The common but very naughty driving habit that will cost you a $400 fine and five demerit points
Three out of four motorists who told the judge they weren't using their phone on NSW roads were still required to pay their fines.
But the low success rate didn't stop many drivers from arguing that it wasn't a phone pictured in their hand, with some going as far as to claim it was actually 'a chocolate wafer,' 'a calculator,' or 'banana bread.'
Mobile phone detection cameras were introduced in early 2020 and have since caught one in every 957 drivers breaking phone laws.
Despite being photographed holding their phones by the cameras, 879 people have contested their fines so far this year.
One motorist told the court they had been snapped holding a 'receipt tin,' which the judge dismissed, ordering them to pay a $500 fine.
Another claimed they were using an 'electric shaver' but were still found guilty.
In a shocking case, a driver claimed the phone pictured was actually a 'Kit Kat,' but the judge upheld their $400 fine and ordered them to cover an additional $600 in departmental costs.
Other failed misidentification arguments included banana bread, wallets, a calculator, and a 'remote control for a car stereo'.
Transport for NSW Secretary Josh Murray explained that many motorists likely believed they could get away with disputing the fine, as the photo they receive is often small and grainy.
He claimed many were shocked when they realised the image supplied to the judge is large and detailed, with the phone clearly visible.
"They're thinking, 'What's to say what the picture shows'," Murray told the Daily Telegraph.
"But once the pic is shown on a big TV screen next to the magistrate, it's often very clear that it is a phone — sometimes you can even see the brand name.
"Everyone deserves their day in court but with three out of four cases being upheld, it's clear many drivers are ticking the box."
Roughly 614 million cars have been checked by mobile phone detection cameras since March 1, 2020.
Of those, 910,000 checks resulted in fines for illegal phone use.
Transport for NSW Secretary Josh Murray explained that many drivers mistakenly believed mobile phone detection cameras (pictured) produce poor-quality images.
The fine for using a mobile phone is typically $423 but jumps to $562 if the offence was recorded in a school zone.
On top of the monetary loss, convicted drivers lose five demerit points.
Up to 47 mobile phone detection cameras operate in NSW at a time.
Revenue collected from mobile phone, seatbelt and speeding fines goes into a Community Road Safety Fund to help cover the cost of road safety initiatives.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Daily Mail
Wild reason new mum was hit with $410 driving fine
A mum who was pumping breastmilk in the passenger seat of a car has been hit with a $410 traffic fine because she had adjusted the position of her seatbelt. Illiya was snapped by an overhead traffic camera on her way home from the Randwick Racecourse, in Sydney, at 7.30pm on February 24. Her husband had been driving while she was using a cordless breast pump for their seven-month-old baby, who was being looked after by a babysitter. The mum said she did not want to pump breastmilk at the function and had instead decided to do it on the way home in the privacy of their car. Despite her seatbelt sitting only partially below her chest, Illiya was still slapped with a traffic infringement notice. She was sent the $410 fine and a photo of the moment she had been using the pump in the mail. The photo showed that the seatbelt was still fastened and Illiya disputed the fine. However, Transport for NSW said it was standing by the penalty. The road authority argued that seatbelts had been around for more than 50 years because they save lives. Illiya was told her appeal had been rejected and she has since reluctantly paid up. According to NSW law, seatbelt rules are enforced to ensure the safety of passengers and they should not be repositioned in any way. 'The lap portion of a seatbelt should lie across your hips and the sash should fall across your chest and mid-shoulder,' the appeal rejection letter she received from Transport NSW said. 'The photos clearly show the passengers seatbelt was not positioned across their chest.' But Illiya argued there were extraordinary circumstances because there could be health issues if she delayed pumping the milk such as clogged ducts, mastitis and infection. 'You can see in the photo I am wearing the seatbelt but it's a bit lower, under my boob, because of where the pump was,' she told 'I totally get if I was holding the baby or if the seatbelt wasn't on but it was.' A Transport NSW spokesperson said seatbelts should be worn 'low, flat and firm'. 'The rules around seatbelt use in NSW have been in place for more than 50 years and the reason is simple – seatbelts save lives,' they told Daily Mail Australia. 'Each life lost on our roads was someone's loved one – a parent, a child, a sibling, a friend. The impact on families and communities is devastating. 'Wearing a seatbelt properly – low, flat and firm – doubles your chances of surviving a crash. 'Whether you are driving or are a passenger, please prioritise safety every time you're on the road.' Wearing a seatbelt doubles the chance of survival if a car were to be involved in a crash. Adjusting the seatbelt to be below the chest could cause injuries to the liver, spleen or abdomen which could lead to death or disability in the event of a crash. In 2024, 33 people died because they were not wearing their seatbelts properly.
