'Gaol Preferable To Paying Fines For Traffic Offences”

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28765, 10 December 1958, Page 7

'Gaol Preferable To Paying Fines For Traffic Offences”

(New Zealand Press Association)

DUNEDIN, Dec. 9. ‘‘The absurdly high fines and costs extorted by the Magistrates’ Courts on decent people who commit one of the thousand and one trivial traffic offences that it is apparently possible to commit in this country” were criticised by the guest speaker, Mr Robin Cockburn, at tonight’s Christmas Party of the Overseas League. ‘‘Take, for instance, the game I sometimes see grown up men playing, with chalk, on people’s tyres, and the game the victims themselves play when they see them up to this business—a sort of mixture of cat-and-mouse and blind man’s buff,” he said. Mr Cockburn described the Magistrate’s Court when traffic cases were being heard ‘‘as a casino where the Magistrates are the croupiers who give the chips. But the house always wins.” He suggested that it might

stimulate a spot of timely “rethinking” in the appropriate quarters if everyone who was convicted for a parking offence in the traffic court elected to go to prison as was his democratic right and privilege for a day or two instead. The Court would then keep him instead of his keeping the Court.

Mr Cockburn, who recently came from Edinburgh to live in Dunedin, is a well-known Scottish journalist and broadcaster.