Roche Denise: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 10 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11901. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker.Tēnā koutou katoa. I would like to rise to take this call for the Greens on the Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill. I will start my speech by also acknowledging the death of MaureenWaaka who was on the board of the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand and was a stalwart defender ofMāori and a support forMāori with gambling problems. She worked tirelessly to raise this as an issue inMāori communities and to try to address the harm caused by gambling.This bill has come back to the House with its good intentions completely gutted and it should be withdrawn by the member who has the bill in his name Te Ururoa Flavell. It is a real shame because the original intentions of the bill were sound. Those intentions were to give councils and communities the power to cut the number of pokies in the area or eliminate them altogether; ensure that at least 80 percent of the 37 percent of the funds that were distributed as grants from gambling machine losses be returned to the communities where the gambling took place; phase out the pokies trusts that distribute the gambling money from pokies and replace them with more accountable committees under the control of local authorities; remove horse racing from the list of charitable purposes that can use the gambling funds; and introduce harm minimisation player tracking and pre-commit cards enabling gamblers to put controls on the amount of time they spend and the money they lose while playing pokies.What does this bill do? None of that. Why? Because the pokie trusts won. There were over 35000 submissions on this bill. The majority of them came from community organisations that are the recipients of the money from class 4 gambling—that is the pokie gambling. Many of these organisations received letters from pokie trusts that havepreviously given them grants encouraging them to put in submissions opposing the bill. One pokie trust Pub Charity went so far as to offer workshops to organisations that had received funding from it in the past. I know this because I asked submitters while they were giving their submissions. They were encouraged to write submissions to oppose the bill. These workshops also ensured that there was a lot of misinformation promulgated and Ruth Dyson has already spoken about that. There were simply so many non-truths told that it was a big beat-up by the industry.Let us step back a minute and just remember what pokies are for and what pokie trusts are for. The Gambling Act says that the only reason—the only reason—pokies exist is to provide benefits through funding to the community. And it says that the money from pokies can be used only for authorised purposes which are charitable purposes; non-commercial purposes that have community benefits; and promoting controlling and conducting race meetings. The only reason that pokie trusts exist is to distribute that money. I am not sure what others think of this but I think pokie trusts using the money that should go to communities to wrangle community groups together to get them to oppose a bill that will make them go out of existence is absolutely wrong.We have also recently seen an example of again Pub Charity’s Chief Executive Officer Martin Cheer deciding to punish Canterbury Cathedral by denying it funding because one member of the Anglican Church made a submission supporting the Flavell bill. And how did Martin Cheer know? He knew because he was in the room when the submission was given. He really could not have missed the submitter saying that he did not represent the Anglican Church and that some people in the Anglican Church were worried that if they submitted they would not be able to access funding in the future. And lo and behold that is exactly what has happened. So what we have here is a pokie trust that interferes in the democratic processes of the legislative system by using threats and rewards to get its own way. That is bullying.This bill was attempting to deal to the pokie trusts and the rorts they get up to. An example—and there are many—from this year is that the Department of Internal Affairs is currently conducting a $30 million investigation into the racing industry in the South Island. That is $30 million of community funding going to racing from three different trusts. This bill was an attempt to stop not just the rorts by pokie trusts but also the funnelling of money from pokies that are concentrated in poor areas to other regions and to also stop the dodgy practice of funding the racing industry. If we think back to the intent of the original legislation which was to provide funds for charitable non-commercial purposes with community benefits I cannot see that providing State money for racehorse owners is a particularly charitable act particularly when you consider that the New Zealand Racing Board is already taking millions from racehorse betting anyway.I note that the report from the Commerce Committee recommended including in the regulations the provision for 80 percent of the funds generated to be distributed back to the same area where the gambling took place. That is what it says in the bill. It also recommended that the actual harm minimisation measures—the player tracking and the pre-commit cards—also go into the regulations. But what that means is that they will have to consult further with the industry about these issues and as we have seen with this bill the pokie industry has got ample money to organise opposition. Is it likely that the industry will agree to measures that reduce the amount of money being gambled? I do not think so.What the industry will do and what it has done is sidetrack the deal with the least effective harm minimisation methods. The classic example is facial recognition technology as a harm minimisation tool which was put forward to the select committee and I must say the select committee became rather enamoured of it. But the thing aboutfacial recognition technology is that it is like a self-imposed ban. It kicks in after the gambler has developed a problem and has already lost a lot of money after they have already been sucked dry. Player tracking on the other hand is a predictive model and pre-commit cards mean that every gambler has to decide before they start gambling how much they will spend. They are the ambulance at the top of the cliff.Perhaps one of the saddest aspects of this bill now is that it actually makes things worse. The select committee has recommended that there be a provision for the transfer of pokies from one area to another. There was nothing in the original bill about this. This will enable pokies to shift their machines from poor areas where they are concentrated to other areas without losing any of their machines. This provision will cut across the ability of councils to use a transferral provision to reduce the number of pokies in their communities and I asked specifically about this. I asked whether councils could still require venues to drop some of their pokies as a condition of their being able to transfer which was the policy of the last Auckland City Council and I was told that they would not be able to do that with this provision in the bill.This is not giving communities a voice. This is not reducing harm. This is a win for the pokie trusts. This bill needs to be withdrawn. If it passes we are likely to have a worse situation than we have already. There is a clear signal that this bill is dangerous. When the agencies that deal with the fallout and that pick up the pieces in the community from the harm caused by problem gambling—and I quote the Salvation Army and the Problem Gambling Foundation—are calling for this bill to be dropped then there has to be some serious reasons for that. I have outlined a few of them. I will outline more as we progress this bill through the House. I appeal to the member Te Ururoa Flavell to heed those people and drop this bill. We will be opposing it.