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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (24 May) . . Page.. 1745 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
anyway that you can claim that having licensed providers in the ACT is going to deal with all the issues of problem gambling. It will deal only with gamblers who want to set limits on themselves, and if they want to do that that is fine.
Mr Humphries has entered the chamber-welcome back. I was at an industry luncheon at the Press Club on Tuesday where we talked about these very issues and I raised the question of the important issue of problem gambling. Gamblers are given the ability to set a limit. So if I am a gambler I can set a limit on how much I will be allowed to gamble, say, for a week or a month. That is good if a person is disciplined and the limit is reasonable, but what no regulator can do and what no Internet provider can do, unless someone is going to suggest incredible invasion of privacy, is determine whether or not that limit is appropriate for that person's income. (Extension of time granted.) It will be families who will suffer. So once again personal life decisions will be still made by the gambler in respect of setting a limit.
Self-exclusion is another interesting one. I was talking to a counsellor in Victoria who told me that the exclusion provisions are not necessarily going to deal with a lot of the problems of severe problem gambling because particularly in the ethnic community there has been a big increase in domestic violence related to gambling stress. If you have violence in a family as a result of a member of that family having gambling problems, then obviously they are not going to risk greater violence by going as a third person and seeking the exclusion of that person.
So what I am trying to explain here is that this matter is very complicated. I am not saying what Mr Humphries seemed to be saying, that it is impossible to do anything in respect of the Internet. It is not. It is clear that you can do certain things. But you are not dealing with the overall social issues of problem gambling. As a government, what you are doing is saying once again, "Gambling is good. We are going to legitimise another form of gambling and we are going to make sure that your privacy is protected." Once again, this is another example of governments being complicit with the industry in encouraging another form of gambling.
I have already briefly covered the revenue issue pressures on governments which have caused them to continually seek new forms of gambling because of diminishing revenue which has resulted from competition and so on. I will conclude with that. I am glad that we are going to get something referred to the gambling commission, even though it is not as comprehensive as I would have liked. I thank members for their support.
Motion, as amended, agreed to.
MR MOORE
(Minister for Health and Community Care): Mr Speaker, before I move the motion to adjourn, I would like to clarify some things I said this morning in respect of which I think I may have inadvertently misled the house. There are two issues, Mr Speaker. I indicated that Dr Bammer was the person who was doing the pre-trial
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