Dyson Ruth: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDyson Ruth: Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) — Second Reading[Sitting date: 04 June 2015. Volume:706;Page:4356. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon RUTH DYSON (Labour—Port Hills): I am really pleased to be able to continue my contribution which was so rudely interrupted when we last debated the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3). This is quite a significant date for Parliament in terms of gambling legislation. I cannot recall the last time that we did not have a gambling bill of some description either on the Order Paper or with a select committee—it has been a long time. It is great that we have progressed to this stage but it is an indication that gambling legislation in New Zealand will have to keep changing in order to keep up with changing technology and the increasing awareness of the public health issues surrounding problem gambling.I want to commend the Minister of Internal Affairs the Hon Peter Dunne for just about all that this bill contains. Certainly many of the 126 submitters who contributed on this bill during the select committee consideration said that they supported the overall intention of the bill. Many shared one single concern which I will elaborate on in a moment. But my primary purpose with that comment is to say that I think this bill moves a little further in the right direction. This bill could have gone a lot further and I hope the next bill does but it certainly went in the main in the right direction. I am hoping that all of Parliament will agree to its progress perhaps with some changes at the Committee stage. I am certainly going to contribute more on that in this second reading but also at the Committee stage.This is a big change. The fact that Parliament is more or less united over this bill is a big change from how divided the House was—and in fact the whole of New Zealand was—over the last Government intervention in the gambling space which was the outrageously dodgy deal that the National Government did with Skycity. It said to Skycity: “Oh well let’s forget about the law. We’ll change it for you and you can have quite a large number of new pokie machines.”Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: That is not part of this bill either.Hon RUTH DYSON: Pardon?Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: All of the Skycity matters that the member is referring to are not part of this bill. It has been kept as a very narrow debate so far and I would like the member to continue in that vein.Hon RUTH DYSON: Mr Deputy Speaker of course I accept absolutely your ruling. I was comparing the response of Parliament to this Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) with the response of this Parliament to the dodgy deal that the Government did with Skycity and actually I did refer to it in the earlier part of my contribution to this very same reading. That dodgy deal was not supported by Parliament; the Gambling Amendment Bill (No 3) certainly is.I want to refer more specifically though to the provisions that are mentioned in both the Green Party minority report and the Labour Party minority report. I trust that the Minister will give further consideration to the issue that was raised in both those minority reports and that was the primary concern of the overwhelming majority of the 126 submitters—that is we agreed over the issue of payments to pokie-machine operators being currently not good enough. They are quite bureaucratic. They are quite expensive. They are not all that transparent. We thought that we could do better in respect of the payments. Everyone agreed on that. The problem is that in the bill that we are now debating as it has come back from the select committee the new payment regime is not a significant improvement and in fact increases the possibility of there being an incentive for the operators to increase the use of pokie machines. So there is the potential for increased harm due to a provision in this bill. It is that point that I hope will be reconsidered when we go into the Committee stage of this debate and I hope that the Minister will consider the fact that we all agree that the current system is not good enough and that the replacement that is proposed in this bill—it will be an improvement in some areas—will run a huge risk of incentivising increased problem-gambling and increased use of pokie machines. I do not think that anyone in the House wants to go down that track.As I said earlier we had 126 submitters on this bill and a very fine contribution by a large number—particularly from those organisations that work so hard in our community—in response to the harm that pokie machines do to some people. Some people are not able to stop gambling; that is a fact. Some people change their whole life and risk their whole family situation because they are not able to stop gambling. That issue of public health and problem-gambling harm was certainly a consistent message. We heard some very sad stories. We heard from some very courageous people who told of their addiction to gambling and explained to us at a full public hearing the harm that they had caused to their families and what had turned their lives around. They did that in an effort to make us focus on the lost opportunity in this bill—the lost opportunity in this bill—and that is the opportunity to further protect people from the harm that excessive gambling can do.Overall this bill moves in the right direction. That is what all of the submitters said as well as the report from the select committee. We are concerned that the commission-based payment that is now being proposed runs a real risk of incentivising problem gambling and increasing it and we do not want to see that. I will be supporting changes to that and I know that Denise Roche from the Green Party also expressed that view consistently and strongly and was backed up by the overwhelming majority of submitters throughout the select committee process. I hope that our concerns are heard by the Minister. He has shown an interest in listening to the views of members in the past. In fact he and I along with three other members of Parliament were on a panel yesterday with the Business and Parliament Trust and we discussed this very point: the fact that Ministers are generally quire dislocated from the process because the select committee wants to own the legislation.But actually in the end the Minister calls the shots on policy determinations. That we need to get those roles better clarified is my submission to Parliament—not a submission on this bill but you will allow me a little leeway I am sure Mr Deputy Speaker because on Thursday afternoon you are clearly feeling more relaxed than other presiding officers sometimes do on a Thursday afternoon. Some of them are much stricter and I am glad that I am taking my call with you in the Chair rather than my colleague the Hon Trevor Mallard. I look—