This is my first post here, and I figure that others will have already perhaps commented on this, but today I (yep) paid the rego on my wife’s car, and the only thing I could think was that “Someone’s making money for nothing!”
My wife drives a little Barina Spark (1.2L engine) ironically in pink, which was NOT my choice of course. And we got the rego papers originally in Business Registration at $880 or so for 12 months. I took them into Canberra Connect to change that value down, to a personal registration, figuring it will drop substantially from a business one. Not to mention this car is ‘tiny’ by comparison to my own SUV/AWD type.
Now, don’t get me wrong – I expected to pay a bit for it, like everything in this damn town, but when they turned around and said $772.00 for 12 months for a personal registration for a vehicle 975Kg Tare or less, I was utterly speechless. I actually said that is completely wrong, and please recheck – then another of the Canberra Connect staff came and said they had a Nissan Micra 3 door (or somesuch) and that’s what they paid also, so it was correct.
Um, Sorry??? WTF is wrong with this scenario??? I look at the amount for the rego, and the breakdown was: $227.50 for Registration Fee, $526.60 for CTPI Premium (through NRMA of course.) Then the usual other charges totalling $18.00 all up.
Like HUH??? This is pathetic, seriously considering that we pay a smidge more per year for Comprehensive Insurance that. Monthly, we pay: $64 or so, and not through the cheapest (ALLIANZ) either.
Can anyone say RIP OFF? Last year, we got rid of our Toyota Camry (V6) because it was about $780 per year, plus the fuel costs… This is a massive rort, as the Spark is a matchbox. Even more funny was the price book that shows ‘UP TO’ 975kg Tare comes in at this rate. Meaning if you have a smaller matchbox (LOL) it’s still the same price.
So bad it’s funny. Would be keen to know what others are paying, I am sure I could practically halve that if I was in NSW…
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TheBusDriver said :
That’s great. But ACT rego do not give a toss. I still get rego renewals (and return them) for a car that belongs to a previous resident that moved 5 years ago. I have even called them about it, to which they respond “we can not do anything unless you send the letters back to us”. I also know of several other people using BS addresses on their licences and rego. Save your rant because nobody at rego cares.
screaming banshee said :
If you live in a different state than your car is registered in, you have 8 weeks to change over the rego. If you don’t, legally you are driving an unregistered card, and your insurance is invalid. For the sake of those you may hit, change your rego over to the state you live in.
troll-sniffer said :
I wonder whether we’ll ever have the balls to say “we got it wrong, NZ got it right so we’re going to do what they do”.
Bump.
Interesting item on WIN news tonight re a competition being held currently in Canberra regarding cutting victims from car accidents,
A comment from (I think) a local participant was that the equipment they had used originally was not capable of cutting the metal in modern cars. Ergo, the metal was stronger,and there more of it.
ACT Gov are still using weight breaks for vehicle rego established when a Holden EH weighed 1100Kg. The 1520Kg weight break, where weights over this level are massively penalised, are now being approached by a number of common cars, as a result of the additional metal required to comply with the current passenger accident protection laws.
It is high time for the ACT Liberal Opposition to start asking the incumbents why these weight breaks have not been increased in years, given that the increased weight will have had a direct decrease in the severity of vehicular injury.
Madam Cholet said :
I don’t see how the above 2 posts are conflicting. Some people need to use the car (I have one). And if you need to, then pay for it.
Madam Cholet said :
It doesn’t. Unless by “seem to” you mean “I don’t have to do the math but…”
Anyway, I drive the Australian median amount annually (10,000 km). Over 12 months, 25% goes to rego (rego+CTPI), 30% to maintenance, 30% to petrol. Total cost of $3382. Not including depreciation.
Chop71 said :
The NRMA does not have a monopoly they are the only insurance company prepared to offer CTP insurance in the ACT.
youami said :
Excuse me whilst I put you straight. I take the bus three times a week, my husband once. We have a child. He goes to school. We both work, we need a second car in case our work which pays the bills requires usto go somewhere other than the office. My husband goes to Sydney to visit his father in a nursing home once a month so I need another car to get about and do the things that need to be done. For many years we did only have one car until such time as we needed another.
So before you jump to conclusions about someone’s motives for having a car, put your brain in to gear and think about someone else instead of yourself.
Madam Cholet said :
And with elections conveniently out of the way for another three and a half years, I reckon we can look forward to further increases of several times the rate of CPI for rego, and various other ACT Government rates/taxes/charges.
Actually, you’ll notice that by far the biggest portion of that cost is the TPI (Third Party [Personal] Insurance). At first I’d thought, like others, that this was due to NRMA having a monopoly in the ACT. The ACT Gov’t was supposed to be opening it up to other insurers years ago with the idea of making TPI more competitive, but other insurers don’t consider it worthwhile offering TPI insurance for such a small market with such high costs involved.
