Whats wrong with just a tax disc?

After spending three days of the bank holiday at Moonee Beach, we’ve moved on to a little village called Iluka which is an extremely sleepy seaside town with it would appear great fishing spots around as were are right on the river.  There’s also a surfing beach here too and Lee is itching to get in the water to try out his new boogie board.  

We suddenly realised on the Good Friday that our ‘Rego’ would be running out on bank holiday Monday at midnight. With it being a long weekend, we just had to sit it out till Tuesday before we could do anything. Rego is the Australian version of road tax and incorporates third party insurance on the vehicle but not the person driving it.  We are currently driving a registered South Australian camper in New South Wales requiring new rego (tax disc).  You would think this could be easy however New South Wales require us to have a complete vehicle safety inspection (blue slip), bit like an MOT, then removal of the number plates and completely re-registering of the vehicle as if it were brand new.  Total expected cost about $700-$900.   

The RTA office here in the town of Maclean didn’t offer much help as she’d apparently never come accross this before.  So off we trunddled to the local mechanics in the town to see when they could book us in for the inspection.  Thursday and Friday were the answers we received.  It turns out that one of the mechanics were able to offer us better advise than the local RTA office and the SA Transport office put together.  The answer?  Re-register with South Australia for 6 months thus avoiding all this NSW red tape.  Oh and aparantley NSW is the most expensive state in Australia to do your vehicle registeration. 

Hey ho at least we’ve had some cream teas in the town during our visit.  Time to get back to our road trip