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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 11 Hansard (20 October) . . Page.. 3383 ..

MR SPEAKER: Order, please! I warned you. I will start warning individuals very shortly, and then I will name them.

MS CARNELL: He still does not be quiet, even when you say you will warn him, Mr Speaker.

Mr Stanhope: I was exchanging comments with Mr Wood.

MR SPEAKER: Well, do not anymore.

MS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, you have to come down to the tinny tacks here. Those opposite rely on the Labor Club, the tradies club and so on for their election campaign and for their positions in this place. Nobody doubts that; everybody knows. But they are still willing to get up here with hand on heart and present what I would have to say is simply not factual. As members will see, the contribution by clubs as a percentage of net gaming machine revenue is - - -

Mr Stanhope: Which page is that?

MS CARNELL: It is attachment 1A. That is the basis of the legislation the Government has on the table. Net gaming machine revenue is revenue after we take off wages, taxes and all of those sorts of expenses. As members can see from the first column, the amount of net gaming machine revenue is $92.619m. That is not gross. Gross is on the next page. It is $146.921m. We allow over $50m to be taken off for expenses and taxes. That is a position agreed with the clubs - what the net gaming machine revenue would actually be.

Mr Speaker, as you can see in that attachment, charities get 1.45 per cent; sport, 2.16 per cent; and non-profit organisations, 0.62 per cent. But we even allow in eligible contributions things like in-kind and public assets. When you look along the columns of eligible contributions, it ain't much. It ain't much when you consider that that $92.6m of net gaming machine revenue, not the $146m of gross gaming machine revenue, happens as a result of the Assembly granting a monopoly on gaming machines. No-one doubts that that is where the money comes from. The clubs admit it. It comes from a monopoly granted by this Assembly and also from a special tax situation granted by this Assembly and by the Federal Government.

This Government is not saying for a moment that clubs should not contribute to all of those wonderful things we are talking about. Of course they should. But remember that the basis of the monopoly is that their profits go back to the community. That is what they say a million times. Even allowing for investment in their premises and so on, surely a damn sight more than less than 5 per cent of their net gaming machine revenue can go to the broader community. It is not a lot to ask. We are not asking for $92m; we are not asking for $45m. We are asking for just over $2m to go to charities. The clubs, after they have paid that $2m, would still have $90m left to go to sport, to go to non-profit organisations, to invest in fields, to invest in infrastructure, to upgrade their premises.

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