Lees-Galloway Iain: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 October 2015. Volume:709;Page:7313. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): As my colleague Adrian Rurawhe has already outlined Labour continues to support this legislation although we do have some reservations about the commission-based payments.We certainly support the increased transparency and the increased focus I suppose on ensuring that as Mark Mitchell said the money gets back to the community organisations that so heavily rely on the money that is raised through gambling. I say this most times I talk about gambling and I do not mind saying it again: I think it is a bit odd that so many of our community organisations do rely on money that is raised through gambling. It is essentially a tax in some cases on some of the poorest and most vulnerable in our society in order to fund organisations that are doing good work in our community. You know it is not the only way we could fund it. There are a variety of other ways that we could fund those NGOs those organisations that are doing such wonderful work. Over time it has become normalised in our society that we fund them through gambling but it does not have to be that way although in saying that I am no prohibitionist. Gambling is like a lot of other things that can be a lot of fun. It can actually provide a lot of entertainment but it does come with harm so we have just got to acknowledge that gambling does cause harm in our society and when we are trying to figure out the legislation and the regulations that go with it there is a bit of a balancing act there.We think on the whole that this Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) gets the balance about right but we have got some concerns around the use of commission payments to fund venues that have particularly pokie machines and we have rehearsed some of these arguments before. A lot of submitters who went to the Government Administration Committee—quite rightly I think—suggested that if the more that gambling occurs in your venue the more money you get that possibly creates an incentive to encourage a greater level of gambling and to have more machines. We do not disagree that the system of payments to venue owners had to change. There is an incentive in fact under the current system to inflate your costs—to inflate your apparent costs—in order to get the highest payment possible out of the machines.So we certainly applaud the moves away from that type of regime but there are concerns about the commission-based payments. Obviously exactly how the commission-based payments are going to work is actually left to regulations and the Minister of Internal Affairs has indicated that he is going to carry out a review of class 4 gambling in general and of course those regulations will be open for consultation. We will be looking very closely at how those regulations are formed and we are sure that the public and interested parties will be looking closely at this as well.One option that is available to the Minister when he is considering what those regulations look like is to have some sort of cap on the commission-based payments. You could have a percentage commission but that may then have a dollar-value cap. So you can take a commission up to a certain dollar value and then if you have a greater volume of gambling that would take you past that dollar value on the commission basis there is nothing to be gained from doing that. That could be one way of disincentivising an aggressive approach of increasing the volume of gambling that happens in the venue.So there is still plenty of opportunity for consideration of these matters there is still plenty of opportunity for consultation and we will be looking closely. We look forward to the opportunity in fact to work closely with the Minister on getting those regulations right so that we can get a win-win situation where we move away from the negatives of the current system but we do not venture into some negatives and some unintended consequences of the potential new system.There is something missing from this legislation and many submitters pointed this out. We certainly continued to promote the idea that we should introduce a pre-commitment system which means that gamblers can set their own limits on duration on frequency and on the amount that they are prepared to lose from their gambling. We understand that the technology is well and truly available for this to happen already. Again gambling can be something that is quite a lot of fun. It can be something that people go into with the best of intentions of not getting carried away and of not getting out of control. They may start off with a certain amount of money in their back pocket and they think “I can lose that.” but then when they get into the roll of things—there are the lights there is the sound there is the whole thing that is actually designed to make you keep coming back—it is off to the EFTPOS machine to get a little bit more. Just one more hit one more hit one more hit and people end up spending a lot more than they had anticipated. That can often be the grocery bill it can be the rent it can be the power bill—it can have quite a significant impact on their family on their loved ones.The pre-commitment system seems to be a good strategy which a lot of submitters came to the committee and suggested that we should have. So we think it is a disappointment that it is not in this legislation. It is a missed opportunity and it would have fitted well in this legislation to introduce a pre-commitment system but again we are interested in working with the Minister to see if there might be a future opportunity to bring such a pre-commitment system into place.Many submitters articulated their concern about the lack of measures in general to address the harm caused by class 4 gambling in particular and gambling in general. And we do think that we need a greater focus on harm minimisation than what has been achieved in this legislation. We certainly applaud the greater transparency we applaud the fact that there is a focus on ensuring that that money does get back to those NGOs but the truth is that gambling does cause a large amount of harm in our society and it causes financial harm often to those families who can least afford to be put under any more financial pressure than what they already are.We think there is plenty of work that still needs to be done and we applaud the steps that the Minister has taken thus far but as I say we do think there is more that could be done so we support this legislation with some reservations but a certain amount of hope that there is more action that we will see in the future.