Brownlee Gerry: Gambling Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Brownlee Gerry: Gambling Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:18114] 
GERRY BROWNLEE (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 I want to make a few comments on this bill because I have some views about the way in which the administration of pokie-machine funding in particular is being handled in this country. I want to state at the beginning that the National Party supports this bill going to the Government Administration Committee. However I have some personal reservations about the bill—not because of the way in which licensing trusts operate or because of the fact that licensing trust trustees who are also part of the trusts that distribute the funds will be excluded from the “key person” provision of the central legislation but rather because the sensible approach that is being taken with this amendment should in my view apply to every organisation around the country that is set up to distribute the funds where trustees are also the owners of the premises in which the gambling machines are located. 
It seems to me that the Parliament is being asked to give some sort of preferential arrangement to people who sit on licensing trusts yet those same arrangements are not available to individual publicans bar owners or cafe owners who pay the money from the machines into trusts for distribution. One of the worst aspects of this is that by allowing trustees of distributing bodies to become— 
Rod Donald 
: Who funded the National campaign? 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: I am sorry Mr Speaker but am I going to be subject to this terrible assault from the Green Party? 
Rod Donald 
: We want to know. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The point of order is coming out of the member’s time. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: No the point of order cannot come out of my time. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Yes it is. I ask the member to carry on. I know what the point of order is. 
GERRY BROWNLEE 
: I wish to make a personal explanation about the allegation made by the Green Party member that I received funding. To save the Green Party member from continually interjecting along those lines I make it clear that it is a matter of public record that in 1996 my election campaign did receive a modest donation from a trust that derived its funds from pokie machines. Might I also say that a number of other parties in this House received considerably larger donations from the same source than the National Party. 
I want to refer to a perfect example of the stupidity that is being exercised by bureaucrats in the Department of Internal Affairs. What is wrong with trusts distributing money to the community for community purposes? Why do the Green Party the Labour Party and a number of other parties in this House which seem to get upset by the fact that sometimes political parties have received money from that source seek to remove the political process from the community? 
This is exactly the sort of issue we were talking about last night in respect of the Public Finance (State Sector Management) Bill—a desire to see that only central government can have a say in these matters and that no community effectively can be influential in choosing to put funds into a political campaign in order that its best interests may be represented. It seems to me that there is nothing wrong with that. However what we have in this bill is a situation where someone is elected to a licensing trust and he or she becomes part of the management of a number of hotels that come under the auspices of that trust. Then that same person is elected to the body that receives the funds from the trust’s hotels bars cafes or pokie machines for distribution to the community. If that were a privately owned outfit that person could not be one and the same. However this bill will allow that exact provision on the basis that the person does not personally benefit. I think it is a very thin argument to run. A person in that position could advance funds to a particular sports club that he or she was involved with to a school that his or her children attended or to a travelling sports team that perhaps he or she was a part of. Seemingly there would be no problem with that because the person was elected by the community at large to administer the trust in the first place. 
That argument could be extended to say that someone who has licensed premises holds that licence by virtue of the community allowing him or her to hold it. The community has effectively through the licensing laws said that the person is a satisfactory individual to run the particular activity. What is wrong with extending that argument to say that the same person can be involved in the distribution of funds from pokie machines in the wider community not just that person’s own community but to organisations in the community? I say to Mr Donald and to those members of the Labour Party who find that idea somehow offensive that if it were not for this sort of distribution many sports in this country would not survive in the way they do today. I do not think that many of our children would have the sporting opportunities they have today. 
It bothers me a great deal that the Department of Internal Affairs has decided there is so much amiss in the system that it has to be involved to an extent that will chew up considerable amounts of money—money that might otherwise go to good purposes—for the administration of its own bureaucracy. Let us be clear about how this will work. The Department of Internal Affairs now not only is able to monitor electronically but is able to employ people to inspect these premises to make sure the machines are working. I would have thought that the best way to know whether something was amiss was to watch the electronic monitor and then monitor the flow of cash that comes from them. One does not have to be some sort of in-the-field inspector to do that. 
The National Party wants to see this bill progress to the Government Administration Committee but I want to say that a number of us are disappointed that the definition of “key person” is not being extended to allow many other operators in the business to also sit on the trusts that are part of the distribution of the funds. We can see that the bureaucracy that is growing up around the funds is starting to soak up far too many of the dollars that ordinarily should go to community purposes.