No tap and a $296 whack: myki fines among the world’s harshest

Victorians caught without a myki cop one of the highest fines for fare evasion in the world, which social welfare groups say punishes poor and vulnerable people who have often made a genuine mistake.

Fines for failing to produce a valid ticket or proof of concession entitlement increased by $8 on July 1 to $296. In comparison, the fare evasion penalty in Western Australia is $100, while in London it’s equivalent to $95 and in Paris $125. In Singapore, it’s just $55.

Attia Rana lost sleep when she received a fare evasion fine that she couldn’t afford to pay, and says it is an unfair punishment for making an honest mistake. Credit: Justin McManus

And if you don’t pay your fine in time in Victoria, that cost can surge to more than $500 in just a couple of months.

An analysis by The Sunday Age of major transit systems globally identified just one jurisdiction that issued higher fines for fare evasion: Queensland at $322.

NSW’s fare evasion fines are $200 and can be reduced to $100 for people who receive Centrelink payments, while Victoria only reduces fines for people under 18 ($99).

Legal and welfare advocates are calling for Victoria to overhaul its fine system to recognise the disproportionate impact such large penalties have on people on low incomes or who are experiencing poverty.

“An almost $300 fine has a massive impact,” said Shifrah Blustein, managing lawyer at Inner Melbourne Community Legal.

“We see people having to choose between paying their fine or paying rent or buying medicine.”

Department of Transport and Planning issues about 90,000 fare evasion fines a year. Late fees can see a $296 penalty jump to $469 after seven weeks – and $533 after 10 weeks.

Blustein said that unlike driving infringements, fare evasion fines had no public safety benefit and were purely aimed at protecting revenue, making them “patently excessive”.

“The people who can pay up-front, they just pay: it makes no real difference to them. The people who can’t pay, it can have devastating, literally life-changing consequences,” Blustein said.

Attia Rana received a fine in the mail from the Department of Transport and Planing after neglecting to touch-on when she boarded a train at Brunswick station last September.

The mother-of-three said she could not afford to pay the $288 penalty when it first arrived, and so it quickly ballooned with late fees to $521.60 – almost a week’s salary.

“Even when I received the first notice, I was thinking, ‘OK this is too much – I’ll have to plan for how to pay for this’,” Rana said of the fine, which arrived in October.

The transport department issues around 90,000 fare evasion fines every year. Credit: Justin McManus

“I couldn’t sleep the night after. I was just thinking, ‘What should I do now?’”

Rana said that while she thought it was important to discourage deliberate fare evasion, she always usually touched-on and had never received a fine or warning before.

“We are human and can make mistakes, but the fine is too much – it should be reasonable,” she said.

During the week, Rana met with a financial counsellor to help her apply to Fines Victoria for an instalment plan to pay the debt.

The transport department estimates about 3 per cent of all passengers across Victoria’s train, tram and bus networks do not touch-on, costing it close to $20 million a year in lost revenue in 2022.

The department issued 87,513 myki fines in the 2023 financial year – a similar number to the years just before the COVID-19 pandemic and down from 93,426 in 2017.

An Allan government spokesperson said public transport fines were designed to target repeat offenders and anyone fined could request a review, which considered exceptional personal circumstances and their history of paying to travel.

“We issue more warnings for fare evasion than fines and our enforcement strategy targets repeat offenders [and] takes personal circumstances into account,” they said.

But Blustein said the review process was difficult for many people to navigate without the help of a lawyer and it required them to provide a high level of evidence about their circumstances to succeed.

Financial Counselling Victoria chief executive Zyl Hovenga-Wauchope said clients seeking help were also often dealing with public transport fines they couldn’t pay and found the government hardship program inadequate.

“It’s the poverty premium,” he said. “They get whacked with a $300 fine that they can’t pay, and then they get whacked with the late fees that continue to rise and continue to penalise them for being unable to pay because they’re excessive in the first place.”

Hovenga-Wauchope said Victoria should adopt similar system of basing fines on a percentage of a person’s income, as is done for some traffic fines in Finland, Sweden and Germany.

More broadly, he said the state should reconsider the cost of using public transport – now $10.60 day, or $53 a week – at a time when several governments around the world are making it free or very cheap, including a trial of 50¢ fares in Queensland.

“The whole system should be 50¢ per trip, and then we completely obviate the need to penalise poor people for trying to get to work,” Hovenga-Wauchope said.

Blustein said many myki fine cases that community legal centres dealt with involved people who made a genuine one-time mistake and couldn’t afford to pay their fine, or could not buy a ticket in the first place because they were experiencing homelessness, poverty or fleeing family violence.

She said that the authorised officers who patrol the system were either not using enough discretion about when to submit a “record of non-compliance”, or that those reports did not contain enough information about people’s circumstances for the transport department to make a sensible decision about whether to issue them a fine.

In addition to the review process, people can challenge myki fines in the Magistrates’ Court. In the 2023 financial year, 608 people asked the court to either dismiss or reduce their penalties, a transport department spokesperson said.

The number of myki fines issued has fallen significantly since the Labor government reformed the fine system in 2017, including by removing the option of paying a $75 on-the-spot fine that a review found unfairly rewarded deliberate fare evaders. In 2015, it issued 181,581 infringements notices and 75,262 on-the-spot fines.

The state government is in the processes of boosting the number of authorised officers on the network from around 650 to 700 over the next five years.

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