Fines fall despite camera use rise

Motorists left guessing over new "anytime, anywhere" speed camera locations are apparently slowing down and getting fewer tickets.

Almost 10 per cent fewer camera tickets were issued in the six months to December than for the same period in 2003, the road policing operations manager, Inspector John Kelly, said yesterday.

The number fell 9.3 per cent - from 248,171 to 224,847 - despite a 5 per cent rise in camera operating time to 38,143 hours.

Figures are still being tallied for tickets issued by police patrols, rather than from static cameras, but Mr Kelly said an early indication was that these were flattening out.

This follows a 12 per cent rise in the number of tickets dished out by road police last financial year, to 408,117.

He said it was still too early to be sure about reasons for the decline in camera tickets, but the police suspected the "anytime, anywhere" policy of no longer confining the cameras to designated zones was a big factor.

The policy was introduced last April and the police insist they are obeying a Government directive not to disguise speed cameras.

Mr Kelly did not know how much revenue the Government was losing from the decline in tickets, saying that was no concern of the police, despite perceptions to the contrary.

"As far as we are concerned, the fewer tickets the better - a lot of people claim the Government has told us to write more tickets, but there has never been an instruction to do that."

His comments follow a revelation in Parliament from Police Minister George Hawkins that revenue raised by traffic offence and infringement tickets leapt 87.7 per cent in the four years to last June, to $59.9 million.

Act MP Ken Shirley, who won the disclosure in questioning the minister, said this was "a staggering increase which will only serve to confirm in the public's mind that the Labour Government has turned our hard-working police into revenue gatherers".

"It's a disgrace that while violent crime has ballooned by 13.5 per cent over the last five years, Labour appears to be more interested in ticketing motorists instead of bringing the murderers and rapists in our community to justice."

Mr Kelly attributed much of the increase since 2000 to the introduction of highway patrols designed to curb the road toll and a policy of ticketing most motorists caught exceeding speed limits by 10km/h, or 5km/h in the case of trucks.

He said it initially took some time to get "buy-in" from police officers to issue tickets at those speeds, but he believed the result was a calmer and safer driving environment in which the annual road toll had eased from more than 500 to 435 last year.

Automobile Association spokesman George Fairbairn said he supported any efforts to cut the toll, but feared such stringent enforcement as soon as motorists strayed out of the 10km/h tolerance zone fed public cynicism towards the police as perceived revenue-gatherers.

It left individual police with less room to make their own assessments about road conditions.

But Mr Kelly said road police retained an ability to exercise discretion, and a "three contacts an hour" guideline was dropped some years ago.