08-12-2008, 03:55 PM
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.
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.