Bakshi Kanwaljit Singh: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBakshi Kanwaljit Singh: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 10 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11906. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National):It is my pleasure to stand and speak on this part of the Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill. First of all I would like to acknowledge Te Ururoa Flavell for his work on this bill. I would also like to acknowledge the officials and the Commerce Committee for their consideration of this bill. To start with I would like to touch on gambling—the harm of gambling that we have been taught from our childhood. Dr Rajen Prasad must know the epic ofMahabharata  which is the narrative of the War ofKurukshetra and that war is based on gambling. The gambling game betweenKauravas andPandavas saw a hundred thousand people lose their lives during that war. That is a lesson that we have been taught from childhood—that gambling is not a good thing.The Government recognises this and we are working on it. We will see that the Minister will be introducing some more measures before the end of this year. The purpose of this bill is to provide additional measures to prevent and minimise the harms caused by gambling and ensure that money from gambling benefits the community and assists community involvement in the decisions regarding gambling. Gambling-machine venues tend to be overly represented in lower-income communities and town centres.Māori and Pacific Island areas are effectively being targeted and often are severely harmed by the use of these machines. Communities in South Auckland and especially in my area of South Auckland have been very vocal in their representation against the number of pokie machines. The National Government takes this problem very seriously. This bill enables the introduction of harm minimisation devices and in addition to this we have $55 million being invested over 3 years to focus on people getting the assistance they need.There were a number of submissions received by the select committee and most of the submissions came from the people who have experienced harm from pokie machines and they gave their personal accounts of lives that have been torn apart by pokie machines. This bill seeks to overcome the vulnerable locations and reduce or transfer the majority of the pokies or even eliminate pokies from those suburbs and towns where they are particularly concentrated or doing particular harm. In fact many communities at risk have voiced their feelings concerning the pokie machines in their areas and have been successful in having them removed.The bill especially requires all pokie-machine trusts corporate societies and other distributors of the proceeds of gambling machines to return at least 80 percent of their funds generated by the gambling losses on local pokie machines back into the charitable organisations that are meeting priority needs in the same local authority area as the venue. However this would mean that the groups in other areas including rural areas might miss out on some of the funding if they are limited and indeed if no machines in these areas are there. For example the majority of the pokie machines are situated in the central business districts of the large cities and therefore the provision of 80 percent requirement would mean that the funding is returned to the communities other than those from which the money was raised.Gamblers who experience problems with their behaviour when using pokie machines will benefit from the $55.3 million 3-year strategy on problem gambling. The provision will include front-line assistance and support in the form of safe gambling practices and raising the awareness of the dangers of gambling. I commend this bill to the House.