Road toll debt clogging courts with some drivers facing fines of up to $200k
Lawyers are seeing clients in Queensland and Victoria with enormous, unpayable toll debts. (Getty Images: Claire Cordier)
Are you good at opening your mail, going through your bills and paying them on time? What about paying for toll roads?
In Queensland and Victoria toll matters are clogging the court system, and motorists have been left with toll fine debts as large as $200,000.
What begins as a toll fee equivalent to the price of a hamburger can become hundreds of dollars within a matter of months.
It's a situation Gillian, from Melbourne, found herself in. Over a period of years, she racked up about 160 tolls from CityLink and EastLink, adding up to about $40,000.
"It was really overwhelming, I was drowning in mail," Gillian says.
"At the time I was unwell, and wasn't able to cope with it … I just wasn't able to face the fact that there was a real mounting problem, and that's how they backed up."
While the piles of envelopes were mounting, Gillian's daughter was living with a chronic illness, and Gillian herself was dealing with a depression and anxiety disorder.
Loading..."Logically, in some part of my mind I knew that the bills were racking up, and I just had no way of paying them," she says.
Asked why she didn't just pay the tolls straight away, Gillian says it's difficult for even her to understand.
"I wish I had an answer to that question, but I knew it was money I couldn't afford … I try not to use toll roads at all now going to the city, or ever," she says.
Gillian was eventually subpoenaed to court and is now on a good behaviour bond. She was fortunate to have much of the debt dismissed by a magistrate, but not everyone is that lucky.
People turning up in court are 'not frequent flyers'
According Denis Nelthorpe, chief executive of community legal centre West Justice, based in Melbourne's outer west, Gillian's story is not unusual.
He says toll matters are clogging up Victorian courts — there were more than 73,000 toll matters in 2015-16 — with fines that are disproportionate to the wrongdoing involved.
"We are seeing people, often women, who've had an emotional upset like a death, a divorce, someone very ill in hospital, [then] there's a mental health reaction," he says.
"And even though they have never had a parking fine, they suddenly turn up owing $20,000 to $50,000."
But the fines can get even bigger.
"It's now not uncommon to see between $100,000 and $200,000," he says.
"What everyone needs to understand is that there is not the slightest possibility that most of those people can pay those fines. If the court were to jail them, we would probably need to build a prison just for tolls."
Toll debt defendants are often people with mental health problems. (Getty Images: Caiaimage/Paul Viant)
It's not just people living with a mental illness who can find themselves with a toll debt problem, Mr Nelthorpe says. It can also happen to people who lend a car to friends or family, or who change address and don't get the fines until later, once big debts have started rolling in.
"It's worth saying that the sort of people turning up in the court are not 'frequent flyers', they are not people who have ever been before the court," he says.
And according to Maddison Johnstone, co-founder of Toll Redress, and other lawyers, there are people in Queensland facing the same kind of issues. Toll Redress has helped clients with debts of up to $100,000.
"We've had thousands of motorists … come to us with very similar problems," Ms Johnstone says.
"Hundreds of these matters are making it to the courts, and the courts are absolutely inundated with pressures from toll road issues."
From a toll to $330 fine … in months
Mr Nelthorpe says in Victoria, big debts often accrue as the result of administrative costs that add up over time.
There are two toll operators in Victoria. (ABC TV)
"This comes back to the fact that we have a default system, and in a default system if you don't pay … an administrative charge is added, so that may take it from $10 to $25," he says.
"[If] you don't pay that when you get the first letter, then there will be another fee, and the fees from the $10 through to the end will take it from $10 to about $330 by the time it gets to court."
Mr Nelthorpe says the bigger problem is that in Victoria, toll companies can send a fine for every day the road is used. So, if you use the toll road every day for a month, you get 30 separate fines in the mail.
"You realise after you've opened the first three, they all say $330 … You actually now owe an astronomical amount of money," he says.
In Queensland, it's a similar situation, with the potential to be fined every time the toll road is used.
But in a statement, the state's sole toll operator Transurban said the fee system changed in late in 2017.
"Transurban Queensland introduced the aggregation of notices of demand … under these changes, all trips made over a three-day period are itemised on a single notice of demand and a single administration fee charged," the statement reads.
Across the border from both states in New South Wales, however, toll operators can only charge one infringement notice per month. Toll fines can still get out of control for some, however debts accrue more slowly, and the pressure on the court system is far less.
Do the changes go far enough?
In Victoria, changes are afoot in the way toll fines are issued.
The state government has linked legislation to a new road project, the West Gate Tunnel, that contains several solutions. But the fate of that bill, and the tunnel, looks uncertain.
The Victorian Government has also written a clause into toll operator Transurban's new contract that means it can only issue one infringement notice a week to motorists.
Transurban is the only toll operator in Queensland. (AAP: John Pryke)
Transurban has 12 months to bring about this change. In a statement Transurban didn't specify when it will implement this change, but said it now only refers a vehicle for an infringement notice once every three days.
Recent changes to the Victorian Fines Act also mean toll operators have six months to deal with unpaid tolls before matters get referred to the criminal justice system.
Mr Nelthorpe welcomes the reforms written into Transurban's contracts, but says a complete legislative package is needed, especially given there is another toll operator, ConnectEast, which runs the EastLink toll road.
"I think there probably is a requirement for legislation … there is more than one toll provider. But secondly, if something is in a contract and it becomes disputed, it will be left to civil courts to work it out," he says.
Mr Nelthorpe says having some of the reforms go ahead through Transurban's contract and some left to legislation would be unhelpful.
"That could produce a result where people on the western side of Melbourne get one result, and people down on the end of EastLink in the Frankston area get a completely different result, which clearly would be beyond the pale."