Hague Kevin: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7321. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): In 1996 I think it was—it could have been 1997—I was working as an independent consultant and I was commissioned by the Northern Regional Health Authority on behalf of the national Committee on Problem Gambling Management to undertake some qualitative research as to what health services would be required for the health sector to be able to deal with problem gambling. Responsibility at that time was shifting to the health sector. So the health sector reasonably wanted to know what it was going to cost and what it needed to do. I spoke to the providers of gaming services as they call themselves—“gambling services” I would say. I spoke to regulators and the Department of Internal Affairs. I vividly recall opening the lift door on to an open-plan office where the Department of Internal Affairs inspectors were all housed. On every single computer screen that I could see someone was playing solitaire—literally 20 or 30 of them.I spoke to the people who provided treatment services for people with problem gambling addiction and I spoke to those people themselves and to their families and I recorded what was pretty much a miserable tale of devastation in people’s lives. The Committee on Problem Gambling Management interestingly was not very happy with my report because I suggested that the cost of providing those services—the services those people needed—would be very considerable.The problem of problem gambling is now better quantified than it was then. So we know for example that category 4 was not really a problem back in 1996 but in the year to September last year people lost in excess of $800 million on pokie machines. I used to run a district health board. The budget for my district health board was $120 million. So the budgets of five or six district health boards were lost on pokie machines. That is extraordinary. We also know from the estimates made by treatment providers and public health experts that something like 40 percent of those losses are from people with very little control over their gambling behaviour—so the budgets as I say of a couple of district health boards.The pokie machines—category 4 gambling—are designed to exploit that weakness. They are designed to exploit the weakness of people with little or no control over their gambling behaviour. Pokie machines are designed to provide that intermittent reinforcement and to give the sense of something mechanical actually happening when of course it is not. The operators of those machines have designed a science in fact of encouraging problem gambling behaviour and maximising the losses that those people will sustain. We know what to do about it. We know that pre-commitment cards for example would make a difference. We know that real-time player tracking would make a difference. We know that adequately funding effective short-term intervention treatment services would make a difference. And yet time and again when the opportunity has arisen in this House to make a difference to improve the lives of those people afflicted by problem gambling and to actually do something that would make a difference this House has chosen not to do it. It seems extraordinary to me that that is the decision that we have made but we have.In the first reading debate we said that we would not support this bill at subsequent stages if it continued to revoke the prohibition on paying venue operators by commission. That provision is still in the bill and despite the Government’s bluster the fact is that commission will provide incentives to increase problem-gambling behaviour. This bill makes problem gambling worse not better. We will not support it.