Page 6168 - Week 19 - Tuesday, 17 December 1991
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But there is a more overriding issue here, and that is that clubs offer facilities, they occupy land, and they employ people. They are part of the business sector in this city. They do a whole range of things in business, because they are run by business people. When those people are not business people you often find the club in some difficulty. They are run by sentiment. They are run by great sportspersons who do not necessarily translate themselves into good business people. That is one aspect of the licensed club circuit that we all know about.
The large clubs in this city, particularly, do an enormous amount of community service work. They do a lot of charitable work. They promote good causes, by and large. I know that there are sustained issues about alcohol consumption, and the fact that we have not yet brought in server intervention legislation, or codes of conduct. A lot of clubs will not continue to serve. But there is financial pressure, particularly at the smaller end of the market, in terms of behaviour and intoxication, that allows service to continue past the point where it should responsibly cease. I am just painting the broad canvas at this stage in the debate.
Coming back to the good works that the larger clubs do, that makes them self-perpetuating in many ways. In other words, they will get bigger and bigger. When you look at the machine floors of some of the big clubs it is like walking into some of the casinos we have been to interstate that have machine floors. They are like some of the many floors of the casinos.
On that point, I think it is very significant that the Chief Minister recently foreshadowed a licence for a casino with a tax rate of 20 per cent. Yet she is going to tax the clubs, the eligible clubs, at 22.5 per cent. There is a further point to make about that: What is the logic in giving an international consortium from abroad a lower rate to pay than our own home-based community serving clubs, our own clubs that spend so much of their dollar directly on the community and whose operations largely are run by business managers who are not really paid a full competitive salary and allowances and by volunteers? The smaller clubs in particular are into volunteer boards. In my opinion, all clubs should be able to afford competent salaried managers and not have to depend per se on volunteers. So, there is an inconsistency in the approach to the casino.
People will say, "Well, it is only 2.5 per cent"; but that, over the years, strings out to millions of dollars of inconsistency. I trust that the Chief Minister will respond to that and will go further than simply to say that she did mention in her presentation speech on the casino that there would be, for some time, a super tax, whatever that is. Let us hear what that is.
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