the demerit points. All jurisdictions send registration renewal notices, but no other jurisdiction has this type of legislative requirement.

Western Australia and the Northern Territory send notices under an administrative policy as South Australia currently does. In the remaining jurisdictions, the legislation allows for, but does not require, a registration renewal notice to be sent, and further, it states that if a renewal notice is not sent, the failure does not affect the expiry of the registration or the obligation to renew the registration.

The Motor Accident Commission does not consider the amendments are likely to have any major impact on its business. SAPOL has advised the government that it opposes the amendment. SAPOL has advised that in every case it would need to know whether a notice has been given before proceeding with an unregistered vehicle offence. This would require an additional check before issuing an expiation notice. With the quantity of notices issued each year, this would be an administrative burden that would add unnecessary cost to the expiation notice system.

The registrar would have to provide the information to SAPOL, and computer systems changes would be needed by the Department for Planning, Transport and Infrastructure and SAPOL in addition. If SAPOL required a certificate from the registrar before proceeding, thousands of certificates per year may be produced and these costs are unbudgeted.

Another problem with the amendment is that it would also require a renewal notice to be sent in every case even where it was not appropriate to send one. For example, if a vehicle is recorded as stolen or wrecked and written off on the vehicle register, or has an interstate address and is therefore obliged to be registered in that jurisdiction, the registrar does not send a renewal notice. When the ownership of the vehicle is transferred, there are legislative obligations on both the transferor and the transferee to notify the registrar.

If the transferee does not lodge an application to transfer the registration in a timely fashion, the registrar should not be required to send a renewal notice to the transferor, who is still listed as the registered owner despite having advised that the vehicle has been sold. In conclusion, the amendment will create a number of problems and costs and will only assist the very few people who are not sent a notice through an administrative error. The amendment undermines the fundamental duty of a vehicle owner to register the vehicle if it is used on the roads and, for these reasons, the government believes the amendments should be rejected.

The Hon. M. PARNELL: Before putting the Greens' position on the record, I would like to ask the minister a question in relation to one of the reasons that he gave for this legislation not being workable, in his view. He said that the police would need to check the status of not just a person's registration, which they can do online, but I think, as the minister said, they would need to check whether in fact a renewal notice had been issued or they would not be able to issue an expiation certificate.

The reason I ask that question is that it would seem to me that a police officer would look on his or her computer, find out whether or not a vehicle was registered, issue the ticket, and then, under this amendment, I would have thought, the main incentive is on the person who has got the ticket to say, 'Hang on, I don't think I got a reminder notice. I didn't know that my rego was out.' My question to the minister is, why would the police need to satisfy themselves that motor registration had sent a renewal notice? Why don't they just issue an expiation and make it the problem of the person who has received the ticket to then take steps if that person thought it was warranted?

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: I thank the honourable member for his question and, hopefully, you will be supporting this amendment if I give you a satisfactory answer.

Members interjecting:

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY: No, oppose the amendment of course! Before the police can issue an expiation notice, they have to be sure that there has been an offence committed, so they need to find out whether a notice has been sent or not, and this is the reason given by the police. We have no reason to dispute the issue, and hopefully that will be enough to satisfy your question.

The Hon. M. PARNELL: I thank the minister for his answer and I do understand that, even if an offence is being expiated, the officer still needs to believe that an offence has been committed. The indication to the police, I imagine, under the old system would be that they would look in the corner of the windscreen and they would see a sticker and it would have a number on it. If it did not have the up-to-date sticker on it, then that would be an assumption, I guess, that the car was not registered and the driver would perhaps be asked to produce the sticker from the glove box (because they had not got around to putting it on yet) or maybe they do not know whether it is registered or not. I do not imagine that if a person said, 'It's not my car,' that the police are, all of a sudden, going to say, 'Oh, well, nothing we can do about it; the sticker is out of date but we're not going to give you a ticket.' They are still going to give you a ticket, I would have thought.

In relation to this amendment, it seems to me that what it is trying to do is to provide some fairness to the regime where we have done away with the stickers. That fairness arises from people having the right to be told when moneys are owed, especially when the moneys owed are statutory amounts for which there is a criminal penalty for not paying it. It is one thing to not pay your phone bill or whatever and perhaps you will get cut off, but those things never happen without reminders. It seems to me that the minister's difficulty with this is that, even though he says that the practice has been to always remind people that their registration is due—they remind them before and they remind them after—they do not want to put it in the legislation. They do not want to have it a requirement that a renewal notice has to be given.

