Yowie hunter Dean Harrison stunned by $5805 fine

Yowie hunter Dean Harrison is used to monster surprises, but a letter he received from the state government has really caused his jaw to drop. Here’s what it said.

He’s used to seeing things most people find hard to accept. But yowie researcher Dean Harrison could scarcely believe his eyes recently – and it wasn’t because he’d encountered a strange mountain beast.

Mr Harrison was taken aback when he opened a letter to discover he’d been delivered a monster of another kind: a $5805 fine from the Department of Transport and Main Roads.

The eye-watering penalty was issued to the Hope Island resident because his daughter had been captured by a state government camera not wearing her seatbelt correctly when a passenger in his car.

Because the vehicle was a company car, the ticket was for five times the usual $1161 penalty.

“My daughter lives in Melbourne. She’s 23 years old. She comes up to visit,” Mr Harrison said. “She was only here two nights.

“She has a condition called pectus carinatum. She doesn’t just have this condition, she has it acutely. It is one of the worst versions that doctors have ever seen.

“So she’s had several operations, major operations, the worst you could ever imagine.

“She’s had this since she was seven years old. By the time she was 17 years old she was having all these operations and you’d hear her screaming in pain.

“It was just heart-wrenching as a father to hear your daughter in so much pain.”

Yowie hunter Dean Harrison with a copy of the $5805 fine notice he received.

Mr Harrison said that, despite the operations, his daughter still suffered a high level of discomfort.

“It’s still tender, it’s still painful, so from time to time, understandably, you may just adjust that seatbelt,” he said.

“You can see from the photo that she’s simply adjusted it, she’s put it underneath so that it doesn’t go over the affected area.

“Pectus, it comes out from the heart basically, it is atrocious. Any sort of pressure on that area is a real issue.”

Mr Harrison said he was confident the fine would be waived when he submitted medical reports to TMR.

However he was frustrated by the time he would have to devote to the process, saying he had already “wasted” an hour and a half attempting to fill out online forms that kept crashing.

The real reason he was speaking out though, he said, was because he was angry he had been fined so much when people guilty of criminal offences often got lesser punishments.

“With all these people being let off for atrocious crimes, the hooning, the break-ins, the teen robberies, stealing the cars, I find it offensive that I’m fined $5805,” he said.

“They find reason to fine me that, with all these people doing real crimes out there getting off scot free.

“We have the biggest fines in the country in Queensland now. It is outrageous, absolutely outrageous.

“It’s not justified at all.”

Follow @keithjwoods