Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

No, I don't play those ones, but thank you for highlighting that.

We will seek to refer this bill to Senate Economics Legislation Committee, and we want to understand the full implications of the bill. Obviously some of the stakeholders will get involved in that inquiry and have a look at some of the questions we have about this.

In conclusion, we're not opposing the bill. Some of the measures are very sensible and practical, but this bill is not just technical. I think there are some really important points that I'll summarise again. I think the most important point here is the government is, for the first time, inserting itself into an area and saying some industries shouldn't be able to get this incentive, for subjective reasons. We need to question that. If the government of the day suddenly thinks that gambling shouldn't be able to apply for a certain tax incentive, we need to look at how it's going to how to determine what gambling is or gambling isn't—or if it's saying that tobacco shouldn't be able to get these R&D incentives. We just want to know what the logic is, what the rationale is and how these decisions are going to be made, because this opens the door for the government of the day to start to impose these rules on a whole lot of other industries that may be unforeseen.

To reiterate the gambling one, what some people term as gambling others wouldn't, and we want some clarity around that, which is why we are going to refer this to a Senate committee.

Debate adjourned.

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