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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2446 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

commission, related particularly to the fact that the commission is advising the minister as well as trying to step aside from the government in an independent way and make social policy decisions based on research involving the public interest and consumer protection.

I recall a number of members-Mr Kaine, Mr Wood and, I think, Mr Rugendyke-signing a letter requesting the commission to look at a particular matter. The chief executive officer expressed the view, as recorded in the minutes, that it may not be good for the commission to respond to that letter until he had talked to the minister. An independent body should not be hamstrung like that. That is of real concern.

If Mr Humphries wants to say that we have a gambling commission which is basically working as a normal bureaucracy in advising the minister and that is what it does, fine, but he should not describe it as an independent body that is there to work separately from government because, clearly, it is not. There is clearly a conflict there. I think it would be useful to reconvene the Select Committee on Gambling to look at this issue in terms of what the Productivity Commission recommended and what we have now.

It would be interesting to reflect on how this commission has worked so far and the difficulties that it has been experiencing, which it obviously has been. We might be able to come up with something more constructive. Hopefully, Mr Humphries would welcome that. There may be some resource implications, but I would hope that we would not just get the very familiar argument from the government that it is not a good idea because it would have resource implications. I would hope that the public interest would be taken more seriously than that.

The particular issues that I have mentioned in the second part of this amendment relate to the commission developing a code of practice. The amendment requires the commission to develop and review a code of practice to apply to the existing licensees and make recommendations to the minister on appropriate regulations for each licence under a gaming law that permits a licensee to conduct gambling.

It is curious that the minister's answer to a question taken on notice indicates that nobody is clear about which conditions are applied at what stage and what is required of an applicant who is licensed to make money from gambling. I think we need to see a much better defined and established set of regulations and parameters for regulations in this regulatory environment before we can be comfortable about just rushing in and licensing more businesses.

I do understand that some members are getting tired of motions on gambling coming from the Greens.

Mr Rugendyke: Humph!

MS TUCKER: Mr Rugendyke made a sound which I think means he agrees, that he is tired of them. I must say that I find that pretty disappointing from Mr Rugendyke. He was on the select committee, but he seems to have forgotten very quickly a lot of the matters that were raised. I am really sorry that he is not giving more serious attention to these issues.

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