Delahunty Catherine: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 04 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4366. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): I think it is my call. I would like to take the opportunity to speak briefly about this bill with a great sense of disappointment. My colleague Denise Roche laid out very clearly why it is that we will not be supporting this bill. A number of bills around the issue of gambling have come to this Parliament with the weight of community expectation that we would make the situation better for this scourge on our communities and I am afraid that once again the Government has failed to do that.Problem gambling is a scourge on our communities and basically what this bill does is make a couple of useful administrative changes but it also opens up the gate to some practices that will enhance what we would call the human misery industry. The human misery industry is the industry that creates dependency on pokies dependency by venue owners on getting the pokie money and dependency on community groups having that money. All of that is encapsulated by some of the changes in this bill particularly the one about moving away from a prohibition on commission-based payments. That is a significant shift and is one of the main reasons that we cannot support the bill. We cannot support that shift in the bill that will allow commissioned-based payments to take place because what it will do is incentivise the pokie venue owners to see those machines—because they get a commission per machine—more heavily used. So we are promoting more gambling harm in this bill.I do not suppose we should be surprised. After all this is the Government that brought you Skycity and traded off our moral perspective on gambling in exchange for more machines. It is also the Government that has stopped the ProblemGambling Foundation’s money until September. So this bill is actually in a context of a problem-gambling Government. I would argue that the Prime Minister is a problem gambler but that is another topic. I shall return to the bill.One of the reasons we are concerned about this is that it is not supporting the right of Kiwis to have a safe flutter but morethe opportunity to dive into an abyss. I think that is the reason why we are so concerned about it: because this is a dangerous product. Although we support the clauses in this bill that will increase transparency—any form of transparency around funding is good—we are opposed to its premise particularly around the assumption that we should reward people who stick by the rules when we know particularly from the mystery shopper study that those problem-gambling venues where gamblers gather are not sticking by the rules. If they are going to be able to benefit further from the addictive behaviour of vulnerable individuals no one is going to benefit.I have heard previous speakers talk about the bill in terms of how marvellous it is that our community groups can access this money—the money of addiction the money of loss the money of family tragedy which is what problem gambling is. Any of us who has worked in the field of trying to set caps on pokies—as I have myself in the town of Tūranga in Gisborne—has seen the struggle that families have trying to avoid this addiction. This bill should have been about that—harm minimisation; pre-commitment cards face recognition technology—to ensure that through legislation the venues would be required to set up harm minimisation. But unfortunately this bill does not do that. It is actually stepping closer to incentivising the venues to want to make more money out of people who are addicted. So we are very concerned about that.We believe that it should have been about greater consumer protection and mitigating the addictive design because we know that the pokie machines are designed to assist people to be addicted. It is a bit like asking the brewers to run drug and alcohol counselling. It is counter-intuitive for brewers to run drug and alcohol counselling and it is counter-intuitive to expect the venues to be the ones that actually manage and police this. We know they are not doing a good job so for all the tutu-ing around in this bill all the little administrative updates and all of the little reassurances about the Department of Internal Affairs having audit powers and being able to enforce compliance it is not going to happen if you actually allow this commission-based payment system. It is not going to be safe for everybody and it is not going to have coverage.We are going to oppose the bill and we are going to put up some Supplementary Order Papers to try to address some of the weaknesses in it. We know we speak for a large proportion of submitters. We know that the specialists who came to the select committee—actually most people referred to the mystery shopper project and many of them were very disappointed when they saw where we had got to. So we will not be supporting the bill. Thank you.