The ACT Party wants to put roadside noise cameras on New Zealand streets to catch loud cars and boy racers, and it would raise the fine for a noisy engine or exhaust from $50 to $300.
The policy, released on Saturday 26 September, would spend $2 million on an initial fleet of 20 relocatable cameras. The first would go to the east Auckland electorate of Tāmaki and other hotspots where residents complain of cars being revved and raced late at night.
The announcement came from ACT’s Tāmaki candidate James Christmas, who is trying to hold the seat for the party at the 7 November election. ACT won Tāmaki from National in 2023, but its sitting MP Brooke van Velden is stepping down, the NZ Herald reported. Christmas, a former National candidate, faces National’s Mahesh Muralidhar and Labour’s Max Harris among others.
Christmas said he had knocked on thousands of doors in recent months and heard the same request again and again, to turn down the volume. “People should be able to sleep, relax and enjoy their homes without having their street turned into someone else’s racetrack,” he said in ACT’s press release.
He said the problem was not the law but catching people breaking it. “These kinds of disturbances are already illegal, but effective enforcement can depend on a Police officer happening to be in the right place at the right time. By the time a person makes a complaint and an officer shows up on the scene, the vehicle is normally long gone.”
ACT’s plan has three parts. The first is the cameras themselves. According to the party’s policy document, as quoted by the Herald, “Modern noise cameras combine microphones, video and number plate recognition. They measure the sound generated by passing vehicles, identify which vehicle produced it, and record the evidence needed for enforcement.”
The cameras would be moved around by the New Zealand Transport Agency as new trouble spots appear, so that drivers cannot learn where a fixed camera sits and simply avoid it. Infringement notices would be issued in much the same way as speed camera tickets, without a police officer needing to witness the offence.
The second part is a fixed noise limit the cameras can measure. At present the Land Transport (Road User) Rule 2004 bans excessive vehicle noise, but whether noise is excessive depends on things like the time of day, the neighbourhood and how likely it is to annoy people. ACT calls this “a largely subjective test, which is difficult to enforce automatically”.
The party’s starting point would be 86 decibels on roads with a speed limit of 50 km/h or less, and 90 decibels on roads between 50 and 70 km/h. ACT says the exact limits would be subject to consultation and technical testing, and it wants the law changed so camera evidence can be used for infringement notices by the end of 2027.
The third part is bigger penalties. The infringement fee for driving a vehicle that makes excessive noise would rise from $50 to $300, and the maximum court fine from $1000 to $3000.
ACT points out that Parliament has already raised penalties to those levels for a separate offence covering noise made inside or on a vehicle, such as loud car stereos, from 9 January 2027. According to the party, no matching increase was made for noise from the engine or exhaust itself, which is the usual complaint about boy racers. “For those who want to pump up the volume, we are going to pump up the penalty,” the press release said.
ACT says a ticket would only be issued where it could be shown the limit was broken and the sound came from the identified vehicle. Camera data would be subject to strict retention and deletion rules, and anyone ticketed could ask for a copy of the evidence.
Noise cameras are not new to New Zealand. In 2013 the Transport Agency trialled one on State Highway 2 in Tauranga to catch trucks using loud engine brakes near homes, at a cost of about $100,000. ACT pointed to that trial and to the use of noise cameras overseas in calling its $2 million costing “conservative”.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins agreed boy racers are a real problem but questioned the timing. As reported by RNZ, he said people were generally “a bit sick of boy racers”, and said he had spent three years pushing government agencies to deal with the problem in his own Remutaka electorate in the Hutt Valley.
“There is certainly more work to be done on boy racers and on the noise and the nuisance that they’re creating, but suddenly doing this in an election campaign when they’ve ignored the issue for the last three years looks a bit rich,” Hipkins said.
Loud cars are one of the few issues that cut across party lines, and both ACT and Labour say residents in their areas want something done. The question the ACT policy raises is less whether noisy cars should be dealt with than whether automatic enforcement is the right way to do it, and whether a fixed decibel limit would catch legal but loud vehicles such as motorbikes and older cars.
Christmas said the aim was to protect the many from the few. “Pairing technology with clear standards and real consequences will give residents the peace and quiet they deserve and ensure the comfort of many isn’t sacrificed for the noise of a few.”
Advance voting opens on 26 October. If you are still weighing up the parties’ law and order and transport promises, try our voting tool to see which party best matches your views.
Would noise cameras make a difference on your street, or is this a job for police on the ground? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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