Spectator
2 days ago
- Spectator
Make teenage summer jobs compulsory
I'm of an age where a summer's evening often means a few gin and tonics on my balcony along with cheese, olives and an Etta James soundtrack. But it wasn't that long ago that the slow descent of the amber orb meant trekking into Chester city centre to catch a minibus that would take me to a shampoo factory on the outskirts of Flint. There, from 9 p.m. until 7 a.m., my job was to screw the tops on to bottles of shampoo and conditioner to a soundtrack of scatological invective from my workmates, broken only by a 2 a.m. canteen break for cigarettes and a semi-melted KitKat. I endured this for three nights a week between finishing my A-levels and going to university, knowing while I stood at the frequently malfunctioning conveyor belt that some of my mates would at that very moment be boozing in beer gardens and attempting to snog girls to the strains of Pulp and Blur in Raphael's indie disco back in Chester. I was 18, but I'd been working since I was 12 and a half – the age I got my first paper round delivering exactly 144 (that number will never leave my memory) copies of the Chester Standard after school to houses, far too many of which were guarded by dogs seemingly professionally trained to attack children representing the bottom rung of the local press. The canine attacks were frightening and the shampoo bottles were sticky, but the money I earned ensured that I was never short of football stickers and, latterly, pints of Boddingtons. More importantly, doing these horrible jobs as a teenager instilled two important lessons in me. Firstly, you do actually take a pride in getting a wage packet, no matter how vile the work. Secondly, these forms of employment acted as a stern cautionary tale: if I didn't crack on with my studies, then I could be doing this kind of toil for the rest of my life. This was all three decades ago. But as a disabled, state-schooled northerner in the world of London media, I've long stopped feeling incredulous at the reactions of my more privileged brethren when I tell them about those odious teen jobs. I'm painfully aware of the potential to sound like Josiah Bounderby in Hard Times so I've never laid it on too thick with my tales of northern manual labour; after all, doing a paper round and a factory job isn't the same as a career spent down a deep cast mine. But, to many of those I have shared my quotidian, minimum-wage tales with, it seems that I have emerged straight from a chapter of The Road To Wigan Pier, only minus the flat cap and rickets. Am I jealous of their ability to eschew ever having had a summer job – chiefly thanks to the Bank of Mummy and Daddy? Yes, of course. But I also know my soul is purer from having had little choice but to work from a young age. As a result, I'm far less likely to miss a work deadline because it's 'all been a bit frantic here lately' or, most nauseating of all, 'because I've been a bit under the weather'. I've been staggered to discover, from my fiancée's 16-year-old son, just how few of his classmates are working, or even being pressured by parents into getting some kind of summer job – whether it be doing an internship or simply earning a crust at a McDonald's drive-through or at an Amazon warehouse. To sail into university and then into your chosen career without ever having known what it's like to tolerate a summer job is a dangerous way to enter your twenties. You will be more entitled. You will have less resilience. You are far more likely to develop confused, patronising or downright pejorative views about people who have less well-paid work than yourself. And you really won't have the same grasp of the value of a ten pound note. You don't have to travel far these days to find much bloviating around the 'snowflake' attitude of today's teens. And while any legislated insistence on 16- to 18-year-olds procuring a summer job of some kind is hardly the equivalent to demanding the reinstatement of national service, there probably should be consequences for the in-betweeners who decide to spend their summer gaming and guzzling rather than doing at least a moderate amount of grafting. So, without wishing to sound too much like one of the Four Yorkshiremen from Monty Python, I humbly suggest that, if you have done no work at all between the end of your GCSEs and the start of university (and work could include anything from volunteering to a lengthy internship or just sweating it out behind the till at Lidl), then this should count against you when it comes to getting into your chosen university. This could quite easily be accomplished. A