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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Thursday, 4 March 2004) . . Page.. 735 ..

place and were being implemented. That review was completed in the time of this government. We are yet to see the review or hear from the government what its concessions policy would look like. All in the committee would be interested to see that.

Recommendation 12 asks the government to write to the Commonwealth to ask it “to review the Commonwealth Grants Commission’s insistence that State and Territory Governments maximise their revenue from gambling”. Currently—and we should be quite proud of it—ACT governments underachieve in their collection of revenue from gambling. The ACT figure is about 0.68 on a standard of 1. That is a good thing simply because, if we raise the amount of revenue we get from gambling, the evidence to the committee was simply that we would be taking that out of the pockets of the problem gamblers. We are all very much aware of the problem that that causes in our society, but to have the Commonwealth Grants Commission say that we have the potential to raise taxes from people who are already doing damage to themselves, their family, their friends, their businesses and their community is certainly not, we think, socially responsible. We should review that.

If there is reasonable potential, maybe you would consider it. But for us to raise by almost 50 per cent the taxation we currently collect would be a retrograde step, particularly when you look at the experiences of New South Wales and Victoria, which are heavily addicted to gambling taxes. Okay, you might take with one hand, but you are certainly paying it out on the other hand. You are robbing Peter to pay Paul because this money is going back out into the community to alleviate other social concerns.

That leads to recommendation 13, which asks that further research be done to establish the extent and the nature of problem gambling in the ACT. There are still large gaps in our knowledge of the effect of problem gambling in the ACT. We can only build on that with more research. The chair at the ANU has been endowed and is operational and that is a good thing. I think we have to fill in the gaps, particularly by investigating problem gambling in different cultural groups in the ACT. That is something that I suspect has not been done.

Following from recommendations 12 and 13, 14 calls on the government to address some of these problems in a number of ways: stricter regulation, better evaluation, monitoring and enforcement, and ensuring that appropriate amounts of revenue do go to addressing problem gambling. They are all linked. It is a very important part of what we do. If we are forced to raise revenue collected from problem gambling, I believe—and I think it is fair to say that the committee believes—we are making a rod for our own backs, and we simply should not be doing that.

Recommendations 15 and 16 look at some green taxes and we certainly believe that these should be consistent with the Office of Sustainability’s indicators about environmental sustainability when they are issued. We still await those indicators. It is very important, if we are serious about a commitment to sustainability—and I do not think there is anyone in this chamber who is not—and we have the Office of Sustainability that has some indicators, that we raise revenue in accordance with those indicators.

There are a few comments on some pages of this report—which members will find—in which the committee expresses surprise on a number of occasions at, for instance, the

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