Page 3071 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 22 August 2017
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Detail stage
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole.
MR GENTLEMAN (Brindabella—Minister for Police and Emergency Services, Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Minister for Planning and Land Management and Minister for Urban Renewal) (11.20): Pursuant to standing order 182A(c), I seek leave to move amendments to this bill that are in response to comment made by the scrutiny committee together.
Leave granted.
MR GENTLEMAN: I move amendments Nos 1 and 2 circulated in my name together and table a supplementary explanatory statement to the government amendments [see schedule 1 at page 3175]. I have already spoken to the amendments in the previous speech, so I ask Assembly members to agree to those amendments.
Amendments agreed to.
Bill, as a whole, as amended, agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Gaming Machine Amendment Bill 2017
Debate resumed from 3 August 2017, on motion by Mr Ramsay:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
MR PARTON (Brindabella) (11.22): Broadly speaking we agree with most of this bill. We are, however, not comfortable with the gaming tax rebate section—clause 13—because (a), it is not an equitable way to distribute such a large sum of money and (b), we do not believe this measure will result in genuine diversification away from gaming. The Canberra Liberals will be opposing clause 13 simply because it is bad policy. We cannot support this government handing back $5 million of forgone revenue primarily to three clubs with no real checks and balances on how they spend the money.
This was a policy in the midst of an election campaign. It was a policy designed to reward clubs who had abstained from the campaign that this government still cannot see past. It was a policy entirely based on finding a reward for those clubs who chose not to raise an opinion counter to that of the government. Indeed, if the minister were constructing policy in this space now, outside of the context of an election campaign, we could all be certain that this is not how it would look. This was a thought bubble from a desperate government. What we see in the gaming tax rebate is pure election campaign politics. The policy was announced for no other reason than to stem the
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