Top brief … Simon Parker has been appointed as Brimbank Council’s new prosecutor. Picture: KRISTIAN SCOTT
By Belinda Nolan
SIMON Parker is Brimbank’s legal eagle.
Although he boasts more than 630 court appearances, he’s only lost a handful of cases.
A former senior local-laws officer for Hume City Council, Mr Parker was recently appointed as Brimbank Council’s newest prosecutor.
He’s one of around 20 in-house prosecutors currently working in Victorian councils.
Mr Parker began at Brimbank on 4 January and has already made his mark, with several court appearances already under his belt and plans to raise awareness of local-laws to prevent future prosecutions.
Mr Parker and his team prosecute violations of the council’s local-laws, including parking, littering and animal offences.
In almost a decade chasing up local-law breaches, Mr Parker has heard every excuse in the book.
“It’s amazing some of the excuses people come up with for doing the wrong thing,” he said.
“Often people give you these long-winded medical explanations for parking offences.
“They think if they go into gory detail you’ll let them off.
“Another one we get is the phantom animal on the road excuse, where people claim they just parked the car illegally while they searched for it.
“But the funny thing is the car was parked in the same spot for three hours so it must have been a pretty exhaustive search.”
Mr Parker’s sleuthing skills are put to good use, going to extraordinary lengths to solve cases.
In one case, council officers closed the net on a litterbug after tracking him through a barcode on a dumped refrigerator box.
“We contacted the manufacturer and were able to narrow it down to the store where the fridge was bought and from there we tracked down the person who bought it and dumped the box,” Mr Parker said.
“It can be pretty rewarding when you get a good result like that.”
Although he’s a tough adversary in the court room, Mr Parker said he did his best to ensure cases didn’t get that far.
“We also do a lot of work to try to prevent offences from being committed in the first place,” he said.
“I don’t want the first time I see someone to be in the court room.”
