Woodhouse Michael: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoodhouse Michael: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16757. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (Associate Minister of Transport)on behalf of theMinister of Transport: I move That the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill be now read a second time. I want to thank members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for their work on the bill. The changes proposed in the bill allow for the fair and practical application of road-user charges in a range of unusual circumstances. The bill will amend the Road User Charges Act 2012 and the Land Transport Act 1998. The Road User Charges Act 2012 provides for the regulation and administration of the collection of road-user charges or RUC for the use of roads and road wear. The Land Transport Act 1998 provides for a range of functions relating to land transport including the registration and licensing of vehicles.The main purpose of this bill is to address an anomaly for some vehicle owners who are required to purchase road-user charges for their vehicles but are unable to do so because their vehicles are not registered and not legally required to be. Its secondary purpose is to enable annual charges in lieu of road-user charges to be collected through registration and licensing processes for vehicles that are exempt from road-user charges. The bill also makes other minor changes to the Road User Charges Act 2012.Vehicles that are exempt from registration not required to be registered or operated under a trade plate in an unregistered state are subject to road-user charges unless they belong to a class of vehicle that makes them specifically exempt. However it is not possible to issue road-user charged licences to these vehicles because road-user charged licences are linked to a vehicle’s registration number. These kinds of unregistered vehicles make only limited use of roads and it is not cost-effective to try to collect road-user charges for them. The Road User Charges Act 2012 will be amended to allow regulations that exempt unregistered vehicles from road-user charges.Other classes of vehicles are exempt from road-user charges primarily because it is uneconomic to collect road-user charges for these vehicles. Also most of these vehicles do very little travel on roads. However some exempt vehicles such as fast tractors do a sufficient amount of travel on roads to cause road wear so it is fair that their owners should make a contribution towards the cost that they impose. This bill allows for the collection of an annual charge in lieu of road-user charges for these kinds of vehicles. By doing so it allows for the fair and practical recovery of costs where collecting them through the normal process would be impractical or uneconomic. The bill also amends the Road User Charges Act 2012 to add offence provisions where light vehicles conditionally exempted from road-user charges are operated in breach of those conditions.Finally the bill contains amendments of a technical nature that support the policy aims behind road-user charges and rationalise enforcement activity. These clarify that a person who has entered into an arrangement to pay overdue fees by instalment will not be subject to additional penalties allow the road-user charges collector to set a licence fee for one-off vehicles that are not covered by prescribed road-user charges types and make minor amendments that allow for the effective functioning of the road-user charges system. The bill will need to be divided into two separate bills at the Committee stage.The bill was referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee in August 2013. The committee considered five submissions and heard from three submitters. The committee has recommended three minor changes to the bill. These changes are necessary to improve the application of the bill. Under the Road User Charges Act 2012 if a vehicle subject to road-user charges is used on a road without a valid distance licence or being registered under an alternative payment scheme the only defence available to the operator is that they had a “reasonable excuse” to do so. One submission noted that this creates the undesirable situation where an operator must go to court to demonstrate that they had that reasonable excuse. Although it is always open to an enforcement officer to accept an excuse as reasonable there can be uncertainty where a vehicle subject to road-user charges does not display the correct road-user charges licence but the licence displayed is one for which sufficient payment has been made to cover the charges that apply to the vehicle. Subsequently the committee recommended a change to clause 6A to give clearer guidance to operators and enforcement authorities as to what circumstances could constitute a reasonable excuse. The amendment provides guidance to operators and enforcement authorities as to a particular circumstance that might constitute a reasonable excuse without otherwise altering the effect of the provision.The second amendment that the committee recommended relates to clause 8 with a new section 12A(2)(e) to remove the previous reference to the operator providing information to the regulator after the “completion of the operation of the vehicles concerned.” This amendment reflects the intention of the clause which is to provide correct information and the intention of the bill which requires information to be provided as soon as practicable once it becomes available. The amendment enables simpler compliance for a small number of operators.Lastly the committee recommends inserting the word “user” into section 57(1)(a) of the Road User Charges Act 2012. This would change the phrase “unpaid road charges” to “unpaid road user charges” making the Road User Charges Act clearer and more consistent. The proposed changes allow for the fair and practical application of road-user charges in a range of unusual circumstances and I commend the bill to the House.