Yang Jian: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeYang Jian: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 10 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:11909. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr JIAN YANG (National):I rise to speak on the Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill. I would first like to thank Mr Te Ururoa Flavell from theMāori Party for introducing the bill and I would also like to thank my colleague and chair of the Commerce Committee Mr Jonathan Young. Jonathan has done an excellent job in chairing the committee over the process of improving this bill.We all agree that gambling can cause harm to some people and communities. The purpose of the bill was to provide additional measures to prevent and minimise the harm caused by gambling to ensure that the money from gambling benefits the community and to facilitate community involvement in decisions about the provision of gambling.There were some things in the original bill that the Government did not support but the select committee has made a range of sensible and balanced changes. For instance the original bill said that the harm minimisation devices may be introduced only through societies’ licence conditions. The select committee recommended a regulation-makingpower instead. Regulations enable us to introduce new technologies on a mandatory basis nationwide rather than through each individual licence.Similarly the bill as originally introduced would have required at least 80 percent of all funds derived from pokie machine gambling to be distributed back into the same territorial authority district. The select committee noted the support for the principle of returning net proceeds to the area where the gambling took place. However the select committee noted that requiring all pokie machine gaming societies to distribute their net proceeds to locally defined areas would also create other complications.For example gaming machines are not evenly spread across electoral districts and restricting distribution would have resulted in little or no proceeds being distributed in some areas. So again the committee recommended the introduction of a regulation-making power instead. The regulation-making power would enable better targeting of the distribution of proceeds and take into account the fact that the gaming machines are used by people from outside the areas in which they are located.Also the bill as proposed would have effectively removed racing clubs from the industry. The amended bill reverses this proposal. The Commerce Committee took the view that as non-profit organisations providing facilities to community groups racing clubs were similar to other sports clubs and that the removal of funding from this source would have an adverse effect.The Government appreciates that harm is caused by gambling. It imposes various levies and duties on the proceeds of gambling to deal with this along with other initiatives to mitigate problem gambling. The select committee’s changes make parts of the bill easier to implement while removing some parts that were not supported by submitters. So I commend this bill to the House. Thank you.