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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 3678 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

down the process and say that we are interested in making sure that the community gets a benefit from a very special interest in clubs. That is what we are doing and that is what we will continue to do.

MS TUCKER (5:59): I will not be supporting this deletion. Having listened to the debate, I think that everybody is avoiding the real issue here. I understand that there are strong feelings about the fact that the Labor Party gets money from poker machines for its work as a political party. I understand that the Liberal Party gets money given to it by the casino or whoever else in business wants to give it money.

That is an issue for debate, but a different debate in lots of ways. We should be looking at it. Obviously, we do not want to get into the situation that exists in the United States, where political success is reliant on the donations received. Obviously, the Greens do not have access to such huge donations. We do not want access to such huge donations, either. We do accept some donations from ethical businesses; but, because of the policy position that the Greens take, we would never have access to those sorts of huge donations. Independent candidates also are less likely to receive those sorts of donations.

I think that it is an issue for the major parties. I am surprised in some ways that Michael Moore has taken the Liberals' side on this. As an Independent, he should be aware of the dangers of this matter for Labor or the Liberals. As a society, we should be interested in the implications for democracy of a reliance by major parties on large donations. We should be looking at that as a serious issue. That is the real issue. That is what we should be talking about if we are wanting to talk about political donations.

What we are actually talking about here, apart from the rivalry on the subject and the political gains, is poker machines. Really, this whole debate is being clothed in the rhetoric of being worried about how much the community gains from the huge amounts of money that are produced as a result of clubs having poker machines. We are talking about the fact that poker machines make huge amounts of money for whoever happens to be running them and owning them.

We know that the majority of that money comes from people losing on them and we know that there is a major issue in our society as a result of that. We know that really well. Maybe we should be talking about actually reducing the number of poker machines. We have a cap on the number of poker machines as a result of Greens' legislation. Maybe we should look at reducing the number of poker machines.

I know that one response would be: "Where are you going to get the revenue from, Ms Tucker?" The point is that if we did a proper cost - benefit analysis of the revenue that we get from taxing gambling and balanced that against the costs to the broader society of having this increasing access and reliance on gambling, we might find that the figures do not look too good at all. From memory, one estimate of the cost to the broader community in New South Wales was $48 million.

That covered things such as counselling, family breakdown, suicide, hospital costs, job losses, legal costs, loss of productivity and the impact on the local economy, the opportunity cost lost, from the money going into these machines rather than going into small businesses. If you did a proper analysis of those costs from having these poker machines that bring a certain amount of revenue to the government, you might find that

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