Clendon David: New Zealand International Convention Centre Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is subject to correctionClendon David: New Zealand International Convention Centre Bill — In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 06 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14449. Text is subject to correction.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): Thank you Mr Deputy Chair.Catherine Delahunty: He just got here.DAVID CLENDON: Of course. Yes excellent choice. I am pleased to take a brief call on this unfortunate piece of legislation the New Zealand International Convention Centre Bill. I think there is one thing that we can be sure about: if this bill passes we can be sure there will immediately be an increase in visitor numbers to Auckland. Even before the convention centre is built every casino operator and every gambling operator around the world will be coming to Auckland to ask Skycity: “How did you negotiate such a sweetheart deal where you cannot possibly lose?” because that is the nature of this legislation. Skycity cannot lose on this legislation. The regulatory concessions are very carefully set up in clause 6 to ensure that any regulatory or legislative change can work only to the advantage of Skycity.You have got to give it credit in a perverse sort of a way for having achieved that. It will be the poster boy of the gambling industry internationally for having pulled off this incredible coup and for having got this extraordinary set of concessions from a Government that is basically giving Skycity an open ticket. It is not even having a dollar each way. Skycity is guaranteed to win whichever way future legislation goes. It is a win-win deal for Skycity. It is a lose-lose deal for New Zealand for people with gambling problems and for the social services which will have to pick up the residue the mess that this increase in gambling and problem-gambling behaviour will leave behind.I think it is very instructive to go back to the feasibility studies that were conducted between 2007 and 2009 over that period. All of the international evidence says that building convention centres in the current era in the current situation means that you will never recoup your cost of capital. You might make money on the operation of such a thing but the capital investment is sunk. You simply cannot generate enough income to pay for that which is why the Ministry of Economic Development feasibility study recommended some sort of public-private partnership: the public sector which could meet some of the capital cost with the trade-off obviously that there are wider benefits attracting people to the region—tourists who will come and spend money outside the convention centre—and a private operator.Ngāti Whātua would have been an ideal partner for example. It is an entity that has cash and that has land already. It is an organisation that is not going anywhere and that is not looking for a short-term return. Instead it did not have an opportunity to put a bid on the table to put up a business case. Unfortunately it was trumped very early in the piece by this extremely shoddy deal that enables an operator Skycity to come in with a guaranteed win—better odds than any casino anywhere in the world has or would ever offer.I would like to speak to some of the Supplementary Order Papers and some of the changes we would like to see made to this legislation. I take Mr Mallard’s point madeearlier that this bill is probably irredeemable in a sense but we must endeavour to at least make it somewhat less bad than it is. Clearly our first—Hon Trevor Mallard: Why don’t you say what I said?DAVID CLENDON: I am much more polite than you Mr Mallard. Yes sir.Hon Trevor Mallard: Polish it up.DAVID CLENDON: Polish it? Well yes. We will not go there just now. Supplementary Order Paper 379 in the name of our co-leader Metiria Turei suggests that we do away altogether with clause 6 because that is the clause that is basically the win-win. It ensures that Skycity cannot lose and that it can ignore any legislative change if it is to its advantage or it can accept if it is to its advantage. There is no way it can lose in any future change in the gambling legislation. This shoddy document overrides the gambling law which everybody else must obey but Skycity can gratefully accept any changes to it that are to Skycity’s advantage—though it is actually hard to see how any law could improve on the deal it has already cut. Our Supplementary Order Paper 379 suggests we do away with that clause and at least put Skycity on something like an equal footing with other gambling operators other casino operators and introduce just a tiny element of risk. At the moment this deal is absolutely risk-free for Skycity.We might assume that it is planning to build this thing in the spirit of altruism to give the people of Auckland a gift—a convention centre that may in time attract more visitors high-dollar-spend visitors which would do our tourism industry no harm. But call me cynical I do not think it did this in a spirit of altruism. It knows very well that the return on the extra gambling capacity that it is being gifted by this legislation will very quickly recoup the capital cost through its gambling machines through the extra capacity that this entitles it to. That is a very unfortunate situation. Every business ought to accept a little bit of risk. It stimulates and it motivates good thinking and good business practice. There is no risk in this deal for Skycity.Supplementary Order Paper 385 again in the name of Metiria Turei suggests we should introduce compulsory pre-commit cards. I am a person who has never entirely understood gambling. I can think of many more interesting and exciting ways of wasting money than poking it into a machine or hoping that a particular card is going to come up.Dr David Clark: Motorbikes.DAVID CLENDON: I will not go into what those ways happen to be but the fact is that motorcycles might be high on that list yes. If Skycity or any casino operator is genuinely committed to reducing the harm associated with gambling does it not make sense to insist that people must make a decision when they are still thinking clearly before the heat of the moment the excitement the adrenalin or whatever else it is that attracts people to gambling and locks them into spending much more than they can afford? Would you not want people making that decision up front? “Tonight I will spend $100.”—which somebody else might spend at a movie at a club at a theatre or whatever it might be. Making pre-commitment compulsory would ensure that people would make the decision when they are thinking relatively clearly before they get into the excitement the heat of the moment at which point all bets are off and they start spending way beyond their capacity and way beyond what they can afford.There is a proposal from the Department of Internal Affairs in fact that all gaming machines should display the odds of winning and how long a gambler has been playing. We know from the literature and from observation that people do completely lose track of time and of course the environment is very carefully managed to ensure that people lose track of time. The lighting the absence of any clocks or any other record the music and in many cases the provision of food alcohol and all of the comforts of home ensure that people completely lose track of how much time they are gambling for andhow much money they are spending until they reach the point of no return. By then they have cleaned out their bank accounts and maxed out their credit cards and that is when the trouble starts. That is when the criminal behaviour starts. People start stealing from their employers from their families from friends or whoever it may be.In that sense we have a further proposition: that Skycity should actually be liable. I refer now to Supplementary Order Paper 378—that the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act should have a new section to extend the definition of “unlawfully benefited from significant criminal activity” to Skycity. It is peculiar that if people—through fraud through outright theft or through whatever means—illegally obtain money and gamble that money and even if they are prosecuted convicted and pay whatever price they pay again the only winner in that is the casino. It bears no cost for that. It may have a very shrewd idea of who the people are who seem to have endless amounts of money—people who are laundering money people who are spending the proceeds of crime and people who have defrauded and stolen cash from employers from their families and from friends—and yet the casino has no responsibility to manage that.We think that inserting something into the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act would put a little bit of discipline around Skycity and perhaps incentivise it to be a bit more thoughtful. Again if it was carrying any risk around this behaviour which currently it is not that would be a considerable discipline to put on it. It is simply unacceptable that the means by which people spend money that has been illegally gained people laundering money—the entity the casino that enjoys the profit of that carries none of the risk and none of the responsibility for endeavouring to see that that does not continue.I will just return to the point that we have been accused of being anti - convention centre per se. I do not believe that there is a strong feeling opposing the idea of a convention centre in Auckland. Why would you? There are arguments from within the tourism sector that it would be an asset that it would attract visitors to Auckland who otherwise may not come and that there is an international market. It is a line call. If somebody wants to make the business case and put their own money on the line to ensure that happens—