Page 3589 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 27 October 2015
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being very uncomfortable with the impact of problem gambling and the very strong reliance on revenue from gaming machines that so many of our clubs have. To me, that was the heart of the dilemma in this inquiry.
As Mr Smyth noted, ultimately this committee has agreed on a lot of recommendations, and I was very pleased about that. There were a lot of areas where we were able to agree. Various committee members brought forward various ideas. Some of them were vigorously debated; on others we simply said, “Yeah, that is a really good point” and moved on quickly.
In terms of the findings of the committee that I particularly want to highlight, without repeating Mr Smyth’s very good summary of the inquiry, I particularly note the suggestion that the sport and recreation sector and the arts sector be invited to join the community clubs task force. This perhaps came from some of the evidence that Mr Hargreaves and his colleagues gave. We had many sporting and community groups submit to the inquiry, helpfully assisted by their supporting clubs, but there is clearly a role for all of those sorts of organisations to be represented on the task force as they have such a major stake in the role of the clubs in the ACT community.
Recommendation 6 says:
The Committee recommends that a taskforce be established ‘to develop an action plan for problem gambling’ …
That is a very good point. What we heard in much of the evidence we received was that there is a good stock of research on what can be done, but as the committee also noted in a later recommendation, recommendation 18, there is a lot of research to be done as well on how to tackle issues of problem gambling. Having an ongoing group to look at that and develop strategies and plans that can be both implemented and monitored would be very valuable.
The committee heard a lot of discussion about online gambling and the role that it plays. I think it would be fair to say that the evidence was that it is still a relatively minor factor in problem gambling but that it is an emerging area and one which nobody seems to have a really good grasp of. This is something that is very challenging, and the committee recommends that the government work with the federal government to get a response on this. Obviously, in a small jurisdiction like the ACT there is very much a limit on what we can possibly do in this space but there is no question that online gambling presents a very significant looming social issue, particularly for groups that are most vulnerable to problem gambling. They tend to be younger men in many cases; certainly they are one group who have a high level of access to the online environment and who clearly are targeted in much of the online gambling advertising that we all see on our televisions on a nightly basis.
Recommendations 12 and 13 about entry into community clubs may seem a bit quirky in the context of the overall committee’s considerations but there is a very interesting issue around the fact that you have to join a club and sign in and whether this presents a barrier to more people going to clubs in a very competitive environment. If you go
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