Page 4606 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 6 December 1994
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CASINO CONTROL (AMENDMENT) BILL 1994
Debate resumed from 10 November 1994, on motion by Ms Follett:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR KAINE (9.01): Madam Speaker, I have to say that this is one of the strangest Bills that I have had to deal with in six years as a member of this Assembly and, indeed, in the 14 years before, when I was a member of precedent advisory bodies.
Mr Berry: What about last week, if you are talking about strange Bills? Come on! Honestly!
MR KAINE: Mr Berry, this is an odd Bill. I will tell you why it is an odd Bill, Madam Speaker. I am sure that you would be interested, even if Mr Berry is not. It is an odd Bill because my information is that the casino made a bid for a variation to the tax rate that applies to it and that, without the casino's knowledge, the Government immediately proceeded to legislation to put their submission into effect. When you read the Bill and when you look at the information that stands behind it, you have to wonder how it is that the Government was so quick to satisfy the casino. At the end of the day - and we did our homework, which the Government did not - there are pros and cons in adopting the course of action that the Government has adopted. I would like to deal with one or two of them. The argument is that there is this business called the junket business. I had always thought that term applied to public servants and politicians, but it turns out that it is a term that relates to gamblers. The Canberra casino, in an effort to improve and increase its turnover, is anxious to attract the junket trade to Canberra.
The junket trade, according to the information that I have, operates this way: An agent somewhere - it might be Singapore or Hong Kong - decides that he is going to put together a party of high roller gamblers and take them off to the casino at Canberra. This is his initiative; it has nothing at all to do with the casino. The casino, if it really wants this business, has to offer some very substantial inducements. A fairly normal inducement to the agent to bring his people to Canberra - as opposed to Cairns, Christmas Island or somewhere else - is 55 per cent of the gross proceeds of this additional business. On top of that, to get the players to come, the casino has to offer inducements to them. That is a minimum of 10 per cent of the gross turnover. So, before a single gambler arrives in Canberra under this junket process, 65 per cent of the potential proceeds has gone to the agent or to the players. Then the casino has to cover all of its operating costs, it has to make a profit and it has to pay the tax to the Government. The casino has put together some fairly persuasive statistics that show that if they have to pay a tax rate of more than about 10 per cent on this business it is not worth their while.
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