few pay stubs or a letter from an employer stating that you have held down a job of some kind should be included with a university application. (Oh, and getting a family member to say that young Toby or Cordelia worked as an intern at Dad's company absolutely won't cut it.) If choosing to party in Ibiza on mum and dad's money can make the difference between getting into either Balliol or the University of Bolton, then teens might find that earning a crust for at least part of their summer is worth the strain. Are there jobs available for 16- to 18-year-olds? Yes, of course – and any claim otherwise should be robustly dismissed by parents if hollered at them by a truculent teen. There is a recruitment crisis in the realms of catering, hospitality and manual work in this country. Many of the jobs are zero hours, many of them come via an agency and almost none of them are well paid. But any teen can get one. As I found myself, nothing works better for scaring you straight than the notion that a lack of academic effort could result in the foreman at a North Wales shampoo factory offering you a job, and I quote, 'full time, if things don't work out, Rob'. So far (and I'm 47 now), they have worked out. But the memory of screwing on those bottle tops at 3 a.m. in 1996 is palpable. Every young man or woman, if they ever feel complacent in their first post-graduation career job, should be able to summon up the smell of chip fat, the weight of a beer barrel or the mephitic odour of cheap shampoo in their leaner moments. A tough summer job isn't for life. But the memory and experience of one is capable, over the succeeding decades, of making you graft harder, make excuses less easily and, just maybe, make you a little more grateful for what you now have.
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Daily Mail
The common but very naughty driving habit that will cost you a $400 fine and five demerit points
Thousands of drivers who were fined for using their phones while behind the wheel argued that the device was actually another item - like a wallet or banana bread. Three out of four motorists who told the judge they weren't using their phone on NSW roads were still required to pay their fines. But the low success rate didn't stop many drivers from arguing that it wasn't a phone pictured in their hand, with some going as far as to claim it was actually 'a chocolate wafer,' 'a calculator,' or 'banana bread.' Mobile phone detection cameras were introduced in early 2020 and have since caught one in every 957 drivers breaking phone laws. Despite being photographed holding their phones by the cameras, 879 people have contested their fines so far this year. One motorist told the court they had been snapped holding a 'receipt tin,' which the judge dismissed, ordering them to pay a $500 fine. Another claimed they were using an 'electric shaver' but were still found guilty. In a shocking case, a driver claimed the phone pictured was actually a 'Kit Kat,' but the judge upheld their $400 fine and ordered them to cover an additional $600 in departmental costs. Other failed misidentification arguments included banana bread, wallets, a calculator, and a 'remote control for a car stereo'. Transport for NSW Secretary Josh Murray explained that many motorists likely believed they could get away with disputing the fine, as the photo they receive is often small and grainy. He claimed many were shocked when they realised the image supplied to the judge is large and detailed, with the phone clearly visible. "They're thinking, 'What's to say what the picture shows'," Murray told the Daily Telegraph. "But once the pic is shown on a big TV screen next to the magistrate, it's often very clear that it is a phone — sometimes you can even see the brand name. "Everyone deserves their day in court but with three out of four cases being upheld, it's clear many drivers are ticking the box." Roughly 614 million cars have been checked by mobile phone detection cameras since March 1, 2020. Of those, 910,000 checks resulted in fines for illegal phone use. Transport for NSW Secretary Josh Murray explained that many drivers mistakenly believed mobile phone detection cameras (pictured) produce poor-quality images. The fine for using a mobile phone is typically $423 but jumps to $562 if the offence was recorded in a school zone. On top of the monetary loss, convicted drivers lose five demerit points. Up to 47 mobile phone detection cameras operate in NSW at a time. Revenue collected from mobile phone, seatbelt and speeding fines goes into a Community Road Safety Fund to help cover the cost of road safety initiatives.
