Roche Denise: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee[Sitting date: 24 September 2015. Volume:709;Page:7094. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take a call—a serious call—on the first three clauses of the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3). These three clauses deal with the title the commencement and the principal Act. In preparing what I was going to say in this portion of the Committee of the whole House I went and looked at the principal Act again and I think it is worthwhile to kind of summarise what it says in the Act are the purposes of that Act the Gambling Act 2003. It has got about nine different purposes but I will refer to only about four or five of them. They are as section 3 states to: “(a) control the growth of gambling; and (b) prevent and minimise harm from gambling including problem gambling; and… (d) facilitate responsible gambling; and…(g) ensure that money from gambling benefits the community;”.If we remember the whole point of class 4 gambling is to provide funds for the community funds for charitable purposes and a few other things around racing that New Zealand First got into the legislation previously. However those are the purposes of the original Act and this bill I believe actually cuts right across those purposes because although this bill is called an amendment bill it actually removes a significant portion of the purposes of the original Act and they do not measure up. The removal of the prohibition on paying venue operators on a commission basis from the 2003 Act essentially cuts right across the purposes in the original Act around preventing and minimising harm—including problem gambling—and facilitating responsible gambling and those are two absolutely crucial parts of the 2003 Act.I find it unusual that this provision is even in this amendment bill because we do not really know where it came from. We heard during the submission process from venue operators and from the pokie trusts themselves that they were quite keen to have this and we have heard an assurance in the House from the Minister of Internal Affairs to say that there will be a provision in the regulations around this bill that will restrict the commission-based payment system from being exploited and creating problem gambling. But we do not know what those regulations say and this is an assurance that we have had that actually cuts right across the purpose of the original Act which is to prevent and minimise harm from gambling.In the previous parts of the debate I was pretty disappointed that Supplementary Order Paper 120—my Supplementary Order Paper—around minimising gambling harm by introducing player tracking and pre-commit cards was voted down because that would have been the ideal opportunity for this bill to measure up to the purposes of the original Act. However that is not what we have got here. So I think that leads us to the point where we have to say that this bill has been misnamed. Actually it should not be called the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3). It really is the “Let’s Have Lots of Pokie Rorts Please Bill” because it expands the opportunities for problem gambling. We know—because we have seen the evidence that was presented to us by the Department of Internal Affairs from its mystery shopper sting—that many of the venue operators in New Zealand who currently have class 4 licences to operate pokie machines on their premises do not comply with the host responsibility requirement that is also outlined in the purposes of the original Act.So when you combine that with the provision in this bill that will allow for commission-based payments you have to ask yourself what the consequences of that are going to be. Given that low rate of compliance with the host responsibility requirement from the new operators you have to say that the consequences will be I believe an increase in problem gambling and more pokie operators rorting the system in order to line their pockets.I guess the other thing that cuts across the purposes of the original Act—and the original Act is named in clause 3 of this bill—is the clause around extending the licences for those venue operators and for those pokie trusts. This worries me because although the Minister has said that this is to be an incentive for good behaviour frankly we have not seen much good behaviour. I see no point in providing the ability in this bill to extend licences for good behaviour when it has not happened. What I would rather have seen and what I am pretty sure the Department of Internal Affairs gambling compliance unit would rather have seen as well is that good behaviour operating first before we changed the law because again if that is outlined in regulations we have no way of deciding now whether it is going to work or not.So on the whole this bill offers an enormous relaxation of the gambling laws to the industry and that enables the industry to practise bad behaviour. The incentivisation of problem gambling in order to increase the commission-based payments to the venue operator is one example. Basically we know that they are not meeting their obligations now in most cases.We do not know where the commission-based payment system came from or who asked for it. We did not see that in any of the information that came through to us and it cuts right across the purposes of the original Act. So we should rename this bill so that when it receives the Royal assent we could have the “Problem Gamblers Enablers’ Act” or the “Venue Operators Make a Mint Act”. I could go on Mr Chair but I will not because you are looking quite glazed. Thank you.