Woods Megan: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 07 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12499. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):It is my pleasure to take a call on this Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill. It is the first call I have taken on this bill. It is also my pleasure to be a member of a party that is going to exercise its conscience on these issues tonight. I feel sorry for many of the members opposite. Clearly their rhetorical flourishes show that they feel something different from what their party is whipping them to vote for. I do really feel a deal of sadness in the Chamber tonight as we debate this bill knowing that there are members here who are going to have to vote against their conscience. Actually the exercise of conscience is something that MPs should do more than a little bit. It is something that is crucial to our role as local representatives and it is something that is fundamental to our justification for being in Parliament.As I said this is the first call that I have taken on this bill and I have not traversed many of the grounds that many colleagues have on this bill and that have been well rehearsed. These are very important points about the harm that gambling particularly pokie machines does in our communities. I guess I was first alerted to the kinds of social harms that pokie machines can bring about in a community when I was first elected as a community board member in Christchurch in 2004 in a reasonably large ward that was made up of one very high socio-economic area and one very low socio-economic area. The high socio-economic area had not one pokie machine in it. The low socio-economic half of my ward was rife with pokie machines. This was nothing but a hope tax in poor suburbs. These machines were nothing but machines put there to give people who had no economic hope some hope in their lives and to exploit them along the way.Talking to my constituents whom I represented as a community board member is something that I will remember for the rest of my political life when we come to consider these issues. I think it is very important to consider these issues from a very grassroots community-up kind of basis. We have heard tonight about a large number of agencies that have talked about what has happened to this bill in its passage through Parliament how it really has been hijacked by the Government to push through its own aims and that it does not resemble the bill that first came to the House. The Salvation Army an organisation that is absolutely committed to reducing the harm of problem gambling in our communities has come out and criticised many of the changes saying that they do nothing for problem gamblers and those at risk or for communities wishing to manage the impact of gambling. It is this kind of efficacy and the ability to reduce those harms that I am looking for in legislation that purports to be about addressing this very real danger that we have in many of our communities.I want to talk specifically about a couple of the Supplementary Order Papers that have been brought by colleagues. One of these is Supplementary Order Paper 290 inthe name of Carol Beaumont which she talked about in her previous speech and the other one is Supplementary Order Paper 292 in the name of the Hon Trevor Mallard. Both of these Supplementary Order Papers talk about the transfer of licences and deal with those issues. In the case of Supplementary Order Paper 290 this provides “that a territorial authority’s class 4 venue policy must include a relocation policy.” which must specify the maximum percentage. It goes on in quite a bit more detail. Then Supplementary Order Paper 292 in the name of Trevor Mallard talks about ensuring that “no class 4 venue licence may be transferred to an area that has higher deprivation than the old venue.”To many members these may seem like very strict rules put on a piece of paper and things that will never come into play but I would like to share with the Committee and enter on the record what happened with class 4 gambling venues post-earthquakes in Christchurch. As a city our city council and our community boards had to confront the very real issue that 36 class 4 gambling venues were destroyed in the earthquakes and were inoperable. I would like to point out that that is 36 venues not 36 machines. Despite the fact that we had a reduced number of machines operating in our city the circumstances of the earthquakes and the emotional stress that was brought about as a result saw a spike in gambling in our city. Along with alcohol consumption gambling increased after the earthquakes. So the city council had to wrestle with a very real problem. I am proud to come from a city that despite these issues and a lot of pressure that was put on it post the earthquakes in Christchurch to change its policy—because it had to come to review its gambling policy in February 2012 earlier than the due date of the August 2012 review—had to come and review this policy and decide. Some very real decisions had to be made. We had operators who were struggling for survival who said that they wanted to transfer these machines to areas that had not been damaged by the earthquakes. They put forward the argument for which I think everybody including the councillors who heard the submissions and subsequently voted to keep the sinking lid had a great deal of empathy that if it were not for the earthquakes they could still be operating these machines that are a part of their business.But sometimes communities and political leaders have to take a stand. Our community leaders and local body politicians in Christchurch made a call that we were not going to rebuild a city on the back of a poverty tax in our poorest suburbs and that we were going to have political leadership in our city that said that the earthquakes have given us an opportunity to clear some of our communities of some of this harm. And we took that opportunity. I think this is actually something that Christchurch when it looks back on the wake of the earthquakes should be hugely proud of. It should be something that we celebrate. This is the kind of leadership we need. We need people who act on their conscience and who understand the harm that these machines can do in their community. They understand that it is a vexed issue but that ultimately they need to put the health and the well-being of their communities first.I urge Government members to vote with their conscience tonight to look at the harms that these machines do in their communities and to exercise their conscience in a way that we as elected members are voted in by our communities to do. Thank you.