From Sydney to the state's furthest outback stretches, drivers on NSW roads are about to find themselves under a closer eye. From Sunday, March 1, the state's network of mobile phone and seatbelt detection cameras will begin scanning vehicles travelling in both directions simultaneously, a significant expansion of a surveillance programme that has been quietly operating for nearly seven years.
The change requires no new hardware. There are currently 10 cameras across NSW capable of capturing images of passing vehicles and running them through artificial intelligence systems trained to detect whether a driver has a phone in hand or is travelling without a seatbelt. On single-lane roads, those cameras previously checked only vehicles moving in one direction at a time. That limitation is now being removed.
According to 7News, Transport for NSW Secretary Josh Murray explained the rationale plainly: when the cameras were first switched on, the goal was to check each registered vehicle in the state at least 20 times a year. Since then, the number of registered vehicles has grown by almost 12 per cent to 7.5 million, adding roughly one million cars to NSW roads. The existing camera coverage was no longer meeting that benchmark.
"We need to ensure our programme continues to check the appropriate number of vehicles, and we use our technology to its full effect," Murray said. The full rollout of the expanded capability is expected to be completed over six months.
The penalties for those caught remain unchanged. Using a mobile phone, even if resting on a driver's lap rather than held to the ear, carries a $423 fine. Travelling without a seatbelt attracts the same amount, along with three demerit points, with additional penalties applied for each unbelted passenger detected in the vehicle. All revenue collected flows back into road safety programmes, according to Transport for NSW.
The scale of non-compliance revealed by the cameras is striking. Murray noted that in 2025, roughly one in every 1,300 vehicles checked was found to have someone breaking seatbelt laws. One in every 1,200 vehicles had a driver using a mobile phone illegally. That mobile phone figure represents approximately three times as many offences as were recorded when the cameras first went live in 2019, a trend that sits uneasily alongside years of public awareness campaigns about distracted driving.
A Question of Proportionality
The expansion raises genuine questions that deserve a fair hearing. Civil liberties advocates have long argued that mass-surveillance approaches to traffic enforcement represent a form of automated policing that affects all road users regardless of their individual behaviour. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and privacy bodies have previously raised concerns about the aggregation of image data collected by government systems, even where that data is said to be deleted after review.
There is also the question of proportionality. A detection rate of roughly one offence per 1,200 vehicles is not trivial from a road safety perspective, but it does prompt a reasonable debate about whether blanketing millions of law-abiding drivers with surveillance is the most targeted use of public resources. Critics of automated enforcement systems frequently point out that human police patrols create a more flexible, contextually aware form of deterrence than cameras operating on algorithmic rules.
Those arguments deserve weight. So do the road safety data. Distracted driving and unrestrained passengers remain consistent contributors to serious crashes on Australian roads, according to the Australian Road Safety Foundation. The tripling of detected mobile phone offences since 2019 suggests that voluntary compliance, even after years of public messaging, has its limits.
The honest position sits somewhere between these poles. Automated detection at scale can be a cost-effective complement to traditional policing when it is transparent, independently audited, and accompanied by robust review processes for disputed infringements. NSW's system does include human verification of AI-flagged images, which is an important safeguard. Whether the programme's governance arrangements keep pace with its growing reach is a question the government should be prepared to answer publicly as the expansion proceeds.
For now, drivers on NSW roads would do well to treat the whole of the carriageway as monitored territory, in both directions, from this Sunday forward.