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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 8 Hansard (29 October) . . Page.. 2501 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

Essentially, what I am attempting to do by tabling this report today is to formalise something that actually has been happening informally. Although the Select Committee on Gambling was appointed by the Assembly with some terms of reference to get on with an inquiry and report by next February, the Chief Minister actually sent a copy of the Allen report, entitled "Gambling and Related Legislation in the Australian Capital Territory", directly to me as the chairman of the committee, seeking the committee's comments in respect of it. We had a look at it. In general, the committee gave it no great priority because our report was not due until February and the committee is of the opinion that the matters dealt with in that report should be considered by the Government concurrently with whatever our committee comes up with in February. In other words, the Government should make its decisions based on the full facts available to it - not only the information in the Allen report but also the information in ours.

However, on 4 October the Government announced that it intended to go ahead and establish a gaming and racing commission. That was a consequence of one of the recommendations of the Allen report. At that point, I wrote to the Chief Minister and said, "We have the Allen report. We really have not considered it yet. We note your desire to go ahead and appoint a new gaming commission. The committee is in no position to comment on that because we have not seen the detail. In any case, we recommend that you do not go ahead with any of those recommendations until after we report". So, we are in this strange position that the committee is responding to a request directly from the Chief Minister and it was not a matter that was before the Assembly at all.

The situation at the moment is that we have a difference of opinion. The committee believes that no recommendations of the Allen report should be implemented by the Government until we report in February. The Government obviously seeks to proceed, at least with this one recommendation from the Allen report, and set up a new gaming commission, which the committee has not had a chance to look at in detail, although we have since been provided with some detail on what the Chief Minister is proposing.

The Chief Minister did comment in her latest communication with me that she wanted to set up this commission sooner rather than later. The committee has no problem with that in principle. I do not think the committee, essentially, has any problem, in principle, with the idea of establishing a new gaming commission. But we would want to know more about it than we do now and we would want a chance to analyse the Government's proposals and to seek community input on it, rather than simply going ahead and implementing something. It is a fairly major change from what we have now and what we have had in the past.

We do not think that the Government should go ahead at this stage and appoint that commission. However, as I say, that communication has been going on simply between me, as chairman of the committee, and the Chief Minister, and the Assembly itself has not been within the loop. My purpose today in tabling this report is to inform the committee

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