From further investigation, it appears that the ACT laws are what cause TPI to be so expensive (and possibly why it’s not worthwhile for other insurers to get involved when, at best, they’ll only get a portion of a small but troublesome market while NRMA has the whole market). The issue is that under ACT law, TPI onlys cover the party who is NOT at fault, whereas other jurisdictions cover both parties (whoever may have been injured). This sounds counter intuitive, but if you’re not covered if someone decides you’re at fault, you’ll make sure that you can pin the fault on the other party, and how do you do that? You hire an expensive lawyer to argue for you for weeks, months or even years – as long as it takes. Ironically, the legal fight over who’s right and who’s wrong costs more than the cost of covering the injuries of both parties. And it’s the overall costs that the insurance company has to cover. So the ACT Gov’t is denying insurance cover to injured ‘at fault’ parties as well as further feathering the nests of the lawyers when it would be cheaper to dispense with the lawyers and simply cover the injuries of all parties involved.
NRMA monopoly on insurance keeps the ACT coffers warm and fuzzy.
If it costs too much, don’t buy a car. Driving is a privilege not a right. And don’t get me started about lack of public transport etc etc, you also chose to live where you live knowing this information.
Bump. I’ve finally got up off of the floor after opening our rego notice for the next 12 months on our very small second car. An increase on last year of $61. Almost 8%. I’m astounded. Won’t bother carrying on about it, but just to say that I don’t think it’s justified.
Madam Cholet said :
Have you asked the dog to contribute? You know, seeing how he’s too lazy to walk to the park.
Our rego and insurance is due right now and because of the ridiculous enormity of the CTP insurance we are wondering whether to only get third party insurance through AAMI instead of fully comp. Even though the car is used to basically only take the dog to the park and the odd work trip when a bus can’t do the trick, we are veering towards fully comp as we had an experience a few years ago where we were hit by a driver who was not insured AT ALL. We ended up obviously claiming on our insurance, which otherwise we could not have done if we’d only had third party.
Anyway, looking at the bills I have to pay, I can’t get over the fact that AAMI will replace my car in it’s entirety for an almost paltry $470, compared to the CTP cost of $772 through NRMA.
If the market in Canberra is too small for other insurers to bother, then why really does the NRMA bother? Even if another insurer could shave off $100 they’d get more business.
It does seem to go up exponentially.
Aeek said :
Until they are wiling to do something about all rental cars being registered in vic, I’m not expecting any problems. Besides any ctp claim resulting from an accident would be drawn from the QLD pool and contributions to the act road funding pool are made every time I fuel.
I am 100% behind a user pays system though which should be levied through a per litre levy on fuel. The less you drive the less you pay, the worse fuel efficiency the more you pay and it would make owning more cars more affordable to get rid of the excuse of a single person driving an suv to work because they need it to take the soccer team to practice on the weekends.
rhino said :
Welcome to the Federal/State fiscal imbalance party…
Rego goes to the state government. In theory the state government is also responsible for road funding. However, income tax and GST goes to the Federal government, which doles it out to the states as the Feds see fit (in theory all GST goes back to the states). So the Feds may earmark some money for road funding, or even give the states additional money for roads (eg joint funding for the Pacific Highway).
But the chances of the states reducing rego because income tax is ‘too high’ is pretty much zero.
Jim Jones said :
You were the one talking about a “user pays” system, I was simply pointing out that a large amount of tax is collected through the operation of motor vehicles outside of vehicle registration.
chewy14 said :
None of it goes specifically to ‘funding road infrastructure’.
That’s not how tax works.
pete09 said :
Yeah I’d agree with that. I don’t know the numbers, but it sounds likely that the costs of infrastructure etc would be definitely larger than the rego collected. In that regard it doesn’t seem so unfair of a number. But since it is just a pool of money, you also have to consider the rest of the taxes they collect from you. Overall you pay thousands in income tax plus thousands in GST and thousands in fees like rego, licences, levies etc. Roads and infrastructure should be one of the main goals for all of this to be spent on. So I guess it’s more of a complaint of overall tax levels. If they cut income tax, I’m sure people could live with high rego levels too. But it is good to subsidise the rego a bit, because it is something that almost everyone needs to pay for and the poorer people often need it even more than the richer people yet pay the same for it. I guess it’s hard to balance a fair system, but within the specific CTP system in ACT, it does seem from the discussion that the government side of the system is set up in such a way as to waste our overall society resources and be a bit unfair. There is definitely room for change to make it more efficient and fair.
Jim Jones said :
How much money out of the fuel excise collected from the operation of motor vehicles goes to funding road infrastructure?