My understanding of how this amendment would work in practice is that, when a person gets a ticket or is charged with not having a registered vehicle, they are either going to say, 'It's a fair cop; I didn't pay it,' or if their response is, 'Well, I don't think I ever got a renewal notice'—and this amendment gives them the right to contact motor registration and say, 'Did you ever send me that notice?' If they come back and say, 'Well, our records show it went out,' then that is conclusive. It is no good for the person to say, 'Oh, well, the kids in the street must have nicked it out of my letterbox' or 'Australia Post has been getting it wrong.' None of that stuff is part of the defence. If motor registration goes back to its computer records and says, 'Yes, on 13 June your renewal notice went out,' then that kills your defence. Your defence is also dead if you actually knew that the motor vehicle was, in fact, unregistered.

So it seems to me that this amendment basically allows a small number of people who, through no dishonesty—and I would not even say through any inadvertency because we live busy lives and we all get lots and lots of bills—did not pay their bill a defence. I must admit that it is always a shock to me when my trailer registration comes up. I do not use the trailer very often and I have no idea when it expires. If I did not get a letter I would not pay it because I have no idea—actually, that was until I downloaded the EzyReg app. Of course, I put my numberplate in the EzyReg app and I do now know when my trailer expires but until then I would not have had any idea until I got a letter in the post.

I appreciate what the minister is saying, that a lot of us now have new tools at our disposal to be able to keep track of when these amounts are due. That is not going to be sufficient for everyone. If the minister wants to go away, perhaps between the houses or whatever, and come back with some solution that, for example, exempts the heavy vehicles—because he said it was an inadvertent inclusion that the heavy vehicles were included. The minister said that they have labels and, therefore, there is no excuse. Touché. That is the whole point. When you had labels you did not have an excuse because you had the label and you had that constant reminder.

If the difficulty is that these amendments cover heavy vehicles which have labels and, therefore, that is a duplication, let us come back and we will remove the heavy vehicles from this requirement, if that is an issue. However, for now, the Greens will be supporting all of these amendments. We will be supporting the requirement for the registrar to send out renewal reminders, as the registrar already does, and we will be supporting the new defence (as limited as it is) that does allow those people where administrative error got in the way of them paying their bills, that they should not be criminally liable for failing to register their motor vehicle.

The Hon. A. BRESSINGTON: I rise to indicate that I will not be supporting this amendment. I would just like to put on the record for everybody to recall that I was the person in here who voted against abolishing the stickers in the first place, so if we had not have done that I doubt we would even be having this discussion. I had a briefing this morning with police and with the Commissioner for Motor Vehicles, I think it was, and the explanations that I was given for not supporting this amendment made sense to me.

With the issuing of the expiation notice, it would seem that there is a 24 hour delay between motor vehicle registration computer systems and the police systems. If an expiation notice was to be issued and, in fact, in that 24 hour period that person had registered their motor vehicle either online or in an office, there is no way for the police to actually know that that has occurred for that 24 hour period.

If we do go with this amendment, it means that an update, an upgrade for both lots of computer systems—quite complex—would be necessary, because we are now providing a defence where there was no defence prior to this for driving an unregistered car. In providing a defence for this, it means that the police would then be obliged to undertake an investigation into the so-called offence which means more use of police resources where it was not necessary before.

Also, we know from the conduct of people with speeding fines that it is not uncommon for people to sign a statutory declaration or people get other people to make out a statutory declaration saying that they were not driving a car for a speeding offence if someone is low on points, or whatever reason. This actually allows the opportunity for someone to present to court.

When they are pulled over by the police, they are not obliged to answer any questions at all, and it allows them 30 days to prepare a defence and perhaps have somebody come into court and say, 'I was actually driving the car at the time; it was not the person who owns the vehicle' and that makes that defence null and void, or it makes the police prosecution null and void. So there is that 30 day period that they have got to actually be able to prepare that defence.

Also, the number—on the information I got this morning—that have actually been affected by this legitimately has only been three people in a two and a half year period. So this bill, as I understand it, was about the glitch in the system and the 8,000 suspended licences. This particular amendment goes absolutely nowhere to addressing the problem that this bill was introduced for and it is for those reasons, that I think are quite legitimate, that I will not be supporting the honourable David Ridgway's amendment.

The Hon. J.A. DARLEY: I will not be supporting the amendment either.

The Hon. D.G.E. HOOD: We are not supporting either.

The committee divided on the amendment:

Majority of 3 for the noes.

Amendment thus negatived; clause passed.

Remaining clauses (2 to 4), schedule and title passed.

Bill reported without amendment.

Third Reading

The Hon. R.P. WORTLEY (Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for State/Local Government Relations) (16:05): I move:

That this bill be now read a third time.

Bill read a third time and passed.