Hipkins Chris: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHipkins Chris: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — First Reading[Sitting date: 06 November 2014. Volume:701;Page:713. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka):I am very happy to take a call on the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3). I certainly hope that I will have the opportunity to see this bill through to its final conclusion. Of course if it follows the passage of the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) I will need to be re-elected at least three more times in order to see this bill through from start to finish. I hope that the Government has more success in passing this bill than the last three Governments had in progressing the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2). The Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) incidentally was one of the first bills I spoke on when I first became a member of Parliament in 2008 and by then it had already been sitting on the Order Paper for several years. So I hope we get to see this bill through much more promptly than that. In fact I hope we get to finish progressing the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2) quite quickly as well.I think one of the things that struck me about the first of the bills I have just mentioned is that this is an incredibly heavily regulated area and it is incredibly technical. However an awful lot of technological change takes place in this area and keeping on top of it is very very important. That is actually one of the reasons why I hope we will be able to expedite this bill and the process around the other bill. When we talk about the technology involved in pokie machines for example the technology that is used to hook people in and get them addicted is heavily regulated. Unfortunately I suspect that those regulations are now quite out of date because the law that enables them is also out of date. It is important that we get this legislation through so that we can keep on top of this and deal with the issues around problem gambling.I want to be really clear here. For most New Zealanders gambling is a bit of fun. They go to a casino and they might walk in with $50; they either walk out with $500 or walk out with nothing. In my case it is normally the latter of the two examples. I walk in with a certain amount of money and walk out with nothing—but it is a bit of fun. Then you might be in a pub and put $2 into a slot machine and that is a bit of a laugh and then you go. But for a smaller number of New Zealanders it is not like that; it is much much more serious. It is a big problem. I see those examples in my own electorate. They are tragedies and we should be taking all of the steps we reasonably can to ensure that we minimise the harm from gambling and that we minimise the potential for people to get hooked in that way. Basically we should put some fences at the top of the cliff rather than dealing with the problems when they arise. I know that that is some of what this bill is all about.The societies that administer class 4 pokies—class 4 pokies are the ones that are not in casinos but are in the pubs and the clubs—have changed quite dramatically over the last 10 to 15 years and that is a good thing. With regard to pokie machines we saw a massive increase in the number of pokie machines and the number of venues between 1994 and the passage of the Gambling Act in 2003. We have seen a steady decline in the number of pokie machines since then and that is a welcome thing. We have also seen a steady decline in recent years—probably since about 2005 when we had the peak when gambling turnover was over a billion dollars in pokie machines in class 4 pokies—and I think that that is a welcome trend as well. So those are good things. We have also seen the sector clean up its act a lot as a result of the passage of that legislation but there is still a way to go.I think back to the wild west days when I was president of the Victoria University of Wellington Students Association. Some of the big sponsors that our University Games team used to have were the local pubs which would take the money from pokie machines and effectively use it as an incentive to lure people in. They sponsored our University Games team but a lot of mutual back-scratching went with it. So they would say: “We’ll give you a certain amount of money from our pokie machines but we expect you to come into our bar with your whole team and divert a certain portion of the money we are giving you back across the bar or back into the pokie machines.”Ian McKelvie: That’s fair enough.CHRIS HIPKINS: Well no no—the member says: “That’s fair enough.” It is actually against the law now. That is quite a corrupt practice because it means that the proceeds from the pokie machines are not actually being applied in the way they are intended. The proceeds from pokie machines are designed to be used for charitable purposes and if a business is applying them in such a way that it says “Well you can have the money as long as you give it back to us.” then it is not actually applying that funding for genuine charitable purposes.That has changed a lot. We have seen a dramatic reduction in the number of societies that are involved in this process. We used to have a situation where every pub would set up its own little society. The pub manager would run it it would be done out of a back room and there would be all sorts of interesting exchanges going on. There is a lot less of that now than there used to be and that is a good thing but there are still some areas where improvement is required and it is often within those less formal settings—the sports clubrooms—where there might be some issues that need to be addressed.I think there are some pragmatic and sensible changes in this bill that will help to address the remaining issues that exist around that and there are also some anomalies that this bill starts to correct which I also think are very sensible. It has always irked me a little bit when you pick up a copy of the Sunday papers to see full-page advertisements printed in a very tiny font listing every individual grant that some of the societies have made. When you think about the cost of the advertisement—to be transparent about it—it often adds up to more than what many of the grants were. That is if you took a chunk of the grants and totalled them up. I would rather see that money going into grants. If we can ensure that there is transparency by having the information available electronically online and at a much much cheaper price than sticking it in a newspaper advertisement—thereby enabling those societies to make more grants—that is common sense to me as well as and that is a sensible thing. So I think that is one of a change in this legislation that is important.Of course my colleague Ruth Dyson also made a very valid point about this though in that it is important that this information is not just buried. So it has to be readily accessible. People have to know where it is and they have to be able to access it. But I do not think that organisations need to spend large amounts of money in order to make that information accessible. In fact I would argue that putting it online in a searchable form is a far more accessible way to make that information available than putting out a full-page newspaper advertisement with tiny little letters that you need a magnifying glass to be able to read. So those are some relatively sensible provisions in the bill which I think will certainly improve the situation enormously.The Labour Party has been very supportive over a long period of time—since 2003 when the Gambling Act was first introduced and passed. There is a long history about that piece of legislation. My colleague Grant Robertson would wax lyrical about that for many hours given the opportunity because of course the legislation started as the Responsible Gambling Act but after it had been though the process the word “responsible” was dropped and the legislation became the Gambling Act. But I think there has been a real drive over a period of time since then to ensure that we do put “responsible” into responsible gambling legislation and the Labour Party has supported this right the way through. So each time there is an opportunity for us to go a little bit further to refine the system further to increase transparency and to reduce the potential for gambling to become a problem we are going to be very supportive of those things. So this legislation certainly makes some of those things better.I mentioned before the societies involved. The changes to conflict of interest provisions in this bill will help to stop the situation where somebody who is involved in the administration of one of the societies or in the running of the pokie machines can eventually end up being a beneficiary of the grants. I think the conflict of interest provisions in this legislation are a big improvement on what we have now and I think that will be very welcome.The final point I want to make—and I think it is a more difficult issue to deal with; it is not dealt with in this legislation but I think it will need to be dealt with by Parliament—is about ensuring equity in the way that grants are applied in terms of the communities that they are drawn from and the communities that they are invested back into. There is too much potential in the legislation now for pokie machines to be located in poor communities for them to take money out of poor communities and then for them to redistribute the money in the form of charitable grants to middle-class or higher -income communities. Taking money out of a very poor community and giving it to the local golf club is probably not going to benefit the people who are most likely putting the money into the machines in the first place. So I think there does need to be further discussion and further consideration of how we can ensure equity in the distribution of grants. I want to acknowledge in my own electorate the Rimutaka Licensing Trust. It has a conscious policy of saying it will reinvest this money only in the communities that it comes from. I think that is a very sensible thing. It means that the local schools in its catchment area do very well out of it because it is investing that money in education. It is going back into the community it is drawn from and I think that is positive. I would like to see that principle applied much much more widely through the class 4 pokie sector.So with those thoughts in mind we will certainly be supporting the bill to the select committee and I look forward to seeing it progress more expeditiously hopefully than the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 2).