Have you received a parking ticket from Auckland City Council since March this year? It may be invalid, says Manukau East MP Ross Robertson.

Mr Robertson has identified that invalid traffic infringement notices are being issued by Auckland City Council, following a constituent’s query over a parking fine.

The ticket, written in July, was issued under the authority of the Transport Act 1962. On 1 March this year that Act was repealed, replaced by the Land Transport Act 1998.

Mr Robertson says that expert legal opinion has deemed that constituent’s parking ticket to be invalid. And if one ticket is invalid, thousands must be.

“This is a pointed reminder that Auckland City Council hasn’t done its homework. Manukau City Council has had the forethought to print infringement notices which covered both sets of legislation, which covered it during the period where the new legislation was being introduced and the old Transport Act repealed.

“It may be only a technicality, but it’s a technicality that could cost Auckland City Council hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. I doubt that this oversight by council management will be appreciated by its ratepayers.”

ENDS

© Scoop Media

Gordon Campbell: On the Sony cyber attack

Given the layers of meta-irony involved, the saga of the Sony cyber attack seemed at the outset more like a snarky European art film than a popcorn entry at the multiplex.

Yet now with (a) President Barack Obama weighing in on the side of artistic freedom and calling for the US to make a ‘proportionate response’quickly followed by (b) North Korea’s entire Internet service going down, and with both these events being followed by (c) Sony deciding to backtrack and release The Interview film that had made it a target for the dastardly North Koreans in the first place, then ay caramba…the whole world will now be watching how this affair pans out. More>>