Page 1135 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 10 April 2018
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action. Changes in consumer tastes, increased competition in the food, beverages and entertainment market, demographic change and, in particular, the growth in alternative gambling products, including online gambling, mean that the clubs’ business model has to change.
The government has already taken steps to support small and medium clubs to diversify their revenue streams. Last year we provided a 50 per cent gaming machine tax rebate and a $10,000 community club grant for those clubs with under $4 million in gaming machine revenue. The results have been promising. The Burns Club recently announced that they used gaming tax rebate funds to install solar panels, reducing the ongoing energy costs to the club. The grant program is assisting many small clubs in diversifying their income streams through things like upgraded dance floors, new performance spaces and other ways to support live music and events.
Diversification is important, but it is one component of a comprehensive strategy to minimise the impacts of problem gambling. This government is committed to promoting a culture of harm minimisation through consultation and engagement. Engagement with people in the gaming industry, with academic experts and with the community is necessary to ensure that our robust harm minimisation framework remains effective.
Our engagement has yielded a series of new harm minimisation measures over the past year. These include: limiting cash withdrawals from EFTPOS machines in clubs to $200 per transaction and requiring interaction with a trained staff member for all withdrawals; increasing the problem gambling assistance fund levy to provide more funding to help people affected by problem gambling; and creating a framework for electronic gaming machines at the Canberra Casino that will come with nation-leading harm minimisation rules, including mandatory pre-commitments and a maximum per-spin bet limit of $2.
The government is hard at work evaluating and building on these existing measures to limit the harms that we recognise can be caused to our community through gambling. The rules we apply to gaming are as important as our policy of diversifying away from gaming revenue. We will keep working on our evidence base about how to prevent gambling harm across the industry in Canberra.
Last year I foreshadowed to the Assembly that I would be holding a roundtable discussion to look at how gambling harm can be minimised in clubs. Representatives of gaming machine venues, gambling reform advocacy organisations, academic experts and regulators attended a roundtable with me in September. The roundtable was the first time a group of stakeholders of this nature had been brought together to share views and work collaboratively to address problem gambling in the ACT.
There was a shared vision of preserving and enhancing the community benefits offered by clubs while at the same time effectively minimising the risks of problem gambling posed by electronic gaming machines. The roundtable discussed how to better develop a better evidence base about minimising the harm of problem gambling. We considered a broad range of options for improved harm minimisation, including
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