John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I met with clubs at Port Macquarie. I had a good meeting with the board members from Port Macquarie Panthers and Club Taree. Back in 2011, the Wauchope RSL estimated that it would cost $1.59 million to change their arrangements with their poker machines. For Port Macquarie Panthers—a magnificent club in Port Macquarie, a beautiful part of Australia—it would cost $3.82 million for mandatory precommitment changes. These clubs do not have a bottomless pit of money, so something has to give. Will it be their sponsorship of the local junior sports teams, their subsidisation of cheap meals for our elderly or their scholarships for our gifted students? It is so easy to just attack the clubs over an issue.

I wonder if we are going to see a bill come to this chamber to put a maximum of $1 on bets at TABs and racecourses. There are plenty of gamblers who have a serious gambling problem who bet on racehorses, dogs, the trots—you name it, I have seen it. So are we going to put a $1 maximum on those bets as well?

What are the measures that the government is taking? We will repeal the functions of the national gambling regulator. All states and territories already have their own. We do not have to duplicate in this place; there is already too much duplication between governments in Australia, at a huge cost. Measures on ATMs, including cash withdrawal limits, are being removed to allow states to regulate. States like Victoria are already doing this at a state level.

I will give you an example: the Gravesend Hotel is in a small community east of Moree. It has the only ATM in town. A station worker, a worker on a property, might go in and say, 'I want to withdraw $300.' Because they have a couple of poker machines in the pub, he cannot. But what is wrong? It is his money. Are we such a big-stick operation here in Canberra that we are just going to say: 'No; you've gone into an ATM'—the only one in the town, by the way—'and you can only take $250 out'? Is that fair? What are we doing here?

The mandatory precommitment trial in the ACT will not commence under the legislation just being passed through the House of Representatives. The government is committed to pursuing venue based voluntary precommitment in the future. It will come in. Under the current laws, passed by the previous government, clubs had to go to all the cost of the precommitment and link the machines up to all the other clubs around the area at a huge cost—and then the patrons did not have to use it! It is just like having a law where every car manufactured in or imported into Australia must have seat belts but you do not have to wear them. That is the case with the previous Labor government's Andrew-Wilkie-style proposal, which would simply have done absolutely nothing except made things more costly.

The government is committed to pursuing venue based voluntary precommitment in the future by allowing the change of machines to do it, which will reduce, enormously, the cost to the clubs. The deadline for venues with greater than 20 machines needing to have voluntary precommitment enabled by 2018 has been removed. I share the concerns of many in this place. I have seen firsthand people with gambling problems. But by putting huge costs onto our clubs and threatening the viability of such clubs whereby they may have to close down, jobs will be gone from the towns. A place for community meetings will be removed. In Port Macquarie many, many elderly people go to the clubs in summertime, not to play poker machines, not to gamble in any way whatsoever, but because it is hot and they cannot afford air conditioning in their houses, and the club is air conditioned and pleasant. We do not want to make it hard for those people.

We want to help those people who have a serious gambling problem. Shutting down the clubs is not on, as I said, especially for the smaller clubs in the rural and regional areas that are the heart of the town. The big stick approach should be given away. People in this country are sick of being told from Canberra what they can do and what they cannot do. People are able to make their own decisions. We need to counsel and assist those with gambling problems. We want to help those people with gambling problems, but threatening the viability of the clubs is not the answer. It is too expensive and too costly. I am glad to be part of the coalition government that will not support this bill.