YouTube Guide How To Apply For a Special Hardship Order Licence

December 17, 2015

 

Once again, I'm Andrew Wiseman, Owner and Principal Solicitor of Wiseman Lawyers, Queensland's only truly dedicated traffic offence law firm.

As I say in every episode, when I say "truly dedicated traffic offence law firm" all we do is Queensland traffic law, the prevention and minimisation of loss of licence, and the only courts that we service are Queensland courts.

But that said, we do literally appear in every single court in Queensland.

As I said, today I'm at Roma. In recent weeks, I've been in Gladstone, Mackay, Hervey Bay, you name it, and as you'll see from the images appearing on the screen now, we will, and do, literally go everywhere in Queensland.

All right, the gentleman that's engaged me today he has received a Queensland Transport suspension, so his licence has been suspended for six months due to an accumulation of demerit points.

So the way it works, is once a person gets 12 or more points over a 3-year period,they'll get a letter from Queensland Transport offering for them to elect between a 3-month driver's licence suspension, or what's called a 12 month good driving behaviour period.

He selected the good driver behaviour period and the condition of that is if you get 2 or more points during those 12-months, you'll then receive a 6-month suspension.

That's what's occurred in this instance, and now what we're doing is applying for what's called a special hardship order. In order to be eligible to apply for a special hardship order there's a few prerequisites.

But in a nutshell, you can't have lost your licence for any reason the last 5 years, you must be the holder of a Queensland licence, and a few other bits and pieces.

Now, what we're doing today is we're applying to the Court for an order that will overlap the 6-month suspension, permitting my client to drive for work purposes only. So, it's effectively like a drink driving work license, except the reason for the application is due to a loss of points rather than drink driving.

There's two hurdles that need to be overcome.

One of them is hardship. Basically if you're self-employed, you need to provide detailed financials in an affidavit, among other items which I won't go into now, but a lot of unrepresented persons make the mistake of thinking that just by wearing their taxi driver shirt in court for example, that's enough said.

But no, you must go into a lot of detail about the hardship that you'll suffer if you lose your licence.

And the other element that needs to be satisfied is the "fit and proper person" element, and that is the harder of the two.

Generally if people have their documents in order, hardship's not difficult to prove.

But "fit and proper person" is and there's a number of steps we get our clients to do to show that they've reformed since losing their licence, and there's also other elements that we address in the affidavit materials setting out other characteristics that show that notwithstanding the fact that they're in this situation, they are a "fit and proper" person for one last chance.

Now this gentleman, he's a self-employed truck driver, so obviously if he

loses his licence, he will lose his trucking business. He's the only employee, so if he's not behind the wheel, the income stops.

His family relies on him.

So, yeah, that's what I'm here to do today. Get him a special hardship licence.

I've already drafted all the affidavit materials, which have been filed with the Court in advance.

And yeah, so pretty straightforward as far as the facts.

It's not as exciting as some of the other videos that you've seen.

Factually, the way that he breached the good driving behaviour period was he was driving a truck.

He approached a T-junction and there was road works surrounding that T-junction and because of those road works he didn't see the Give Way sign and as a consequence he entered the intersection without giving way and there was a policeman at the road works who has seen him and giving him a ticket.

So, a bit of an unfortunate situation but he's gone straight onwards and yeah, here I am today at Roma about to go into the Roma Magistrates Court to apply for a special hardship licence.

All right, so I'm just pulling up to the Courthouse now, so I'll just find a park.

And yeah, once I'm done I'll let you know how we went.

Righto. Job done. All right, application granted. It was a bit of hard work to be honest, because as the Magistrate pointed out, the client had accumulated 40 demerit points in the last 10 years and this was the third demerit point disqualification that he received in that time.

So I had my work cut out for me persuading the Magistrate to give him a special hardship order given his traffic history, which wasn't ideal to say the least.

But as I said, given the elements that I had covered in the affidavit materials and the steps that my client took after we asked him to do so, prior to the Court date, we were able to persuade the Magistrate that on balance he is a "fit and proper" person to be given one final chance and his application was granted.

He was granted a 24-hour day/7-day work licence, so he can work at anytime day or night.

And yeah, needless to say the client's very happy.

He's not going to lose his business, won't lose his house, and given that he is his family's sole financial provider yeah, the rest of the family's not going to be jeopardised either.

So, that's me for today at Roma.

I'm heading back to the Roma airport now for my flight back to Brisbane.

And yeah, I'll see you next time, thanks for watching.

Wiseman Lawyers specialise in Special Hardship Order Licence applications, DUI Drink Driving and Traffic Law.

Regards

Andrew Wiseman, Wiseman Lawyers

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