Rurawhe Adrian: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRurawhe Adrian: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6452. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): I would like to start off by going straight to clause 6 of the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) and speaking about commission-based payments. I want to reflect also on the original Act the Gambling Act 2003. The real purpose of the venue payments as I understand it from the original Act was based on cost recovery for those venues that hosted class 4 gambling machines or pokies. I understand and believe that in doing so the intent was for commission-based payments to be prohibited at that stage because this was seen as a community service and as for the real payment back to the community the funds would be distributed to the community that those funds came from. Clause 6(b)(ii) reads: “the only commission that is paid to or received by a person for conducting the gambling is a commission payment to a venue operator that complies with regulations made under section 371(1)(dd);”.So that is a fundamental change to the original intent of the Gambling Act 2003. We pointed this out in the Labour Party minority report and provided information on exactly why we are against commission-based payments and it is for that very reason. The original intent was for communities to benefit from gambling machines and from the profits being distributed back to that community. Ever since that time venues have created ways that they can maximise the return that they get from cost recovery and I think that has been well documented. So this is a fundamental change which we believe will incentivise gambling so that venues have an interest in seeing more money going through the machines that they host and we are fundamentally opposed to that. There are—and I will get to that in later calls perhaps—the issues around the areas that we do agree with but this is a key area.Another issue that we have as I said refers to another section. We are concerned about that because we do not actually know what the model is. We do not know what the commission-based model will be for making those commission-based payments. That is a problem. It is a problem because it could be anything. There is a Supplementary Order Paper that suggests that it should be set at a certain level. I think that it is not a good idea to leave the model to be created by regulations. It should have been part of this bill.Every single provider organisation that made a submission to the select committee opposed commission-based payments to venues. They all cited that they believe it would incentivise gambling. It would also in their opinion and certainly in my opinion provide another reason for the venues not to fulfil their host responsibilities and as we saw in the mystery shopper project that the Department of Internal Affairs ran in December last year only one out of the 102 venues was compliant. I believe that it is not unreasonable to think that commission-based payments organised and run by those venues are going to provide us with a better outcome. I have not seen the evidence. I refer to the submission made by the Problem Gambling Foundation which is adamant that this kind of process and this kind of payment system to venues will indeed make its job a lot harder and every other provider also had that same opinion about commission-based payments.Also in Part 1 I want to talk about the “key person” issue. There were a number of submitters who made some very good submissions about the “key person” issue because of the difficulty it would provide and the way that it was originally stated within the bill as it appeared in the first reading. So the work that the Government Administration Committee did on this particular issue I think resolves it to a better outcomethan was originally stated which we see in the bill today. For example the Racing Board told us that because of the way the bill was written it would not be able to pay its employees. Of course that is not a good outcome for this part of the bill so I wanted to highlight that.I also wanted to address the submitters who were in support of these payments and acknowledge some of the things that they actually said about their reasons for commission-based payments. I do not agree with the outcome but I acknowledge that the current system is not being implemented in the way that it should be and I think that the Department of Internal Affairs could be doing a lot better. That is all I have to say on Part 1. Kia ora.