Page 3590 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 27 October 2015
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to Lonsdale Street, to Dickson or anywhere like that—Civic, Manuka, Woden, Callam Street, even Anketell Street—there are half a dozen or a dozen different places you can just roll into, whereas if you have to join a club I question whether that is a barrier in a very competitive environment.
The recommendation about the net loss of land zoned in the ACT as a community facility zone is very important. The committee discussed this and I think there was an accepted view that community land might be changed over time, but we should not lose the overall stock of it, because of its value in the community. In my mind, that was the key take-out as to that recommendation: overall, we do not want to lose any. As the city changes, as different parts of the city ebb and flow in their population density, the provision of services and the like, an important part of planning ahead is to make sure that there is land for community facilities, whether that is new religious groups wanting sites, whether it is clubs providing different facilities over time or whether it is new groups coming in, replacing the clubs and providing different types of community facilities. Trends will change over time. Just as we can think about how many of the particularly ethnic-based clubs we built 50 years ago, if we think about how different the city is now, over the next 50 years different trends will arise that will mean that we want to have that opportunity to have different uses but have land available for them.
Recommendation 26 was one that I particularly wanted to touch on:
… that the Government investigate differential tax rates for clubs that have better problem gambling measures in place.
This is about the principles in the way that risk-based licensing has been done in the alcohol space: it is about giving both incentive and recognition that, where people go above and beyond the bare minimum, there should be some benefit to them making that additional effort. That is a recommendation I particularly support and encourage the government to look at further.
I turn now to my additional comments. These are some places where there are a few points where I did not fully agree with the committee—although, as I have touched on, in many places we did find a lot of common ground, which is very valuable.
I disagree with the committee’s finding to remove the existing $250 withdrawal limit at ATMs. I believe that limit should be retained. The recommendation runs counter to accepted problem gambling harm minimisation measures and should be rejected by the government. The government submission, as I state in my comments, notes that the existing ACT withdrawal limit was passed in the Assembly with tripartisan support in 2012. Then the commonwealth government introduced the national scheme as part of the negotiations with Mr Wilkie and others during the Gillard era. The election of the Liberal government led by Tony Abbott as Prime Minister saw the withdrawal from problem gambling harm minimisation, and the national withdrawal limit was rescinded on 31 March 2014, which made the ACT law stand in its own right. The Productivity Commission has been very clear about the importance of these kinds of limits; I strongly urge the government not to withdraw this measure.
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