Paying fines with counselling – Victoria

Recently a friend of mine lent her car out on a service like CarNextDoor.

The person who rented the car, did it for a long period of time and during this time the owner of the car moved house and was late in switching the address of her Driving License. Unbenounced to her , the person who had rented he car actually racked up 4 speeding fines, and these all went to the old address. CarNextDoor \ Vic Roads has a service where you can change these over to the actual driver , however by the time these had been found or chased up by Vic Roads , the time period was over , so these were now stuck in her name.

All sorts of calls to Vic Roads along with Court Hearings

She called up Victoria Legal Aid who actually said there was a way to get these paid off with Counselling

Victoria has a Work and Development Permit (WDP) scheme which helps “vulnerable and disadvantaged people with a non-financial option to address their fine debt”

She was able to say the debt was causing her Mental Health issues ( 3K’s worth of fines would clearly do this ) , and she was able to get a mental health plan in which each session she went to reduced her fines until she was down to nothing

  • treatment given by a doctor, nurse or psychologist

Interestingly the counselor didn’t need to talk about the fines at all during her sessions

https://online.fines.vic.gov.au/Support/Work-and-Development-Permit

1 Comment

  1. Very interesting article regarding the WDP!
    https://www.justice.vic.gov.au/wdp

    The woman had the right to have her matter heard in a Magistrate court and hearings now are held via video or phone calls.
    She wasn’t the driver, her only fault was not to update her residence address which is not a punishable offence.

    Regarding Legal Aid, it’s frustrating that people who answer the phone are hopeless and ignorant.
    One time it happened to me, the person who answered the phone asked me thousands of questions to check if I was eligible for the service, the “Lawyer” then agreed to support me.
    All she did was reading “word by word” what is already available on their web site!
    So I told her, anyone can do it, you don’t need to be a Lawyer, she had a 2-3 second pause but she couldn’t debate my statement!

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