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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4517 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Mr Speaker, the first of those matters are the matters we are discussing tonight, and I will come back to them in a minute. The licensed clubs, of course, have since introduced a code of conduct in relation to their activities, which is designed to minimise the adverse effects of gambling and also to deal with notifying people of the availability of counselling services. I believe that they have also looked at the provision of assistance for gambling services. I am not sure whether the ACT Government has done so yet. So, I think some progress has been made in relation to the strategy which we announced back in April; but there is a significant distance to go in relation to this matter.

Most significantly, Mr Speaker, we still have made no progress in relation to a social and economic impact study of gaming in the ACT, which I think is a necessary backdrop against which we ought to be making any further decisions in relation to expanding the availability of gaming machines beyond the current distribution through licensed clubs. As I said, that proposal was put back in April. No progress has been made on it. I am interested to hear the Chief Minister now indicating that she accepts the need to do this, that she is going to get her bureaucrats to start some work on it, and that it ought to be a matter for the next Assembly.

It is perhaps disappointing to people on all sides of this argument that more work could not have been done in the intervening eight months since we first proposed this, which could have advanced this matter a bit further before today. Perhaps we would be in a better position to make judgments now than we are. But, Mr Speaker, I am heartened to hear that the Chief Minister is at least accepting the need to move in that direction in the life of the next Assembly and is willing to provide some resources within her department to collect some of the initial information in relation to that matter.

In relation to the two motions relating to studies, Mr Speaker, the Labor Party has always had a concern about the proposal to use a board of inquiry under the Inquiries Act as the mechanism for conducting this study, as proposed by the Greens. There are certain aspects of what the Greens have proposed which we think have merit. We have proposed an emphasis on the social and economic impact, which the Greens have been happy to adopt and incorporate into their motion. But there are other elements of their proposal which go beyond what we think needs to be done.

Most importantly, our concern with using an inquiry under the Inquiries Act is that it seems to us that an inquiry under the Inquiries Act ought to be reserved for occasions on which there is the power of compulsion to give evidence and the necessity for taking evidence under oath or in a privileged situation. In the kind of investigation that we have proposed, we believe that an inquiry under the Inquiries Act is way over the top and a very expensive way of gathering the information which we believe the community needs in order to make more informed decisions. So, Mr Speaker, the Labor Party, instead, proposed an independent study - someone commissioned by the Government to conduct the study, at arm's length from the Government - which would be available to members in this house and the community in relation to these matters.

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