David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to add a few additional comments to put this into context. There is a very active poker community in Australia. They like to play poker. They like to win. There are tournaments. They make money. Some people lose money. Some of them have high stakes, and they can lose a lot of money at once, but mostly it is pretty small beer. That is not, essentially, regulated very much at all. That occurs in pubs and clubs where people gather, and if you are interested in playing poker competitively, there are no shortage of opportunities. What we are doing here is saying, 'You can't do that online. You can't play poker online with the same sort of people.' The risks are the same—you can lose small amounts of money or large amounts of money—and you bet what you choose. Yet, we are saying, 'No you're not allowed to do that online. You're only allowed to do it face-to-face.' It a little bit like saying to Australians, 'You're allowed to talk to each other by telephone, but you are not allowed to talk to each other by FaceTime, because FaceTime goes via a server in another country.' I am sure most of you know what FaceTime is. It is that method within Facebook of talking to each other external to the telephone system. What we are basically saying here is that one kind of playing poker is okay, but another kind of playing poker is not okay because it is online. Seriously! This is the 21st century. Almost everything is online these days, and to pretend that we can regulate so that you can do one but not the other is dreaming. I think it is very bad legislation. We really should not entertain it.

The CHAIR: The question is that amendments (1) to (4) on sheet 8054 moved by Senator Leyonhjelm be agreed to.