Mitchell Clayton: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMitchell Clayton: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee[Sitting date: 09 September 2015. Volume:708;Page:6454. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CLAYTON MITCHELL (NZ First): I am very pleased to be standing here tonight after our scheduled meal break to talk about the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3). You are looking at me a little bit confused as to a scheduled meal break Mr Macindoe. It is what we do but unfortunately this Government has taken that away—I am just letting the world know. Anyway I digress and I am really wanting to get back to the bill.The Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) I think is actually heading very much in the right direction and I would really like to put it out there to the Minister to give me some feedback on his thoughts in relation to Supplementary Order Paper 95 which we have got in for an amendment. It is to do with section 30 in clause 6 amending the meaning of class 4 gambling. Unlike the Labour Party New Zealand First strongly believes that the current situation with “actual reasonable and necessary costs” is a very clunky way to work out how site venue operators are going to be remunerated for the cost of having those machines in their venues.There is a real cost associated with having licensed machines in a licensed premises and it is very difficult to work out what you are actually entitled to receive as far as payment goes. I think the fairest and most equitable way of working that out despite what Labour says is through a commission-based payment. You only have to look at other parts of gambling throughout New Zealand that operate under a similar method. When you look at the TAB which of course does exactly the same thing it works on a commission-based payment for its venue operators on the turnover of their site. It is 1.5 percent commission—I believe it is 1.5 percent commission for their venue operators. If you have got a busier operation you are obviously going to get a higher return but at 1.5 percent of your gross turnover it is hardly a significant incentive to have a racing organisation like the TAB for example in your establishment.What we are proposing here—what New Zealand First is putting forward on the table—is exactly that. A fair reasonable and actual cost to be calculated is very clunky. It is very antiquated. It is very difficult to actually determine what you are entitled to. With rents going up all the time and as wage costs alter you are virtually going through uncertainty from month to month and from quarter to quarter as to what you are actually going to receive as a payment to have those machines on your premises.What this amendment will do is amend this bill by bringing in a 1.5 percent commission-based payment on the gross turnover of class 4 venue operators’ licences. We looked at the different scenarios that may work in a commission-based system. We looked at 16 percent of net turnover but the fluctuations that you get from net turnover as opposed to gross turnover are of course how often those machines pay out. You have some weeks where of course you have a negative banking situation where you have actually given more money to your gamblers—your punters who are in your venue—than you actually took in in kind. So some weeks you find yourself under a net turnover adjustment of actually getting a negative fee. On gross turnover you look at the overall turnover of the venue and you are putting a 1.5 percent loading on that.We think that that is a very fair very reasonable and respectable amount. It is hardly going to justify venue operators going out there to promote gambling and of course there are laws that already prevent that from happening in your licensed premises. It is very very heavily monitored. You cannot even have a display on your monitor to show what your jackpots are to the outside world. When you enter a gaming room you know you are doing so for the purposes of having a punt on the gaming machines and you do not know what the jackpot is until you enter that gaming machine so you can hardly go out there handing out flyers or go out with a megaphone promoting that your gambling room is going off like a bucket of pipis in the sun—“Get in there and have a quick punt in my pokie-machine room because it is going to be fantastic.” That is not how the system operates.I think to be honest the Labour Party is creating ghosts where there are not any—ghosts goblins and ghouls in its brain—to come up with an idea that somehow getting a commission-based payment for licensed venue operators is a bad thing. We do support that. We hope that the Supplementary Order Paper gets the support in the Committee. I clearly see that it is not going to get support from the Labour Party. We certainly do hope Mr Dunne that we get your support and the support of the National Government.We would be a strong supporter if we could get that through in this piece of legislation. We do believe that the amendments that have been put forward are heading in the right direction. When the first and the second readings were put through we were a little bit concerned about some of those clauses particularly around key operators. I do believe that that has been ironed out.We certainly had some issues in regard to what constitutes a conflict of interest particularly in the light of New Zealand being so small that only one degree of separation is going to basically negate you from getting any sort of financial support if you are in a club organisation from those societies that are handing them out. I think that you have tidied that up very nicely too Mr Dunne so thank you for that.This very important piece of legislation has five areas that we largely support. It creates further transparency. It makes it a lot clearer about who is getting what and why. It identifies a much better way of who are going to be the key people who are now going to be held responsible. That is what this legislation is about too; it is about personal responsibility to make sure that you are operating within the confines of the law. And what it really is about which I like the most is cutting through a little bit of the red tape. It is about cutting through the bureaucracy to ensure that we can actually get more money returned to those communities which is what class 4 operating licences in venues are there to achieve.Unlike the counterparts that we have got—Skycity Casino—which operate under a completely different model from what we are operating under here this is sensible. This is for the community. This is about returning as much as we can back to those communities. We will support this if we get the support for our Supplementary Order Paper 95 put forward by New Zealand First which amends the 1.5 percent of gross turnover for those venue operators. We hope that it does get through for the final reading. Thank you.