Mitchell Clayton: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6464. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I rise to take another call on Part 1 of this bill the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3). In speaking to this bill I appreciate the Hon Peter Dunne taking a call and clarifying just a couple of things. That probably leaves a little bit of an untold story there and I just really want to refer again back to New Zealand First’s Supplementary Order Paper 95 around clause 6 and new clause 6AA which is about commission-based payments.Mr Iain Lees-Galloway along with the Greens and Labour have been sort of talking more about the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) and harm minimisation. This bill is not strictly about harm minimisation. This is about transparency and a clearer easier way to fundamentally work out what and how we are going to be paying those venue operators. The question was asked by Mr Iain Lees-Galloway—he cannot get his head around or fathom why a higher turnover venue would justify a higher payment.Under the current scheme it comes down to fair reasonable and necessary costs to operate a licensed premises. The difficulty you have got when you try to work out what your premises is entitled to comes down to the floor area of your gaming room compared with the floor area of your entire establishment whether you have got carpet what the wall coverings are what sort of fittings you have got in your room how many staff it takes what the turnover is on your bar what your hours of operation are and what your power costs are. You can imagine the sort of conundrum you have got to work out where you sit for a payment under the current scheme. What we are simply saying under a simple scheme—and let me give you some numbers so you can rattle those around in your brain. An average to high turnover—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order!CLAYTON MITCHELL: Mr Chair?The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Nothing is going to rattle in my brain.CLAYTON MITCHELL: Mr Chair I do apologise. It is a bad habit—I will get out of it. I mean Mr Iain Lees-Galloway’s brain. To get that clear inside Mr Iain Lees-Galloway’s brain—if you took an averagely high turnover of $9000 a week of banking in a gaming site which is over the average but we are working on that and if you look at a current site payment of around about $150 per machine it would work out somewhere around about $1350. Of course they fluctuate. The rents in Auckland can be astronomical and they could be paying twice or three times what they are paying or even five times what they are paying in Invercargill. So a site rental in Auckland might be getting $200 for a site machine and therefore generating more turnover because of the location and so forth.With each increase in turnover comes an increase in foot traffic and that becomes costs in staff. Staff costs are the largest unfixed variable business cost in hospitality. Rent is fixed power is generally fixed and a lot of those other associated costs are fixed. But the moment you have to increase your staff to cover a higher turnover venue you have got more wear and tear on the fixtures and fittings in your premises then you could surely understand economically that you could not sit within the current regime.What we are suggesting—putting it under a commission-based system—allows for higher turnover. At a turnover of $9000 a week and earning $150 a machine that is around $1300 a week—you are hardly saying that you are making a lot of money out of that. It is not even covering a portion of your rent let alone all the other running costs that go with it. What we are saying is that establishing a fee that is based on the gross turnover of gaming machines ties in with the actual running costs attributed to that site and the ongoing costs of that. That is why we think that commission-based payments are better than not.We have gone through the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) which talked about harm minimisation and the Minister has talked about other areas where that is going to be picked up on. We too are concerned about issues of problem gamblers. They do make up 0.03 percent of the population. That as a percentage seems pretty small—I think it is about 20000 problem gamblers—but that is not broken down into the types of problems we are having. There are problem gamblers that have TAB problems there are casino problems and there are pokie machine problems and none of that is really captured in an overall breakdown of what class 4 gambling is actually directly proportionally responsible for.The biggest problem that we have got as this very fast world of gambling changes is the new onslaught of online gambling. That is the elephant in the room. That is something that needs to be addressed that we have not even started to consider. Yet we are throwing a lot of stones and a lot of weight and a lot of anti - commission-based payments talk when it is just a simple and easy way to work out payment for the venue operators and for the Government to assist in those payments.