Page 3748 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 26 August 2009
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
the Labor clubs and owns the licences. The national office of the ALP think they do. At least they say that it is half of their asset base. Somebody needs to come clean and ask how it is that the national office owns half of this thing that is the Canberra Labor Club Group. In theory, the licences belong to the members, not to the national office of the Labor Party, and that is why this is murky.
It is very easy politics to characterise what we are doing as holding the government to account. We had confirmation today from the Chief Minister that there is a conflict of interest, which I have been saying for a long time and which the Labor Party has rejected. The Chief Minister spoke earlier about divesting themselves of their poker machine licences because he felt that was what the Liberal Party wanted.
What we actually said for many years is that they have to acknowledge the conflict of interest that exists in members of the Labor Party, who vote when their club holds these licenses. We got some sort of acknowledgement of that today. By distancing themselves from the Labor club and adopting the take the money and run approach, they have confirmed the conflict of interest.
The problem for the community is that this is quite unforeseen by the act. The act talks about surrender of licenses and the reissue of licenses. It does not talk about the selling of licences, and the president of the Labor club makes it quite clear that that is what they are doing. If they do not sell the licences, then the clubs would be worthless. The Canberra Times of 15 August reports him as saying, “Cancelling the gaming machine licences would make much of the clubs worthless.” That is right.
Now we have confirmation that what they are selling is the cash flow. They are selling the cash stream—the rivers of gold—so that they can take the money and run. I contend that that is probably illegal. It is certainly not intended under the act. This is why we say we need to know what role the Chief Minister has played in this, because we clearly do not know. The Treasurer should go back and read the Chief Minister’s answers because they are all over the place. You can pick and choose which answer you want to believe on whichever day the minister gave it.
That is why we have moved this motion today. We would like the Chief Minister to come down and give an unequivocal no, that he, his staff or his representatives exerted no influence over the members of the board in regard to this sale. It is a very simple request. It is a very easy thing to do. All ministers managed to do it when they were first asked. They managed to do it without any hesitation, but not the Chief Minister, and that is the problem.
While the murkiness on who owns the clubs continues, while the murkiness continues on who exerted the influence, while the murkiness continues on possible breaches of the Corporations Law and while the murkiness continues on possible breaches of the tax act, we need some answers. The Assembly is an appropriate place to get those answers.
The commission will look at the gaming machine aspects, and rightly so. But the Assembly still has the right, should have the right and will have the right to ask these questions because it is appropriate to hold the government to account. It goes back to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .