Wednesday, 13 November 2024

Fines system

Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (18:42): (1284) My adjournment this evening is to the Attorney-General, and the action I seek is for her to overhaul the Victorian fines system to limit the disproportionate impact penalties have on people on low incomes or who are experiencing poverty. There have been calls for years for Victoria to implement a fairer fines system. As we find ourselves now in a longer and deeper cost-of-living crisis, these calls become more acute. People on low incomes have to choose between paying their fines and paying rent or buying medicine. The system is unnecessarily sending people to jail, adding enormous costs to the court system and corrections, and it is derailing people’s lives. In fact fines are the most widely applied criminal sanction, dwarfing the number of court hearings for more serious criminal offences determined each year, and shockingly, community legal centres report that unpaid fines are among the top five issues that clients are seeking help with.

Victoria has a flat rate system, so a speeding fine which might be a crippling financial burden for someone who is poor might be a mere annoyance for someone on a higher income. These fines are designed to be a deterrent and to promote safer driving, objectives that we all can agree with, but they are not functioning as a deterrent for the wealthy, who can easily afford them and may think little of them. Victoria has one of the world’s harshest fines systems for public transport infringements. Victorians travelling without a valid Myki or concession card are whacked with an enormous $296 fine, whereas in comparison in WA the same kind of offence is just $100, in London it is $96 and in Singapore it is just $55. New South Wales fare evasion fines are $200 and reduced to $100 for people on Centrelink payments. Toll road offences, which generally do not pose a significant community risk to safety, are allowed to spiral into debts of tens of thousands of dollars, which are easily accrued if you have moved address, do not get the notices or are in financial hardship to begin with.

The Australia Institute released a report last month titled Refining Fines: Addressing the Inequality of Traffic Penalties in Australia calling for a proportional system where there is a sliding scale of fines based on a person’s income. My colleague Dr Tim Read sought and published a research paper in 2022 advocating a similar day-fine approach to that used in Finland, Switzerland and other jurisdictions, and even New South Wales has recently implemented fines reform to help people who are already under financial strain. It is high time that Victoria did the same.