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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Wednesday, 11 February 2004) . . Page.. 168 ..

simple. Hotels, of course, have a general licence, which means that they can have accommodation, they can have bottle shops and they can sell liquor from their premises. Taverns have an on-licence. Liquor can be provided during certain hours and these premises have access to class B machines.

Section 18 (3) (a) enables a hotel which has premises of at least 12 rooms that are for use as accommodation for lodgers—I think we now have seven such establishments in Canberra—to have access to up to 10 class B gaming machines. Those institutions have had that for some time, so there is actually no change there.

There is a change to subsection (3) (b). Premises that do not contain rooms to be used as residential accommodation by lodgers—there are quite a few hotels around town like that; an example would be the Irish pub at Dickson—or places that contain fewer than 12 rooms for accommodation and are currently entitled to only two non-existent class A machines, would be entitled to up to two class B poker machines, the draw poker machines. Similarly, in subsection (4) a licence must not be issued for premises to which an on-licence applies for more than two machines. In other words, on-licence premises—that is, taverns—would now be able to have access to two class B gaming machines.

Subsection (5), the final subsection, ensures that the licence must not be issued for premises to which an on-license applies—that is, the ability to serve alcohol—unless the on-licence is stated to be for the primary purpose of running a tavern/bar. Alcohol can also be served in restaurants. It has never been anyone’s intention to have any sorts of poker machines in restaurants, so that is why that subsection has been included.

I want to thank a few people. I have been involved in the club industry as a director of about three clubs. I suppose I get around. I have certainly drunk in quite a few taverns and hotels in my time. I have been well aware, through my involvement in the industry and the prosecution of breaches of the legislation that I used to be involved in—I suppose that is relevant, too—of the ongoing issues in relation to poker machines in hotels, taverns and clubs.

I made mention earlier of class A machines—those little slot machines, the fruit machines, where you can put in only 20c and the most you can get back is 40 times that; in other words, eight bucks. They are a lot of fun to play, but we have not seen them since about 1983 when the Shanty at Woden got rid of the one or two machines which I think Johnny Press used to run. You can apparently still play them in some country pubs in England, but effectively those machines are non-existent.

There has been a campaign for about 18 years—last year I presented some legislation, which was rejected—to enable equity and fairness to apply to all hotels and taverns by giving them access to two class C machines. The class C machines, of course, are the machines you will see in all clubs. Class B machines are the draw poker machines where a hand of five cards comes up on the screen. They have nothing like the payouts of the class C machines but they are still a reasonable machine in that sort of industry.

There has been a complete inability to make any change to enable taverns and hotels to have access to class C machines. I am not going to go into history or allegations of conflicts of interest with Labor clubs or anything like that—I will just put all that to one side. All sorts of reasons have been advanced over many years to preclude any extension

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