We went and checked the mail today after a few days of not doing so. Our post office box was pretty full, which is fairly unusual. The contents were stuffed in a bag as we had other things to do before we went home. On arrival at home, my partner opened the letters, one of which was addressed to me from the New South Wales government. It was a fine notice for a parking offence in Queanbeyan in early March. The fact that I hadn’t been to Queanbeyan at all this year made me scratch my head in disbelief. Initially I suspected that the fine notice may have been bogus (i.e. a scam) and that the addresses for payment may have been bogus too, simply as a way of extracting cash from the gullible. Then I suspected that someone might have ‘borrowed’ my car while I thought it was parked in the carpark where I work (I know of someone who had this happen to them).
So, I went online to the NSW government website and chased up parking fines and how to dispute them. One of the facilities they have on the website is images of the ‘offence’ when it was being committed. It shows a silver-grey Nissan nose to curb, supposedly in a taxi rank. The fine notice had on it the correct registration number for my vehicle, and the vehicle which committed the offence seemed to have the same registration number (although it is blurred and difficult to be certain). However, my vehicle is a Mazda and is registered in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), while that committing the offence is registered in NSW, so has a different style of registration plate (in the ACT, the ‘ACT’ is above the numbers, while in NSW, the ‘NSW’ is printed vertically to the left of the numbers).
Given the time of the offence and the fact that the image of the vehicle had the door open and someone who looks like a schoolkid getting out of the car, indicates that the offence took place at school drop-off. After explaining this all to the website for disputed fines, I went and took a photograph of the back end of my car with its ACT registration plate and submitted it to their website.
After submitting the request to review, I received an e-mail to say that my ‘request to review’ had been submitted and that Revenue NSW will “aim to process my review in less than 42 days”. How they could confuse an ACT registered Mazda with a NSW registered Nissan is something I don’t understand. It will be interesting to see what they do.
Heard something similar on ABC radio some months ago. Car ID was completely wrong, a digit on the number plate had been incorrectly noted.
Iirc, in the ACT the plate ID offence is initially handled by computer but is supposed to be checked before a notice is sent out. They obviously don’t try to match the vehicle make, type or colour, nor in yur case do they have a flag for the jurisdiction of the rego plate, either of which would be a fairly obvious indicator. Incompetence or just lack of care? Neither should be acceptable.
Friend’s wife was booked for running a red light at a major intersection in Qld last year. It was their car but they had no memory of infringing. Checked the image and it appeared to show they had. Fine was about $500 so wife returned to the intersection and took a picture. Sure enough the official image was cropped hard so that it didn’t show the traffic lights on the left which had turn left arrows. The camera may have been installed prior to that set of lights going in and not updated, but again that’s no excuse. Their notice was rescinded but we can only imagine how many others got booked and didn’t check.
Not that many years ago there was a “famous” case of a Sydney bloke whose car was clocked speeding on a tollway It WAS, while on the back of a tow/repair vehicle. He knew that it couldn’t have been him so checked the image and sure enough it clearly showed the truck with his car secured to its flat-top.
Jon,
It pays to check.
Jon,
I just heard from someone on Mastodon (like Twitter but without the arseholes) that this has been happening a bit recently with the advent of Y prefixed rego plates in NSW.
They work only from the number. My guess is the automated system in NSW misread the plate number and the reviewer – there is a reviewer, right? [insert Padme meme here] – failed to pull the photo because it is blurred. Any reviewer in NSW can’t check the the vehicle type because its registered in the ACT and our rego systems are not accessible joined up in any way, a fact I discovered while trying to transfer a Vic registered motorcycle to SA.
There’s no national database Laurie but anyone can get basic vehicle details from ACT rego numbers via the ACT govt site.
I hope the registered address isn’t part of that!
But the point being that Queenbeyan council are not performing any sanity checking. The assumption is the automatic text recognition is correct and mistakes will be caught by the recipient. My guess is there is no human oversight at all.
No, make, model, year, colour and a few more things which possibly shouldn’t be public eg last 4 digits of VIN.