Thursday, 23 June 2022

 Mr RICH-PHILLIPS (South Eastern Metropolitan) (17:55): (2020) The matter I raise tonight is for the attention of the Minister for Roads and Road Safety in the other place, and it relates to the relatively recent introduction of a 40-kilometre-an-hour speed zone on the Nepean Highway at Frankston. This was done last year to facilitate on-street dining because no-one could go into restaurants or any other venue last year through the lockdowns. As a consequence of the introduction of that 40-kilometre-an-hour speed zone on, I emphasise, the Nepean Highway, an enormous number of people have been fined at the speed camera at Nepean Highway and Davey Street. Now, the speed camera is not new—it has been there for quite some time—but the reduction in the speed limit from 50 kilometres per hour to 40 kilometres per hour has not been well signed and there is limited signage identifying the change in speed. Unlike most 40-kilometre-an-hour speed zones there are no flashing signs, as you would expect to see in a school zone—this is not a school zone, it is a retail strip—and as a consequence many people in the Frankston area are not aware that the speed zone has been dropped from 50 kilometres an hour to 40 kilometres an hour. As a consequence, since May of this year more than $20 000 a day in fine revenue has been collected from that Davey Street–Nepean Highway speed camera.

This is absolutely unconscionable conduct on the part of the government—to drop a speed zone in an area in a way in which it would not normally be lowered, on a main highway, to do it without signage and then to collect $20 000 a day in fine revenue. It is absolutely unconscionable on the part of the government. So the actions I seek from the Minister for Roads and Road Safety are to ensure, firstly, that appropriate signage is put in place—flashing signage as you would expect in any other 40-kilometre-an-hour zone—that there is adequate notice of that and that the fines which have been incurred to date, effectively tricking people into fines by inadequately signing the change of zone, are all considered and, where appropriate, reversed to reflect the fact that this change in speed zone was not properly notified and was not properly identified to the Frankston community.