David Guyatt Wrote:Thousands of people are daily ticketed and fined for parking and traffic offences. It is impossible to estimate what proportion of these are truly fair and justified, and little or no attempt is made by local authorities, police or the private sector to establish innocence or guilt. On the contrary guilt is assumed, thus reversing the "Presumption of Innocence" convention that is enshrined in law. I say this because the "appeals" procedure is largely operated by the same authority/private entity that issued the fine/ticket, and because it is in their financial interest to reject an appeal.

Also, it is common practice now for those issuing a fine/ticket to rapidly pass on those who default to a private "Debt Recovery Agent" who automatically add on their own charges to the amount fined -- and often these additional charges are outrageously high. A fine of £70.00 can quickly become several hundred. It is hard not to compare this practice with the old criminal strong-arm tactic of extortion (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extortion for a definition).

For these and many other reasons besides, people receiving a fine may consider undertaking a bit of research in order to establish their position and to fight unjust fines that has been arbitrarily levied. If you do, you will be joining a growing band of citizens who fight their corner rather than collapse in fear and simply pay up under threat.

The fact is that our government, authorities and institutions no longer can be trusted to represent our interests. On the contrary, over the last few decades they have modified and changed long established laws that once protected us from such abuses, and which instead now benefit the government-corporate complex payola machine.

Further important information can be found on the following websites:

The Consumer Forum

Money Saving Expert

Peter Lemkin Wrote:I always thought that along with only really serious offenses of real overparking, that it should be some proportional amount to your earnings....so the rich pay MUCH more per hour overparked and someone poor very little...... but given the system, in fact it works out the other way around. Once I lost a very important court action because I was too poor to keep feeding the meters at the Court and Law Library in the center of a big city, over an extended period. The fines were building-up to where my car would be towed and I had to abandon my own legal defense, to a large extent.

Mark Stapleton Wrote:That's an excellent point, Peter.

The current system of identical fines harshly discriminates against the poor. The standard no parking zone fine in Sydney is about $135, which is a painful penalty for a low income earner but a mere mosquito bite for a millionaire. Hence the penalty is much greater for the poor person, despite the fact the amounts are identical.

Macquarie Street is probably the most salubrious street in the Sydney CBD, with many millionaire stockbrokers, lawyers and specialist doctors. If you walk down this street, you'll see many Porsches, Rollers and other luxury cars and they often have the telltale orange envelope under the windscreen wiper. They obviously don't care about the fines, it's chump change to them---they need the parking spot.

I favor the system used in some Scandanavian countries (I think Sweden and Finland), whereby the fine is commensurate to the wealth of the offender, using net taxable income as the yardstick.

Interestingly, the original parking cops in Australia were disabled or handicapped war veterans, who had trouble getting work. The Government knew they would also be less likely to be the target of verbal or physical abuse, due to their circumstances. However, Governments here and elsewhere eventually saw the potential in the rich income stream these fines could provide and now, as we all know, it's become an industry unto itself.

It's morphed into a cruel system of state sponsored theft. Once again the poor find themselves at the butt end.