Bakshi Kanwaljit Singh: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Bakshi Kanwaljit Singh: Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 09 May 2012. Volume:679;Page:2146. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KANWALJIT SINGH BAKSHI (National) 
: 
 I am pleased to stand to speak on the first reading of the Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill. I would like to start by congratulating Mr Flavell on bringing this very good piece of legislation to the House. National is supporting this bill going through to the Commerce Committee and I look forward to seeing the submissions process.  
Gambling can do a great harm to our society but we cannot blame those people who gamble sensibly for entertainment. As I understand the bill helps local authorities to create rules to control gambling. They will have tools and powers to decide what types of rules they want and up to what degree they want to go. The purpose of the bill is to provide additional measures to prevent and minimise the harm caused by the gambling and ensure that money from the gambling benefits the community and to assist the community’s involvement in decisions regarding gambling.  
We are concerned about the gambling problem and our policy is to minimise the harm caused by gambling. There is not enough money in the world to keep someone on the gambling table. Gambling makes a mockery of hard work. Gambling machine venues tend to be overly represented in lower-income communities and town centres. In South Auckland the lower-income population especially Maori and Pacific Islanders are effectively being targeted and often severely harmed by them. It is very important that we address this problem.  
This bill seeks to overcome these areas of harm in locations with excessive numbers of pokies by enabling authorities in consultation with their communities to reduce the number of or even eliminate pokies from those suburbs and towns where they are particularly concentrated or doing particular harm. It especially requires all pokie-machine trusts corporate societies and other distributors of the proceeds of the gambling machines to return at least 80 percent of these funds generated by the gamblers’ losses on local pokie machines back to the charitable organisations that are meeting priority needs in the same local authority area as the venue.  
However this would mean that groups in the poorer areas including rural areas might miss out on the funding if there are limited machines in these areas. Only a small proportion of pokie gamblers’ losses distributed in grants for community benefit goes into the same communities that generate them. This is because the majority of the gamblers’ losses go to pay machine site rentals machine maintenance trust fees for pokie trust members and other administration costs. Gambling losses occasionally go into grants made to organisations based in other local authorities altogether—sometimes even in the other island or areas.  
 Gamblers who are having problems with their behaviour when using pokie machines have problems keeping track of the amount of their losses. Gamblers could more often be able to manage their gambling if pokie-machine venue operators were obliged to keep track of each gambler’s overall losses and time spent on gambling machines through using common technological devices like player tracking systems. This bill proposes making such player tracking devices and pre-commit cards a required condition for a pokie machine venue operator’s licence as issued by the Department of Internal Affairs. I know Mr Flavell has worked hard to draft this bill and I congratulate him once again and commend this bill to the House.