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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 3610 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

This bill is a small step to acknowledge the huge potential for making money from poker machines and to ensure that the windfall gain clubs have results in broader communities benefit. The social harm created by poker machines is certainly felt in the broader community. There are suggestions about how this social harm can be acknowledged by the industry. It is the polluter - pays principle, if you like, being applied to a social issue. The polluter - pays principle usually relates to environment issues, but it can equally apply to a social issue, as in this case.

We need to find some way of getting the industry to accept that it has a responsibility to make some effort to compensate for the social harm it creates. Let us not forget that most of this profit comes from people losing their money. We know that people from low - income brackets who lose their money are much more greatly affected. There are huge consequences not only for the individual gamblers but for their families and for the general community.

The Productivity Commission and the Assembly Select Committee on Gambling recommended that a levy be imposed on all forms of gambling and that the fund resulting from the levy be independently administered. There have been different ideas about exactly how that money should be spent. The Productivity Commission had the idea of the broader community benefit being included in how that money would be spent. The select committee said that it should go to problem gambling education and research. I am of the view that it should go to services for problem gambling education and research.

In speaking to the Chief Minister earlier, I alerting him to the fact that I intend to raise this proposal again and ask the Assembly to support my call to him to ask the gambling commission to undertake a feasibility study of the implementation of such a levy in Canberra. That would seem to be a sensible first step in progressing this discussion. That is a debate we can have on another day.

Labor will be putting some amendments. We will be supporting several of them but not all. In two places the bill provides for an inappropriate handing over of a policy function to the gambling commission. As members are well aware, the commission was not set up to have a policy function. It was set up to have a research function and a monitoring/regulatory function. The policy function should rightly stay with this parliament. Those two areas need to be corrected. Mr Quinlan has amendments to that effect which we will support.

In the funding of government services in the ACT and across Australia, conservative governments are putting quite a strong emphasis on partnerships between government and industry and community. That is fine in principle. However, it is dangerous if responsibility for essential public services, which many people in the community and certainly the Greens believe are the responsibility of government, is handed over to industry.

In the United States sectors such as education have been totally co - opted because they know that their funding has been linked to revenue from gambling. The education sector has inadvertently found itself in partnership with the gambling industry and co - opted by

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