Stephen Jones (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

We are here today to comment on the report that was tabled in parliament this week by the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Gambling Reform, entitled The design and implementation of a mandatory pre-commitment system for electronic gambling machines. The reason that this committee has conducted the inquiry is that we have a problem. We have a problem with pokies addiction, and it is real. It is a public health issue, it is a family issue, it is a workplace issue and it is an economic issue. It will not go away as a result of the hysterical speeches of those who sit in the chamber opposite me. It will go away because members in this place have the courage to do something about it.

The reason we have an obligation to do something about it is that governments license the existence of gaming machines. We derive revenue from them. Therefore, we have an obligation to ensure that they are operating safely and in line with community values. I can tell the members opposite and everybody else that the community simply does not accept the proposition that any business, organisation or government should profit from the misery of others. Our objective in bringing these reforms forward is to ensure that we are able to properly regulate this form of gambling which is proven to have an addictive and damaging effect on so many Australians.

Throughout the 1990s there was a liberalisation of poker machines throughout Australia. It led to what the Productivity Commission has recently described as the maturation of the industry. In common speak, that has led to a growth in the number of machines in clubs, pubs and many other venues around the country. So we have the situation today where there are close to 200,000 electronic gaming machines in this country, and nearly half of them are in my state of New South Wales.

As I have already mentioned, we have an obligation to do something about this because governments derive a source of revenue from gaming and poker machine revenue. States derive about $5 billion per annum from gambling—about 10 per cent of state revenue—and a significant proportion of that comes from electronic gaming machines. The total gaming revenue in the economy as a whole was $19 billion in 2008-09, which is about $1,500 per adult.

As members opposite have indicated, Australians do not mind having a punt. I do not mind having a punt myself. I am amongst the estimated 600,000 people who play poker machines. Unfortunately, about 115,000 people have a problem with gambling. While these 115,000 people make up only about 15 per cent of the total gambling population, they contribute somewhere between 26 per cent or 40 per cent of gaming revenue. So we have a problem, particularly when you consider that hotels derive about one-third of their revenue, clubs about 60 per cent of their revenue and casinos about 78 per cent of their revenue from these machines. We have a problem and we have to deal with it.

We can stick our heads in the sand, like the member for Moncrieff, opposite, begs us to do and say that what we are doing at the moment is good enough. But we on this side of the House do not believe that that is fulfilling our obligation to the communities that we represent. We have put in place a proposition which says nothing more than this: we do not give up on problem gamblers and we do not think that people who play poker machines, as the member opposite seems to suggest, are somehow mad and bad most of their lives. We understand and the evidence before the committee was quite simply that, yes, when problem gamblers and many other gamblers are in a gaming environment and sitting before a poker machine they lose control and are not operating on the basis of reason that most of us would operate on normally. But even these people have moments of lucidity and moments of reason when they go home and they have to explain to their wife, their husband or their kids, or when they have to go to work the next day and explain why they are asking for an advance in their pay, or when they have to go and cash in their television or their video recorder. They have moments of reason and they understand that the behaviour they engaged in last night, last week or for the last 10 days when they were on a binge—'chasing the losses', as the member opposite has pointed out—was wrong. The tools that we are proposing to put in place will give them some control over that gambling addiction.

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