faq01
Question: What are these fines from private car parking companies?
Answer: In all states of Australia, shopping centres and other organisations often hire private parking companies to enforce car parking arrangements on their land. If there is a boomgate and ticket issued on entry, then everything works smoothly. Virtually everyone pays for the parking time which they have used, and problems are quite rare.
However, problems regularly arise from "pay and display" car parks, where a driver is required to display a ticket on their dashboard, even if parking in a 'free' spot, or free for a certain number of hours. If you do not display a ticket or overstay the free time, the private parking companies claim large sums of money for this that are out of all proportion to the costs of parking.
However, by law, these private companies are not allowed to issue parking fines. Only government bodies such a councils and police are allowed to issue fines. The private parking companies print them in such a way that they look like normal council parking fines, but in fact they are not legitimate fines. If you examine a fine from a private parking company carefully, you will notice they are claiming "liquidated damages". What this means is the company are claiming you damaged their business by breaching the terms of the contract, and they are asking you to pay a certain amount (usually $66.00 or $88.00) to pay for this damage. They claim that by parking without paying, you damaged their business to the value of $66.00 (or some similar amount). This is what they call "liquidated damages".
Read the other FAQs of this site (see links at left) to discover what obligations you might have to pay these "liquidated damages".
Disclaimer: the author of this website is not a lawyer and this site does not constitute legal advice. All information on this website is of a general nature only. This website does not condone deliberately breach the terms and conditions of a car park.