Could you pay a $200,000 speed ticket? Greens' plan for income-based fines

Greens Bass candidate Cecily Rosol said the proposal to impose more significant fines on those earning higher incomes would make Tasmania "fairer and safer".

"Fines should be a disincentive for every person not to break the law, but for people on high incomes, they're usually nothing to worry about," she said.

"Meanwhile, people on low incomes are copping fines that are completely disproportionate compared to what they earn, which can be crippling."

The plan is based on a long-running scheme in Finland, where speeding ticket fines are linked to a person's daily disposable income and increase with the severity of the infraction.

It has resulted in headline-grabbing incidents such as the one last year, when multi-millionaire Finnish businessman Anders Wiklof was fined EUR121,000 for driving 30 kilometres per hour above the speed limit.

He was fined $63,680 in 2018 and $95,000 in 2013 for similar driving offences under the same traffic scheme.

According to the Zoominfo business portal, Mr Wiklof is chairman of Wiklof Holding, a logistics, helicopter services, real estate, trade, and tourism company with an annual revenue of US$9.2 million.

Ms Rosol said many other places worldwide have income-based fine schemes, and Tasmania should introduce its own.

"Obviously fines are an important part of our legal system, but they were never intended to push people into extreme hardship.

"On the other hand, you can have someone on a high income decide they're just going to ignore the rules because if they get a fine, it will be no skin off their nose."

When asked about the proposal, Premier Jeremy Rockliff said he would not support the implementation of an income-based fine scheme.

Tasmanian Small Business Council executive officer Robert Mallett said if such a scheme were introduced, it would be almost impossible to manage.

"This would be an administrative nightmare," he said.

"Your income can be fiddled left, right, and centre. There are plenty of high-income people who fiddle their income so that [on paper] they earn virtually nothing."

High-income earners could also attempt to avoid hefty fines by registering their cars in the names of lower-earning relatives.

"The fine is the fine, and we're much better off educating people to comply with the law rather than worrying about how much we're going to fine them," Mr Mallett said.