In politics, perception is everything. What an elected representative says and the legislation they enact sends a clear message to the community the priorities of the government.

If this is true, in New South Wales we have the extraordinary situation where the government appears to place more importance on preventing littering than on the life of a cyclist.

ABC radio announcer, James Valentine, who hosts a hugely entertaining afternoon show on 702 Sydney, recently broadcast a series of interviews with citizens who had received fines from the Environment Protection Authority for littering. Except these bewildered offenders swear they didn’t do it. On further investigation, super-sleuth Valentine discovered there existed an army of “litter-dobbers” who could report an incident online, and the EPA with no investigation whatsoever and little regard to the tenet of “innocent until proven guilty”, simply issued a fine to the supposed offender.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out this system is open to abuse. Don’t like your neighbour? Simple, dob him in for littering.

Listeners were quick to phone Valentine with similar incidents where they had been wrongfully accused and fined. In each case, the onus was on the person receiving the fine to prove their innocence, not on the witness or the agency to verify that the incident did in fact take place. In NSW, littering is taken very seriously. So seriously that natural justice is suspended in the interest of keeping cigarette butts and pie wrappers off our footpaths.

Now to cycling. NSW Police recently released the data on fines issued to cyclists for such offences as riding without a helmet, riding without an appropriate warning device (a bell), and riding on a footpath. The figures showed a huge windfall to the government with revenue increasing seven-fold. This increase is largely due to two factors: stiffer penalties introduced by the Baird government for cycling misdemeanours, and an increased police focus on cyclists. While the NSW government was raking in the cash from cyclists, the new “safe cycling” legislation had led to only four motorists being fined for not passing cyclists at a safe distance.

The police and the government, by their actions, have shown that its the cycling fraternity they plan to target rather than motorists who carelessly steer two-tonnes of metal close to a fellow citizen. Some cyclists have fitted digital action cameras to their bikes in the hope of recording the wayward motorists.

Recently I was passed dangerously by a vehicle on a road in regional NSW. When I caught up to the motorist at a stop sign, I tapped on his window and asked him if he realised how close he was to hitting me with his vehicle. He shrugged and said, “If I’ve broken a road rule, tell the police.”

So I did. I took the video evidence, recorded on the action camera attached to my bicycle seat-post, to the local police station where a police officer copied the footage, accepted my statement and promised to look into the matter.

A month later, I received an email from the police officer advising me that he spoke to the motorist who admitted that he hadn’t seen me until I’d tapped on his window. As the motorist in question had an unblemished record, the police officer – on advice from his supervisor – issued a warning, rather than a traffic infringement notice and accompanying fine.

This despite the fact that the motorist had virtually admitted he had been paying so little attention to what was in front of him that he hadn’t seen me until I tapped on his window. In my police statement, accompanied by the video evidence, I had verified that on returning to the scene after the incident and aided by the video footage and road markings, I was able to estimate that the distance between the vehicle’s passenger side mirror and my handlebars was between 30 and 50cm – clearly a breach of the road rules.

In this case, the police erred on the side of the motorist. In my follow-up email to the police officer, I wondered if the police would have been so accommodating if the motorist had admitted to not seeing a stop sign, a pedestrian crossing or a school speed-zone sign?

The police officer treated my initial complaint with respect and acted in a thoroughly professional manner. However one could argue that in NSW, the perception of the police going easy on motorists and being quick to charge cyclists remains. My experience does not dispel that this.

Could the seven-fold increase in fines to cyclists perhaps have been avoided if the police had simply issued warnings to each offender regarding the recent changes to the road rules?

Now the unscrupulous among us may suggest I would have been better served by dobbing the motorist in for “littering” rather than for nearly killing me. The helpful EPA would have issued the motorist with a stern fine, no questions asked.

Yes, it’s illegal to give false evidence. It’s also illegal to overtake a cyclist without allowing a safe passing distance of one metre.

In NSW, one could be forgiven for thinking that the safety of a cyclist matters less than a scrap of paper thoughtlessly tossed in the gutter.