Page 1998 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 5 June 2018
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some reports to this Assembly, defined as so-called disclosable reports. There will also be other protected reports whose contents will be deemed contrary to the public interest and therefore not for the public domain or for this chamber.
As conveyed in the explanatory statement to the minister’s bill, there also appear to be some finely tuned boundaries in relation to section 136 dealing with human rights and privacy considerations. The importance of these are dealt with at some length in the explanatory statement. We can only hope that the right balance has been struck here.
I must confess that I am a little unsure of what we are dealing with here in the sense that we have a multiplicity of advisory sources feeding the minister’s decision-making process. On one hand we have the Gambling and Racing Commission, which is already established as an independent body under the Gambling and Racing Control Act. On the other hand the minister wants to create this additional advisory source with powers vaguely resembling some sort of royal commission.
When these sorts of organisational overlays are created, you are prone to creating a number of negative outcomes—administrative tensions, competition for resources, frictions over functional responsibilities and boundary disputes. Someone needs to sit over the top of all of this to make sure it stays cohesive, coordinated, productive and effective. The minister needs to explain how this will be done without consuming the rest of his day job and impacting on good governance.
This organisational dichotomy does not come without a price. And we are not sure whether this will be considerable or not. We can be certain that the three-person panel described in section 136E will not have a hope in hell of covering off on all the professional skill stream specifications listed in that section. Some of these streams will require very high-priced help indeed.
No doubt, given the classified nature of some of its information collection, analysis and reporting, it will require its own dedicated corporate services infrastructure—I do not know; perhaps even its own accommodation and IT system. I am not sure that this represents value for money or that it will provide the solutions to the problems that the minister cannot seem to find.
In terms of functional efficiency we would have to ask this: why can this sort of body not be stood up inside the Gambling and Racing Commission itself? The commission is a longstanding body with a remit to oversee and regulate the gaming sector, and has a wealth of corporate memory and expertise fit for this purpose. I hope that Canberra’s ratepayers are not going to be slugged in order to set up this sort of show.
In conclusion, we have a bill that appears to amplify the deterrent effect of the previous bill in terms of enticing a casino body to invest in Canberra. It does provide a comprehensive set of controls, checks and balances, but these are at the expense of organisational fragmentation and costs incurred in creating an additional source of advice for ministerial decision-making. On balance, this side of the chamber does not believe that the minister has got it right and we will be opposing this bill.
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