2015-11-12
Speech in parliament: I rise to speak on the Gambling Legislation Amendment Bill 2015. The bill provides for a range of small reforms. It allows the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation (VRGF) to have an advocacy and policy role as part of its functions. This is a positive step and makes it more consistent with the role and responsibilities of VicHealth, a comparative body in many ways. It also allows the VRGF to recommend its own CEO, with approval from the minister, and gives it the ability to charge directly those with gambling licences for the cost of its services in limited circumstances. The bill also reforms the legislative arrangements for the training of workers in gambling venues to make sure that the training is more flexible in relation to improvements in content over time. Finally, the bill closes loopholes and ambiguities in the enforcement of interstate exclusions of problem or unlawful gamblers.
That is all well and good. There are some positive reforms in the bill, but the Greens’ ongoing concern is that it is just tinkering around the edges while the meaningful reforms to limit the harms of gambling remain ignored. It is good that the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation can provide policy advice to government, but realistically that expert advice has already been given in the Productivity Commission’s 2010 report. The government does not need more advice; it just needs to take action. Many of the key recommendations in the Productivity Commission’s report to reduce problem gambling, such as mandatory precommitment and dollar bets, have been ignored by successive Victorian coalition and Labor governments as well as by federal governments.
Let us look at some of the things that continue to this day. Over the last few weeks there has been a huge amount of advertising on trains for the spring racing festival. We often see gambling ads on public transport, which normalises it for children. How about we do something about that? Billions of dollars are lost every year by problem gamblers, causing immeasurable hardship, family breakdown and even suicide. Instead of implementing simple, effective solutions recommended by experts, the government proceeds with piecemeal reforms such as these and policies that it knows are deemed to fail, such as voluntary precommitment. It is clear that the government knows voluntary precommitment is going to fail as the budget papers reveal that the government does not expect any reduction in losses as a result of this initiative. In fact it expects the losses to increase in this and the coming financial years. Spending by problem gamblers makes up an estimated 35 per cent of revenue from pokies machines, so if voluntary precommitment were effective, we would see a drop in poker machine tax revenue, not an increase.
Successive Victorian governments have tried very hard to look like they are doing something while doing virtually nothing about problem gambling. It has got so bad that the past two governments have tried to claim credit for a number of the successful Greens reforms that we negotiated, such as having ATMs banned from pokies venues. When will we have a government that has the guts to cop on the chin a slight dip in revenue from pokies, stand up to the hotel industry lobby and take some meaningful action to assist people who are profoundly affected, especially by pokie machines?