Hello everyone and welcome back to the Glosset Channel. I am here once again to speak to Ziggy's a pattern. We did do a number of interviews together for the Glosset Channel a couple of years ago but we're going to do some more now because Ziggy's online presence has changed. Ziggy, welcome to the program. Hi, how you doing today. Very good, thank you. Now there have been some changes. Your car website, CAW.org.au is no longer online. That's correct. But you do have your own personal website. Oh yes, I've had that probably since about 1996. Now can you tell us a bit about the background of the car website and also give us some updates on your new website. What was the reason for closing down the car website? Well the car website started off as a personal campaign against road tolls because I figured that the governments of New South Wales and Victoria that had toll roads at the time. They had that were making enough money from all sorts of revenue to be able to build good roads in this country without relying on private companies building roads for them. So I figured that if people could boycott the toll roads we could force the governments to resume them as public roads and then there would be no toll roads and I still think that can be done. But unfortunately people started using the toll roads. The toll roads companies saw that they were making money. The government saw that they didn't have to build roads but they could get others to build roads for them and then take a percentage of the tolls. And therefore it was fighting a losing battle on that front. So what I also did was I started campaigning against unfair fines and speed cameras and traffic cameras in general because I thought they were a ripoff. So you developed a name at a reputation as something of a motorists and road users advocate? Yeah well I wound up with a subscriber list and I had quite a lot of people on it and they used to call me up and ask me for advice on how to try and beat well speeding tickets that they thought were wrongful. And all sorts of other things parking tickets that were wrongful. And being stitched up by cops I've had quite a few instances where my subscribers would call me up and say that they were booked for holding a mobile phone when they weren't when they were driving or not wearing a seatbelt when they were and it literally turned out to be their word against the words of the cops and we know how the courts work. The courts work in a way that 99.9% of the time they will take the word of a cop over that of a citizen or a motorist. So I guess in instances like that it's really up to the motorist or the road user to have some form of evidence contrary to what the police may be saying. Particularly in instances where police are really only working to meet their monthly quota or what police although they don't officially admit the existence of these what they call a performance benchmark. That's right they call it in New South Wales the name of it is performance objective. And you would agree that these things do exist. Are they not openly admitted by police? No they've been oh they've been whistle blows that have actually confirmed that the quotas do exist just like the parking officers who have blown the whistle on quotas with councils. They certainly do exist and a cop who doesn't come into the come into his station after a week with an empty book because he hasn't managed to catch anybody he's going to probably get a reaming out by the station sergeant. So you one of your one of your main objectives with car at the time and I know the website doesn't run any more but you you were a supporter and even a supplier of certain electronic devices that would safeguard drivers. Well I found out after seeing in courts and listening motorists plead their case and having dealt with a lot of people who contacted me wondering how they could beat a wrongfully issued infringement. I came to the conclusion at the end that the only way you could do it is to have irrefutable hard evidence in the form of let's say a GPS log video of that exact moment proving that the the motorist wasn't speeding but was booked wrongfully and in fact this happens a lot here because in this state alone the government's own figures a couple of years ago came out that stated that one out of every seven speed cameras in New South was defective. So you know you've got a situation where a defective camera may not book somebody speeding but then you've got the corollary where a motorist can go past a camera not speeding and be booked by because the camera is defective. So that would obviously emphasise the importance of someone having their own backup data to prove or disprove whatever allegations are being made about them to prove I was not speeding or to disprove claims that they were speeding. Absolutely there's no good going into court relying on your word only because your words worth nothing. If a cop comes into court waving the prosecutor or the police come into court waving a photo taken by a speed camera saying that you were doing 18 or 60 zone that's what they call evidence. You know it's admitted into evidence as an exhibit and the magistrate unless you can refute it has to take it at face value. So if you've got nothing to to refute that photo from the defective camera you're going to get nailed. So the only way to do it is to have your own device and I came to the conclusion that a lot of motorists were too bloody lazy to go and get their own so I set up a deal with a company in Taiwan to supply with what I thought was the best all in one dual camera GPS equipped dash cam in the world at the time and I was importing them on a on a no profit basis just to get these people to put them in their cars and protect them because I was just getting very fed up with people getting stitched up without without having any evidence to refute their claims. So what was happening was the people who who installed these devices a couple of them actually had contacted me and told me that they had actually scared off the infringement bureau by just telling them that they had hard evidence GPS logged video showing that they weren't speeding and the tickets were withdrawn. Now I still got a lot of people who kept coming to me and complaining that they were stitched up or booked wrongfully but they refused to arm themselves with the one device that they could save them. It's like a one off insurance policy they fork out $6,700 bucks or $1,500 a year to ensure their cars and they do that every year they've got to pay their CTP every year and all sorts of other costs but one off cost for a device that can save their neck against wrongful tickets they refused to buy them but they used to bitch at me when I couldn't help them they used to say how can I get out of this ticket and I said well you can't do it if you if you don't have any evidence to counteract the police version and they say oh we didn't want to spend the money well pay the ticket go away leave me alone.