Hundreds of Western Australian parents have been left with $550 fines and eight demerit points after artificial intelligence road safety cameras detected their children moving seatbelts, sometimes only briefly and without the driver's knowledge. The fines, issued under the state's expanding AI-camera enforcement programme, are now drawing sharp criticism from families who say the penalties feel disproportionate to the risk involved.
Lisa Taylor was among those caught out. Her 10-year-old daughter, who is neurodivergent, slipped the seatbelt off her shoulder momentarily during a car trip. Taylor told 7News the child found the belt physically uncomfortable due to sensory sensitivities. "My understanding from her perspective was the seatbelt was hurting her," Taylor said. "She does have a profile where she does struggle with sensory problems."
Triple M radio host Xavier Ellis was also caught by the cameras and voiced a concern shared by many drivers. "I didn't realise how much the onus was on the driver to continuously keep checking children and whatnot, how they're harnessed in at all times," he said. For parents of young or neurodivergent children, that expectation raises a practical question: how is a driver supposed to monitor rear-seat seatbelt positioning while keeping their eyes on the road?
The cameras use AI software to review every image captured, automatically flagging potential offences. According to the programme's design, any flagged image is then reviewed by at least two human officers before a fine is issued. WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch acknowledged the tension in genuine hardship cases. "There are genuine cases. Those ones will always be difficult. And I think the team that do run this process need to know that there will be exemptions from time to time," he said.
From a road safety perspective, the programme is doing exactly what it was designed to do. Seatbelts save lives, and the statistics on unrestrained passengers in crashes are not contested. The Road Safety Commission has a clear mandate to reduce road trauma, and technology that identifies non-compliance at scale is a legitimate tool in that effort. Those who argue otherwise risk downplaying the genuine danger of unrestrained rear-seat passengers.
Yet the Commission itself has signalled that the data is revealing something unexpected. Road Safety Commissioner Adrian Warner confirmed that roughly 80 per cent of the offences now being detected involve passengers who have their seatbelt clipped in but are not wearing it correctly, rather than being fully unrestrained. "What we didn't know is that about 80 per cent of the offences we're detecting now with these new cameras involves someone who has it clipped in, but they're just not wearing it correctly," Warner said. In response, the Commission says it is returning to an education-focused approach after discovering this trend.
That shift in posture is significant. It suggests the programme's early enforcement phase has captured a large cohort of drivers whose children were broadly compliant but imperfectly positioned, which is a different risk category from those who ignore seatbelt rules entirely. A $550 fine and eight demerit points represent serious consequences, and applying them uniformly across that spectrum raises legitimate questions about proportionality.
There is also a broader policy question about how AI-assisted enforcement interacts with individual circumstances. The Western Australia Police Force and the Road Safety Commission have human review built into the process, which is a meaningful safeguard. But the volume of detections and the speed of the fine-issuing process can make contesting an infringement feel practically difficult for most families, regardless of merit.
The strongest version of the case for strict enforcement is simple: consistency is what makes deterrence work. If exemptions are carved out too liberally, the deterrent effect is diluted and road trauma statistics suffer as a result. The counterargument, equally reasonable, is that proportionate enforcement builds public trust in safety systems, and trust is what sustains long-term compliance.
Both positions reflect genuine values rather than bad faith. The evidence from the Commission's own data suggests a recalibration is warranted, not an abandonment of the technology. A clearer appeals pathway for cases involving medical or disability-related circumstances, combined with a continued education campaign, would allow the programme to pursue its safety objectives without generating the kind of community backlash that ultimately weakens road safety culture. The cameras are here to stay; the question is how the system around them is designed to handle the cases that fall at the edges.