KEY POINTS:
At first reading, the Government's plan to slash fines for people who can't pay seems designed to provoke fury and outrage. Why the hell should people who break the law get a lesser fine because they've refused to pay their previous speeding tickets?
There have been numerous
cases of young male drivers who've walked away from tens of thousands of dollars worth of fines because judges have decreed that there's no likelihood of them ever paying the money to the courts, and thus, with a stroke of a judicial pen, they've wiped the fines. And quite rightly, that brasses people off, especially those people who take their punishment and pay up.
Catriona MacLennan, a lawyer who works with low income people, claims that a $200 fine is a big deal for someone on a benefit or who is unemployed, but to a middle-class person, it's nothing.
I would beg to differ. Sure, if the benefit was your sole income, it might be tough to pay it off but there are ways and means of supplementing a benefit, not all of them legal. And unless you're one of the few billionaires in this country, $200 is a big deal to most of us.
The government claims they're trying to come up with a better, more workable system using carrot and stick methods like rectification notices. These give people time to put right an offence such as having an unregistered or unwarranted vehicle and if the notice is ignored, their vehicles are confiscated or impounded.
What about giving people the option of working in the community if they can't pay their fines and want to keep their cars?
There's plenty of litter in parks - especially after the weekend - and the offenders could be put to work there. Or scrubbing graffiti off fences and walls of their neighbourhoods - there's any number of environment enhancing jobs they could be involved in if a little creative sentencing was employed.
As we drove back from Taupo a couple of days ago, we were passed, at speed, by a young man in a Peugeot with a jaunty reindeer's nose fixed to the front of his car. He seemed to know the road, but I commented that with the number of cops on the road, he was bound to be picked up before he got very far.
And there he was - just as we pulled into Tokoroa - sitting by the side of the road, looking very glum indeed, as a cop wrote out a speeding ticket.
I hope the young man got lots of money from his nana for Christmas because given the speed he was travelling, the fine will be hefty. If he doesn't pay it, then the Peugeot - jaunty reindeer nose and all - should be impounded.
Nobody should get away with breaking the law because they're rich - and nobody should get away with the breaking the law if they're poor, either.
