Thread: Buying an interstate Vehicle - cautionary tale

Originally Posted by Brian Hjelm

Dead right. In Qld. any registered vehicle offered for sale has to have a Safety Certificate with the blue paper displayed on the vehicle. Not to do so is an offence and attracts a fine.

OK so if I want to sell my car in QLD as registered, it has to have a roadworthy. From what I remember the roadworthy's only last a set time. So if I advertise my car for sale with a roadworthy and, it doesn't sell before the roadworthy runs out what do you do? Do you have to get another roadworthy ad infinitum until it sells?

Ivan

It certainly should be national.
The simple answer would be for each state to agree to recognise actions taken by the other states. For example, if one state passed a vehicle for rego, then it should be possible to transfer it to another state just by paying a processing fee.
I had an interesting situation with some former refugees who moved from SA to Queensland and wanted to transfer their vehicle rego and licences. Their English was poor. They went to the Department of Transport, things happened, and they were told to ring a phone number in a couple of days, but they didn't understand why they had to ring it, so the phone call achieved nothing.
I went with them to the department and asked what it was about. Turned out they had to call that very office to confirm that SA had sent a fax confirming the rego. was valid. The inspection here had been done and was fine, so it was all fixed up on the spot.
In this case the procedure was OK, but the language issues made it unnecessarily complicated.
Could all have been avoided if every state could just look up a national database showing every vehicle in every state and confirm the details without having to send faxes and muck around.