Hipkins Chris: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:326. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I have to confess I am just refreshing my memory of the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2). I would like first of all to acknowledge the Minister whose name is on the bill the Hon Rick Barker a very competent and excellent Minister of Internal Affairs. Of course this bill was introduced back in 2007 and I would like to congratulate him on his foresight.I would say however that one of the reasons this bill came about in the first place was that the then National Opposition was concerned that the Gambling Act—it was originally called the Responsible Gambling Act and after Parliament was finished with it it became just the Gambling Act because it decided that the word “Responsible” no longer applied—was too prescriptive and that in fact it would date too quickly. Indeed that proved to be the case at least in some instances. So this amendment bill was introduced by Rick Barker in 2007 in order to try to keep up with some of the changes. I am therefore delighted that given National’s concern about how quickly the bill would date it has expedited this process and 7 years after the bill was introduced we are now making progress here in the House.If we turn to Part 1 in particular and look at some of the definitional issues that are covered by Part 1 it is very clear that the Act would date very quickly because of the technology changes that have come in since then. We are talking a lot about gambling machines and there are some technical provisions on that that I know my colleague Stuart Nash is intending to speak about so I will not steal his thunder but there are other provisions here around electronic means which I relocated again just before—for example instant game and remote interactive gambling. There have been huge technological advances since this bill was introduced—and in fact since the Gambling Act itself was passed back in 2003—that make this legislation necessary.I would of course point out that I think the Minister in the chair Peter Dunne is now the fourth Minister of Internal Affairs to be in charge of this bill. Rick Barker introduced the legislation. Richard Worth—things did not quite work out for him—then picked up the legislation after that. Chris Tremain I think was after that and now Peter Dunne. Have I missed one? I must have missed—Hon Peter Dunne: You might have missed two.CHRIS HIPKINS: I have missed a couple. So there have been a few other Ministers along the way. Actually no I think Nathan Guy was the Minister of Internal Affairs for a little while there. So this bill has passed through many hands.Of course it is a largely technical piece of legislation and there are a variety of Supplementary Order Papers designed I guess to try to bring the bill up to speed with what has happened in the 7 years since it was introduced. But it is a necessary piece of legislation because it deals with some loopholes and so on. I am aware that there is another gambling amendment bill also on the Table which I am sure Parliament will get to in due course.The bulk of the provisions that I want to speak to are actually in future clauses of the bill but just to give you another example things like eftpos devices are better defined in here. There was eftpos 7 years ago so I am not sure what the necessary change is but there are a variety of changes that are being made simply to bring the law up to date with technological advances and changes that have happened.I do want to talk about the purpose clause in Part 1. There is an amendment here—the very first amendment under the purpose clause clause 4(1)—that changes the purpose of the overall legislation by omitting “the harm caused by” and substituting “harm from”. This is something that I would quite like to have an explanation from the Minister on about what the justification for that is because it seems to me that “harm from” gambling could actually be more narrowly defined than “the harm caused by” gambling.One of the overall purposes of the Act I think—if you go back and look at the principal Act—is that we want to try to reduce the harm caused by gambling so I would like to know why the wording has been changed there in the purpose clause. It is now around “the harm caused by” gambling and it is being changed to “harm from” gambling and it seems to me that the latter definition could well be interpreted as being more narrow than the definition that is in the Act at the moment. So I would like to know what the justification for that wording change is.