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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (4 June) . . Page.. 1821 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

women's sporting organisations to improve their marketing skills and fundraising abilities. They seem to have ignored other options.

Other options include encouraging, or providing incentives to, businesses or philanthropic organisations to contribute more towards women's sport. There may also be methods of leveraging greater private sector funds. In short, the government seems to have decided that gambling revenue is the only avenue of improvement and that that is all they will be doing.

This bill seeks to amend an act that is currently under review by the Gambling and Racing Commission. I have concerns that this bill seeks to change the way community contributions are allocated, without taking into account the broader issues under consideration by the commission.

There were a number of recommendations in the December 2001 report from the commission relating to community contributions, including a recommendation that a minimum level of contributions to charitable and social welfare organisations be established.

This bill pre-empts the outcome of that review and means that we are considering one group of contributions without looking at the effect on other groups. I have a particular problem that the bill will mean that the needs of one group will be raised above those of many other worthy groups such as social welfare and charitable organisations.

I believe it would have been better for the government to allow this issue to be dealt with in conjunction with the rest of the review of the act, so that the relative needs of many groups could be taken into account. The Australian Democrats believe that issues like this need to be examined in the context of the wider problems in gaming machine regulations, because dealing with problems in isolation can lead to myopic perspectives and unintended outcomes.

Even though the government is dealing with this issue in isolation, it does not seem to have done very much research. When I was given a briefing on this bill, I was very surprised that the government seemed to have very little background information. They were unable to tell me how much funding women's sport currently receives through community contributions and could not give me even the vaguest estimate on how much this bill would generate for women's sport.

We have very scarce information on the implementation process that would accompany the passing of this bill. We have been told that ministerial guidelines will be produced, but we have not yet been given any indication of what might be in them. No-one has yet been able to give me a definition of what would be recognised as women's sport, a point raised in detail by the opposition.

Mrs Cross spoke at length about netball as a women's sport. I play netball in a mixed team.

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