Page 2543 - Week 08 - Thursday, 19 August 1993
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In a Bill such as this, that prescribes an offence, the penalty for that offence ought to appear also - particularly as in one case, as I discovered in discussions with the officials, the penalty is $25,000. If you commit an offence for which the penalty is $25,000, the penalty ought to be right alongside the offence so that you know what your obligation is; you understand the order of magnitude if you commit an offence under that Act. That is straightforward, and I think that the Minister is equivocating when she says that everything is okay and that I do not understand. I do understand. I think that people ought to be clear on what their responsibility is and they should not have to scramble through a number of Acts to find out.
In connection with proposed sections 45F and 45H, the Minister has a strange attitude. She says - her officials say this and she accepts it - that, because you make an original payment up front for a licence, that is adequate to cover any future service. That is what she is saying. When I register my car I pay a substantial sum, and when I sell it I still have to pay - or somebody has to pay - a transfer fee. By the Chief Minister's logic, when I pay a considerable sum up front to register my car I should not have to pay another fee simply to transfer the title to somebody else. That is the same argument. What I am saying here is that, if somebody comes to the Government and says, "I want to change the permit that I have", under the user pays principle it is not unreasonable to expect them to pay to have it done, even if it is only $10 or $15 or whatever. To shrug it off and say, "Because they pay a substantial fee up front we think that covers this service now to be delivered" is a specious argument.
Another matter that I raise is that in a number of places this legislation refers to the commissioner satisfying himself that the interests of the club members have been taken into account. My question of the officials and my question of the Chief Minister is: How does he do that? Against what criteria does he judge whether it is in the interests of the members, and just how does he determine - for example, in the case of the Southern Cross Club - whether the members of the club agree with the change that is being proposed by their management, unless there is a ballot?
I pointed out to the officials that gaming machines went into clubs in the first place only with the approval of a majority of club members. When you change the system significantly by going into network machines with very significant stakes, I would like to know whether the membership of the club in fact agrees with that. As far as I can see, the only way you can determine that is by ballot. The Bill is silent; it simply says that the commissioner has to satisfy himself. How and by what manner is what I want to know. The information provided to me does not answer that question. The officials, in their briefing, did not answer it. The only conclusion seems to be that the commissioner is omniscient and he just knows. I do not think that is good enough.
Madam Speaker, my last question was about clause 31, which talks about the fifth or seventh working day. Only this week the Attorney-General gave us a very learned dissertation about not being able to define things in terms of working days because you do not know what public holidays are. Now we have before us, from the very same Government, a Bill that determines and prescribes things in terms of working days. The Government cannot have it both ways. If the fact that we cannot define a public holiday was not good enough for the Attorney-General yesterday, how can it be good enough for the Government today? Yet the Chief Minister shrugged my comment off and said that I am obviously uninformed or I do not understand.
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