If you’ve ever been tempted to channel your inner rebel by sneakily wiping chalk off your car tyre to avoid a parking fine, you might want to sit down. And then stay seated, possibly for the next 25 years.
Yes, you read that right. Australians are being warned that a viral “parking hack” doing the rounds on TikTok could come with a sentence usually reserved for high-stakes criminal masterminds.
At the centre of the controversy is the humble piece of chalk, wielded not by schoolteachers or hopscotch champions, but by parking rangers quietly marking your tyre to time your stay. But thanks to a TikTok video with over a million views that shows someone casually dousing their chalk-marked tyre with water, this once-innocent act has blown up online… and not in a good way.
Criminal lawyer Avinash Singh from Astor Legal has issued a very serious warning: tampering with those chalk marks might be seen as attempting to pervert the course of justice – the same charge used for people trying to interfere with police investigations.
“Removing chalk off a tyre could hinder a parking ranger from carrying out their duties and prevent them from issuing a fine,” Singh told news.com.au. And hindering a parking ranger, it seems, is right up there with some of the more… ambitious crimes.
While some online commenters applauded the chalk-washing move, branding the TikToker a “hero”, “legend”, and “modern-day Robin Hood”, the legal system is less impressed. In fact, depending on where you live in Australia, you could be staring down a fine of $750 or even 25 years behind bars.
To put that in perspective, that’s longer than you’d get for robbing a 7-Eleven and apologising afterward.
South Australia got so fed up with chalky interference that they actually wrote a whole new law about it. Section 174AB of the Road Traffic Act of 1961 makes it an offence to remove a parking inspector’s chalk marks, with a maximum fine of (you guessed it) $750.
New South Wales isn’t far behind. Under Section 319 of the Crimes Act of 1900, interfering with chalk could net you up to 14 years in the slammer! Queensland and WA? Seven years. And in Victoria, the fine print gets scarier: a maximum of 25 years for the “common law offence of attempting to pervert the course of justice”.
Suddenly, that $120 parking fine doesn’t seem quite so bad.
Images: TikTok
