Why is New Zealand so soft on speeding?

Sunday, 5 July 2026

OPINION: There is a type of lawlessness New Zealand finds easy to condemn. It is the teen ramraiders crashing through mall shop-fronts; the gang members fortified in their pads. For them, we tend to favour tough talk and a firm hand. Law-breaking should have consequences.

Then there is speeding. It is the everyday offence committed by otherwise respectable people. Our approach to that is more cuddles than condemnation.

Most of our penalties for road offences were set in 1999 and, for the most part, have not changed since. If you are caught driving 59kph in a 50kph zone, you will be fined $30. That was the penalty a quarter of a century ago, and it remains the penalty now.

The laws of physics haven’t changed since 1999, either. Research tells us roughly one in three pedestrians hit by a car at 50kph will die, compared with one in two hit at 59kph. A small increase in speed is not a small increase in danger; it can be the difference between an ACC claim and a funeral.

Most of us would agree, at least in principle, that killing each other on the roads is best avoided. The difficulty is that the sanction for materially increasing that risk has been frozen in time. For a wealthy driver, or even a merely comfortable one, there is effectively no deterrent for minor speeding. It is not so much a punishment as a service charge.

This looks absurd when compared with countries we usually regard as peers.

If you are caught doing 59kph in a 50kph zone in Brisbane, you will be fined about $400. In Melbourne, about $315. In Sydney, about $180.

Those figures look mild beside Norway, where the equivalent penalty is about $578. Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Singapore all impose significantly higher penalties for low-level speeding than New Zealand does.

As of writing, none has collapsed into an Orwellian police state of snail-like driving. They have simply accepted the obvious principle that speeding is dangerous and should be discouraged.

The same leniency continues further up the offending scale.

Imagine a Christchurch driver doing 89kph in a 50kph zone — a typical urban road with pedestrians, cyclists, and drivers intermingling. If stopped by police, the consequence is a $400 fine, 50 demerit points, and permission to continue with their day. Unless the speed is more than 40kph above the limit, there is no automatic licence suspension. If the driver is detected by a fixed camera, there are no demerit points at all.

The 50kph limit exists because the human body is not built to absorb high-speed impact. A pedestrian hit at 89kph is very likely to die. The driver may imagine the risk is still within their control, but it is not; they could be Max Verstappen and still fail to avoid a child rushing into the road, a cyclist wobbling, or another driver making an ordinary human mistake.

If the same offence happened in Melbourne, the driver would face a fine of about $950 and an automatic six-month licence suspension. In Finland, speeding fines are tied to income: in 2023, a wealthy businessman was fined about $240,000 for driving 30kph above the limit. In Norway, speeding in that range can become a criminal matter, with the driver risking a suspended jail sentence.

New Zealand has demerit points, like most countries. Repeat offenders can eventually lose their licence. But this is a slow-acting tool for an immediate risk. A driver has to build up a record before the system finally removes them from the road, by which point the damage may already have been done.

Low fines might be more defensible if there was a credible risk of being caught.

The number of fixed speed cameras on our roads is lower than you might assume. In the entire South Island, there are just seven. Three are in urban Dunedin. There is not a single fixed speed camera north of Leeston, and none on the West Coast.

That leaves much of the deterrent effect to roadside policing and mobile safety cameras. They are, by design, meant to catch people out and are easily caricatured as revenue-gathering, even though revenue from speeding fines goes into the Crown’s accounts, not the police budget.

One encouraging sign is the arrival of average-speed cameras, which measure a vehicle’s speed across a stretch of road rather than at a single point. NZTA has confirmed 17 locations, three of which are in the South Island. The first corridor in operation, north of Auckland, is showing success: before enforcement, a baseline survey found 88% of drivers were within the limit; after the cameras began operating, compliance rose above 99%. The cameras are well sign-posted.

Enforcement works when drivers believe they may be caught and when the consequences matter. New Zealand has historically been weak on both sides of that equation.

There was a brief window when this could have changed. Under the previous government’s Road to Zero programme era, NZTA’s board endorsed a $365 million business case for a national network of 824 fixed safety cameras by 2031. It was modelled to reduce deaths and serious injuries by 2221 by 2040.

After the change of government, NZTA said that option was no longer affordable under the new transport funding settings. It instead recommended a $249m programme, with 204 cameras operating by June 2027. The modelling suggested it would reduce deaths and serious injuries by 794 by 2040. In other words, the cheaper programme saved money by giving up roughly two-thirds of the expected safety benefit.

In the context of transport spending, this is pocket money. It is roughly equivalent to about 1500 metres of the new Belfast to Pegasus motorway, which has been touted as partly a road safety project because it will prevent about four deaths and serious injuries a year.

That sits alongside the Government’s decision to reverse many speed-limit reductions, a policy officials and independent experts warned would cost lives. The early signs are not reassuring, with this year’s provisional road toll of 173 tracking above the previous three years. When prevention is reduced and deterrence remains feeble, we are tolerating more risk. The results are not especially mysterious.

There is a familiar rebuttal here. Drivers are sick of being told that roads they have driven for years are suddenly too dangerous. They resent speed limits lowered by people they suspect do not understand how ordinary life works outside Wellington.

Some of this frustration is fair. Speed limits should be credible. Road safety policy should not treat every driver as a menace, or every rural highway like the driveway of a daycare.

But none of that changes a basic fact: speeding is not a private act. It exports risk onto the pedestrian at the crossing and the child on the scooter. We accept this logic elsewhere. Drink-driving is punished not because every drunk driver kills someone, but because the behaviour creates an intolerable risk. You can’t fire a gun down a street and plead innocence because the bullet didn’t hit anyone.

A country serious about road safety would start with the obvious. It would raise speeding fines and index them to inflation. It would bring licence-loss thresholds closer to those in comparable jurisdictions. It would make camera enforcement more visible, more predictable and much more widespread. It would ensure camera-detected speeding has real consequences. Most of all, it would not coddle people who willingly risk other peoples’ lives for their own convenience.

None of this would eliminate road deaths, which have many causes. But speed is the one factor that makes every crash worse. It shortens reaction time, lengthens stopping distance, and increases the violence of impact. This is not ideology. It is physics.

New Zealand’s lack of sophistication on this is becoming harder to ignore. Other countries have steadily driven down road trauma through unglamorous, well-evidenced policy. We are not short of evidence. We are short of nerve.