Page 2630 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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The reason, as I have outlined in my closing comments in the in-principle stage, is that we recognise the significant role the clubs play in the community and recognise also that there is a very strong community expectation that they operate in a transparent and accountable way.
Whilst we acknowledge that the club industry has taken some steps to adapt to the increasing importance of governance practices in the not-for-profit and corporate sectors, the Gambling and Racing Commission’s regulatory experience and the review of the existing governance provisions found that there were areas where further improvements could be made. These improvements include, amongst other things, ensuring that club directors act in the best interests of their club by introducing a clear and locally administered requirement that they do so, ensuring that there are full and appropriate levels of disclosure and guaranteeing member representation on club boards, as a number of these clauses go to.
As to the question of whether the bill duplicates the Corporations Law—yes, it does, and it does so to provide a locally administered requirement that, regardless of any other role and responsibilities that a club director may have, when performing their role as a director of a club they must act with the club’s best interests foremost in mind. This has been done for two reasons. The first is to ensure that all club directors are required to act in this manner. The Gaming Machine Act does not require all clubs to be incorporated under the Corporations Act, and smaller clubs are generally only incorporated associations. This new section therefore ensures that the key provision in the Corporations Act applies to all club directors. The second reason for its inclusion in the GMA is that it enables the commission, as the local regulatory authority, to educate directors about their responsibilities and take timely action, including encouraging remedial action if a director does not comply with these requirements.
I stress again, as I did in my closing remarks, that the bill’s requirement does not share the Corporations Act civil penalty, where directors may be held personally liable. This is around giving the commission the capacity to take disciplinary action against the licensee, which we believe would encourage the club to resolve any particular issue with a particular director or numbers of directors.
In the context of the concern in relation to this particular clause, the commission will work closely with the club sector in relation to its operation. Again, the government has committed to reviewing this legislation after a two-year period. We believe that this provision and this law should be supported today, but we do undertake to review its provision within the two-year period.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (12.09): The Greens will not support this amendment. At the heart of the amendment lies a significant misunderstanding about our federal structure and the role each level of government should rightly play. Who questions that, where a director is not acting in good faith, in the best interests of the club and for a proper purpose, the commissioner should not be able to do something about it?
The fact that this is the same test used in the Corporations Law has no material impact on the appropriateness of the ACT law. The reality is that, given the disciplinary
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