Nash Stuart: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNash Stuart: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) — In Committee[Sitting date: 28 October 2014. Volume:701;Page:329. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]STUART NASH (Labour—Napier):I tend to agree with Chris Hipkins’ definitions around “the harm caused by” and “harm from”. One to me is causation and the other is lot more passive. It does not matter if you are in deep financial stress and you turn to gambling to get yourself out of that financial stress no matter what that may be that is still harm caused by gambling. You get yourself into trouble from gambling but I actually agree with my colleague Mr Hipkins. I think one is a lot wider and one is about the causes of gambling which is really what we should be dealing with in this bill. Harm from gambling—well it does not have the same ring or the same causation as “the harm caused by” but that is last thing I will say on that.Gambling is a rather insidious disease. I do not think there is anything good or enjoyable about gambling. I do not mean to sound like a wowser but there are 50000 New Zealanders who have a gambling addiction. For every person with a gambling addiction there are probably five or six who are affected by it and they include the employer who might have had money stolen or the family members and so on and so forth. The media is full of stories of people who actually have stolen whose lives have been ruined who have lost marriages lost their houses lost their jobs let alone substantial amounts of money and their self-respect.But what I would like to talk about is clause 5(5A) and the definition of a “gaming machine”. I was not aware until Mr Hipkins mentioned it that there is actually another gambling bill on the Order Paper. When I had a look at this bill it really is a 2007 bill because even though in 2007 we had the internet and we had all those whiz-bang devices that we have got now gambling really did not come to the fore on the internet until the last 2 or 3 years. In fact what we are finding is that a lot of people are not actually going to casinos because there is a stigma associated with playing the pokies or putting money in those slot machines. But they can now do it in the comfort of their own home and the privacy of their own home so somewhere we need to include on here something to do with the internet. I am sorry but maybe the Minister of Internal Affairs can tell me whether this bill will come before Parliament yet again with another amendment as technology continues or is the new bill that is on the Order Paper about internet banking and the regulation around that—not internet banking; internet gambling and the regulation around that.Hon Ruth Dyson: Some people sort of see it as banking.STUART NASH: That is true—that is true. The other part of internet gambling—which is so insidious of course—is that there is no tax paid on it. People say that the best way to launder money is obviously by going to a casino and that is how you do it but at least Skycity and other operators like that actually do pay tax whereas there is actually no tax paid on internet gambling. It is a major concern. As the Minister in charge of the bill is a former Minister of Revenue he will know the impact of the internet. It has had a significant effect on the amount of revenue the Government can collect. With the amount of money spent on gambling the tax implications are significant. So can the Minister inform me whether the bill we have on the Order Paper is about regulating internet gambling or whether there will need to be Supplementary Order Papers around this to bring that in.Here it talks about a device whether wholly or partly mechanical or electronically operated—we all have a picture of those; you go down to a casino and there are thousands and thousands of them—that “is adapted or designed and constructed for gambling; and … is played or confers a right to participate whether totally or partly by the insertion of money into it or by the direct or indirect payment of money by any other means;”. So to me this precludes internet gambling.Although the Hon Rick Barker was a man of a lot of vision and foresight I do not think even Mr Barker in his time would have foreseen the growth of the internet gambling industry and actually how many people can play it and the insidious nature that it has. In fact in this day and age you can even buy your Lotto tickets online so it is not just the overseas sites that are controlled by the guys operating out of Macau. This is actually the New Zealand Lotteries Commission. What we have done is made it easier and easier over the years—not incrementally almost quantum leaps—for people to gamble away their money but as a consequence of that I see that a whole lot of legislation is going to have to be introduced to regulate this industry and actually keep people from harm.As mentioned there are 50000 people in this country with a problem gambling situation and we will need to do something about that but in the meantime I am keen to know what the definition of a gambling machine is also because—