Page 2817 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 June 2012
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minister, excludes new players in new areas like the Molonglo valley. And that would be the shame. If we are going to say that old areas can have poker machines but the new areas lose, that is not how it should be.
For me the most important recommendation in the report is recommendation 11:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government should implement programs to address the root cause of problem gambling.
The majority of people in the ACT use poker machines for their enjoyment, and they use them well; they are not affected by it.
There is a small percentage of our population who use poker machines, I think, as an expression of some discontent in their life. I will relate the story of a friend of mine who rang from a small club and said, “Can you come and pick me up?” I said, “I could come and pick you up, but why don’t you just drive or get a cab?” He said: “I’ve just put the fortnight’s pay through the machines. I am over the limit, and I have not got the taxi fare to get home to explain to my wife that we are broke.” He was not a problem gambler. He had depression, and his expression of that—his cry for help—was to go to the machine and blow a fortnight’s pay.
Unless we address the pain that some people are in, that they choose to express through problem gaming, we are just beating around the bush and we are not going to get to the root cause that drives that half a per cent of people who have a problem with things like poker machines.
So for me recommendation 11 is the important thing. Let us address the root cause.
Linked to that is recommendation 15. The former government, of which Mr Moore was a part, established a chair at the ANU to address problem gaming. I do not think that chair has ever been used effectively to deliver it; in fact, I am not even sure the chair exists. There used to be a professor in the position to do the research. My understanding is that it has been downgraded to a research assistant. Indeed, when the committee secretary went and looked on the website to find out what that chair had been up to, she could not find a great deal of information.
This is the abandonment of evidence-based policy by the government and by the former minister in trying to deal with the issue of problem gaming. We actually set up a chair to look at the causes, how we could ameliorate the impact and how we could save people from this scourge. What has the government done? It would appear it has downgraded the chair.
So recommendation 15 calls on the Minister for Gaming and Racing to make a statement to the Assembly about the status of the chair and what work it is doing. We are not addressing the problem. We know from some of the work that has been done by the Productivity Commission that the only time people seem to go and get help is when they are almost suicidal. I can attest to that through the case of my friend. He was so depressed about his life and where he was—it was a plea for help.
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