A hoon (/huːn/ ⓘ) is an Australian and New Zealand term describing a person who deliberately drives a vehicle in a reckless or dangerous manner, generally in order to provoke a reaction from onlookers.
[2] Hooning is also sometimes used in the context of other activities involving high speeds such as skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, etc, in reference to young people going irresponsibly fast and endangering others.
[5] Linguist Sid Baker in his book The Australian Language suggested that hoon (meaning "a fool") was a contraction of Houyhnhnm, a fictional race of intelligent horses which appears in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift.
The term hoon has obtained a semi-official use in Australia, with police and governments referring to legislation targeting anti-social driving activity as "anti-hoon laws".
[10] Former Western Australia District Court Chief Judge Antoinette Kennedy described the minister's reaction as "the politics of envy".
In the state of Victoria, hoon-related offences include burnouts, doughnuts, drag racing, repeated driving while disqualified and high-level speeding were added to Section 84C of the Road Safety Act 1986 in July 2006.
[19] The legislation, amended in December 2009,[20] directs that, upon conviction for a 'prescribed offence'[21] the motor vehicle be forfeited to the Crown; the Police Commissioner then has discretion to sell or otherwise dispose of it, i.e. crush it.
[23] In Tasmania, police officers have the power to confiscate and clamp motor vehicles where drivers commit certain types of "hooning" offences.