Roche Denise: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 07 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12505. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):I am going to spend this call talking about my Supplementary Order Paper 325 which I am really hoping the member in the chair Te Ururoa Flavell will actually support as well. It is an amendment to the original Gambling Act and a restoration of what was in the Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill that was put forward by Mr Flavell which is to take racing and race meetings out of what are known as the authorised purposes of the Act.I think we need to think about what the Gambling Act is actually about. The Gambling Act 2003 says that the only reason we have pokies in New Zealand is to contribute funds for community purposes or for authorised purposes and those authorised purposes are a charitable purpose or a non-commercial purpose that is beneficial to the whole or a section of the community. Then somewhere in the mid-2000s after the 2003 Act came into being there was an amendment to it that said that promoting controlling and conducting race meetings under the Racing Act including the payment of stakes became an authorised purpose as well. The original intent of the 2003 Act was to support community organisations and to support good charitable organisations that do great things for their community and that do not make money in other ways.I am not sure about anyone else in this Committee but from my point of view those people who own racehorses do not strike me as being charities. I think that it is anathema to most people to know that the proceeds of one form of gambling are supporting another form of gambling particularly when you take into account the millions that pass through the New Zealand Racing Board from its own gambling so I hope that there will be some support particularly from the Māori Party members for this Supplementary Order Paper tonight.What is really interesting about the authorised purposes is that pokie trusts tend to forget that the only reason they exist actually is to distribute that money for authorised purposes. They frequently act as if they own that money and that it is their largesse that they distribute. It was really offensive to me to find out that during the submission process a couple of pokie trusts were using the money that they got from that gambling money that was for community purposes to lobby to hold workshops for community organisations and to scare them into putting in submissions against Mr Flavell’s bill. I am not sure about anybody else in this Committee but using community purpose money to lobby or to influence a select committee strikes me as something that is meddling terribly with democracy and democracy frankly should not be bought.It is for this reason that I am opposed to the Government’s suggestion that we put some of the harm minimisation attributes of this bill into the regulations. As Mr Lotu-Iiga said that will mean that there will be further consultation with the industry and what we know is that the pokie industry scared community organisations into opposing this bill. We had over 30000 submissions—30000—most from community organisations fearing that they were going to lose money. I take on board what Mr Hipkins said about national organisations fearing that they would not be able to access funds but with the original intention of an 80:20 percent split—that 20 percent of the proceeds could go elsewhere—I do not believe there would have been many national organisations that would suffer or lose money. We have created an addiction. We have created a society in which our community organisations are addicted to pokie money.