Bradford Sue: Gambling Bill — Third Reading 
Bradford Sue: Gambling Bill — Third Reading 
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SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 At the Third International Conference on Gambling in New Zealand being held in Auckland today the Hon Damien O’Connor addressed participants by saying: “Problem gambling is a destructive addiction. There is widespread evidence of the harm that problem gambling is causing society. There has been a dramatic increase in problem gambling especially pokie machines. The figures paint a bleak figure of problem gambling in New Zealand and there is a higher concentration of pokies coinciding with areas of high deprivation.” I say to Mr O’Connor: “How true!”. How can a Labour Minister go in front of an international conference of people who really know in the deepest possible way about the downside of the gambling industry and acknowledge those obvious facts when just a few hours later in the House his Government with the help of United Future is intent on passing a bill that now has clauses in it that assist the promotion of problem gambling rather than minimising it? 
At 4 o’clock this afternoon that same conference in Auckland passed a resolution stating in part that it “expresses its alarm at the most recent changes in the Gambling Bill and calls on the Government and all parties represented in Parliament” to reject the late United Future and Labour additions to the bill and to support initiatives to allow local authority control over gaming venues community distribution of pokie proceeds and obliging Government to report annually on its overall income from and dependency on gambling proceeds. Although I report that resolution to the House because I think that if anyone’s voice should be heard on this bill it is the voice of those who work daily with the people whose lives are wrecked by the havoc that problem gambling causes I have little hope that at this late stage Labour or United Future members will be willing to change their minds despite the embarrassment that their position has caused them. 
Labour has come a very long way from its early discussions with the Alliance and the Green Party in the last Government when I think all of us saw hope that the bill we are dealing with today would be a truly responsible Gambling Bill. It was even called the Responsible Gambling Bill throughout most of its history; the fact that the Government Administration Committee chose at the last minute to delete the word “Responsible” from the title was indeed a prophetic indication of what was to come. 
I am one of the few MPs now in the House who sat through the entire select committee process on the bill. After months of submissions and consideration the committee in its wisdom decided to keep the clause that banned Internet and remote interactive gambling because of the evidence we had heard of its deleterious effect. Then just days before the bill came back to the House for its Committee stage a Government Supplementary Order Paper turned up as a result of a deal cut with United Future that reversed the select committee’s decision and allowed the Lotteries Commission—that is the Government—to proceed with one of the most pernicious forms of gambling available in the modern world. As Dave Macpherson the spokesperson for the community group GamblingWatch said earlier this week: “Internet gambling is to entertainment what Internet pornography is to sex.” As with pornography all around the world treatment agencies and Governments are concerned about the high rate of under-age access to gambling opportunities over the Net. Studies have shown that we already have a high rate of problem gambling among children and young people and I find it simply incredible that United Future and Labour have agreed not only to refuse to regulate against Internet gaming but also to promote it through what has become a most irresponsible bill. 
On top of that the Government and United Future in their wisdom have chosen to reject the decision of the select committee—which of course did include a number of Labour MPs at the time strangely enough—to ban banknote acceptors from gaming machines. That was done after we had heard evidence of the way in which banknote acceptors make it that much easier for addicted gamblers just to keep on going without having to get up from the machine for even the shortest of breaks. Pokie machines are now undeniably the source of most new gambling addictions in this country and are responsible for a rising rate of problems particularly among women. The select committee felt that anything we could do to slow the deliberately seductive way in which the pokies keep people playing was undeniably a good thing. However United Future was not on the select committee during the last Parliament and it decided not to listen to this sound advice. Labour also decided not to listen to it. They thought the idea of slowing addiction rates was not even worth bothering about. So again we are in the disgraceful situation where a bill that was supposed to be about harm minimisation has ended up being at least in part about harm maximisation. 
The third part of the Labour - United Future deal has seen the gambling industry itself being given a greater voice and hence influence in the process of setting the problem-gambling strategy and levy. Those are the people and organisations actually responsible for the problem in the first place and to give them a larger say is a dereliction of conscience and of common sense. The gaming industry also has of course a massive vested interest in keeping the problem-gambling levy as low as possible and throughout the select committee process its representatives made many arguments suggesting that the scale of the problem was exaggerated and the costs of dealing with it overrated. On the whole the sector is also keen to keep problem-gambling strategies focused on treatment rather than on the additional public health goals of health promotion and harm minimisation. Labour and United Future are entering very dangerous territory here. In fact this last issue is the most substantial and retrogressive of the changes engendered by their amendments to the bill. 
For the last 9 months or so the Green Party has been working with church organisations community groups and local government to try to bring about several critical and positive changes to the bill. We have fought a long hard struggle to try to persuade Labour firstly to allow local authorities to have control over all not just a few pokie venues and numbers in their districts and secondly to change the pokie profit distribution system to one that is equitable and publicly accountable. On the first of these—local government control—we have done a lot of research and discovered that in fact not one territorial local authority will have the ability to control more than 30 percent of the pokies in its district and that 15 councils nationwide will have no say over any of them because they were licensed before the magical date of October 2001. In George Hawkins’ own backyard Manukau City there has been an explosion of gambling exacerbated by the conscious choice of Pub Charity to site its machines in the areas where the poorest people live. The Mayor of Manukau Sir Barry Curtis and his council have fought a valiant battle along with many other local body representatives to try to get the Government to change its mind on this but to no avail. 
On the second of the two issues distribution the Green Party has been subject to much deliberate misinformation about our policy. As anyone who read our Supplementary Order Paper or listened to anything I have been saying over the last year will know what we are after is not some centralised bureaucracy with no local control over where the $200 million in pokie profit goes but rather a carefully balanced system between national and local needs that is aimed at sharing the proceeds fairly between sports and recreation arts and culture and broader community purposes. In our model fully two-thirds of the funding would have been distributed by a range of very local committees. However all of this was not to be. As I have said before this week Labour has completely disgraced itself by choosing to go with United Future on this bill. 
Contrary to the misconceptions that some MPs have deliberately promulgated lately the Green Party has never stopped being willing to negotiate with Labour on the changes we wanted made. We have always been willing to talk negotiate and compromise right up until the last minute. We have never to quote what Matt Robson said the other day “thrown our toys out of the cot” on this issue. It is just a myth. We did keep trying. Late on Monday this week when we had nearly given up hope of changing Labour’s mind we were made aware of the last-minute unanimous resolution of the New Zealand Council of the Labour Party this past weekend to ask its own caucus to reverse the deal with United Future and to support local government control and publicly accountable distribution systems. I know that there are many people in the Labour caucus who actually do support their own party’s representative body in its feelings on this issue. I am just sorry that they could not persuade their colleagues on Tuesday that it might be more important to honour that part of Labour’s heritage that calls for social and economic justice for all of our people rather than the part that sold out its members in the 1980s. 
History is starting to repeat itself for the Labour Party and I hope its MPs do some serious thinking about what has been happening over the last couple of weeks. Whose votes does Labour want in 2005? Are they those of the pokie proprietors and the Pub Charity administrators or those of the people whose lives have been devastated by problem gambling? Which party would those MPs rather work with for a better future for New Zealand—one that will not support a jot of industrial relations or other progressive legislation or one that shares the vision of that part of Labour that does want a better future for all its people not just those who already have money and power?