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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2515 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

the tip of the iceberg; there are all sorts of academic arguments about how you define problem gambling. But what we know-there is general consensus on this-is that the number of people who are even identified under the current system as having a problem with gambling, and that is at the extreme end, impact upon at least 10 other people.

We also know that there are extremely large costs to society and that society has to carry the costs of those problems, through things such as counselling, employment loss, fraud, legal costs and so on. New South Wales at one point in time did actually estimate the cost. From memory, it was about $48 million in the year that they did it.

So the question we have to ask as a community is: what do we do to reduce the harm? We need to answer that, and to answer that question we need to look at the research that exists. As one of the people who were instrumental in having gambling looked at in this Assembly and having the Gambling and Racing Commission established, I know there was very little research when we first started looking at this, which was in about 1996.

We know that there was already in Sydney a gambling institute. Jan McMillen was doing the work then, as were a couple of other academics. But since then, of course, there's been a much broader interest in the research that's occurring, and we have the ACT government now supporting the capacity at ANU for us to have our own research into the issues so that we can actually assess the social and economic impact of gambling on our community.

We've seen this government increase gambling tax in this budget, which is not a wise move, according to most commentators. We know governments are already heavily addicted to the revenue that comes from gambling and have to be concerned to see that addiction increase. It's a very easy slug on the community as a tax, and one that doesn't bring a lot of controversy, except from people who are concerned about the social harm. That's the position that Ms Dundas and I are particularly putting today.

One of the things that have come out of the research-an argument put forward by the taverns-is that they'll have a smaller number of machines; that therefore will reduce the capacity for anonymity; and that will make it difficult for people to gamble in a problematic way. However, the Productivity Commission found on that that the anonymity was not that important; what's a greater influence is the access to the gambling facility. That's coming out consistently in all the research. Quite recently, Dr Marshall, a PhD fellow, had a presentation on the geography of gambling and concluded that the correlation between location and gambling activity was definitely there; it was certainly more pronounced than the socio-economic divide.

He said that the research was finding more gambling intensity within population areas with high EGM concentration than within population areas with less EGM concentration and that increased frequency is more important than the time spent gambling. Once again, if it's easy to do, if you get there, it's more likely to be a problem that will increase the frequency of the gambling, which obviously leads to the issues of problem gambling.

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