Three Melbourne councils to pay back almost $20m in disputed parking fines
Three councils in Melbourne will pay back almost $20m in disputed parking fines after the Victorian ombudsman found they had acted unlawfully by outsourcing the reviews of contested parking fines to a private contractor.
Glen Eira city council, Port Phillip city council and the City of Stonnington have denied any wrongdoing in their management of parking fine reviews, but said they had agreed to pay back any reviewed fines issued between 2006 and 2016 or 2017 as a “gesture of goodwill”.
The ombudsman, Deborah Glass, said all three councils had slightly different contractual arrangements with a firm called Tenix to review contested parking fines.
In a report tabled in Victorian parliament on Tuesday, Glass found that all three councils appeared to be in breach of the Infringement Act 2006, which gives people who are issued with an infringement the right to ask the “enforcement agency” that issued the infringement to review its decision.
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“The legal issues have not been tested in court; and not being a court, the Ombudsman cannot definitively determine the lawfulness of the councils’ actions,” she said. “But I can express an opinion on whether an administrative action appears to be contrary to law.”
The act makes no reference to private contractors, and Glass said the definition of “enforcement agency” is unclear.
But correspondence from the Department of Justice and Community Safety, which administers the act, said that reviews must be conducted by the agency that issues the fine.
In a letter to the ombudsman, the department said: “The department’s communications, provided over many years, have consistently advised that an enforcement agency must determine internal reviews internally, although contractors can provide administrative assistance as part of this process.”
Two other Melbourne councils that had contacts with Tenix, Monash city council and Kingston city council, last year announced they would pay back 46,000 parking fines, worth a total of $4.9m, that were reviewed and upheld between 2006 and 2016 after determining they had a “legal and moral” obligation to do so.
Monash city council had earlier written to the attorney general to request a retrospective amendment to the act allowing for the use of private contractors, but the request was refused.
The issue was discovered by a lawyer who ran a website called the “fine defender”. From 2016, they wrote several letters to Melbourne councils disputing the legality of the internal review process.
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Glass said it was likely that other councils and agencies that are authorised to issue infringements in Victoria are also using external contractors to conduct internal fine reviews.
Glass found that Glen Eira council had outsourced its decision-making on internal reviews to Tenix between 2006 and 2016, while Port Phillip and the City of Stonnington had “in effect, rubber-stamped the contractor recommendations”.
“Council officers could, in principle, review the evidence,” Glass wrote. “But in practice, the speed with which recommendations were accepted gave no hint of independent assessment. One file review showed a council officer taking one minute to approve recommendations for 107 applications, or about half a second per application.”
The City of Stonnington said it “rejects this position entirely”, saying it set clear parameters for internal reviews and Tenix had no discretion.
“The purpose of this arrangement was to ensure that efficiency in this process was achieved,” it said in a response included in the ombudsman’s report. “Council officers were still appropriately instructed to review Tenix’s recommendations and were the ultimate and final decision makers in the process.”
