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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 3604 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

(5) Associated organisations may receive donations which comply with the Act if they can be demonstrated to be community building, do not relate to the primary purpose of the contributing club -

in other words, money that is not set aside just to encourage people to use poker machines -

In other words, you cannot include payments to staff, entertainers and others that are associated directly with running the club.

Mr Speaker, those are pretty broad guidelines. What is not included is contributions to lobby or umbrella groups or organisations unless the donation is used directly for community benefit, and I have already spoken about that. You cannot claim for entertainment that is provided to patrons of a club. In other words, you cannot claim for things that you need to generally run the club.

Mr Quinlan: To bring them in to play the poker machines - no, you could not do that.

MS CARNELL: Fine, Mr Quinlan agrees with that. Expenditure by a licensee on commercial activities will also be disallowed. In other words, you could not include building an extension on the club or a Christmas promotion to encourage people to come to your club to play the poker machines. That is pretty reasonable, I would have thought. You cannot claim capital expenditure that I suppose might be related directly to the enhancement of gaming machines generally to improve the profitability of your club.

You cannot include the purchase of holiday units for the use of members only or sporting facilities whose usage is restricted - facilities that are not available to the community generally. In other words, you cannot include measures that are taken by clubs to encourage club membership and to encourage people to use poker machines. This is quite logical. Also, donations made to political parties, political candidates, lobby groups or trade unions are not covered because, again, that is not about enhancing the general social fabric of our broad community.

This does not stop clubs contributing to those things. Of course it does not - they can do that with the other 95 per cent of net gaming machine revenue that is not covered by this legislation. This is 5 per cent of net gaming machine revenue.

Mr Speaker, why are we asking the Assembly to approve the legislation to make larger clubs become incorporated bodies under corporations law? We are doing so for a wide range of reasons. These are very large businesses. Why do we have corporations law at all in this country? We do so so that the community generally, and maybe shareholders in particular, can see in a transparent way what those large companies are doing. The requirements under corporation law are quite specific, quite transparent, and quite open to public scrutiny, and so they should be.

We are not asking small clubs to do so. This requirement will apply only where the annual gross revenue is greater than $500,000 a year. Any entity that has a gross revenue of more than $500,000 a year would be incorporated under almost all scenarios that I can

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