Page 2634 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 25 September 2007
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important tasks that it did in 2001, with the compliance of the then Treasurer, now Senator Humphries, was to establish on the ANU campus, with the co-operation of the ANU, a chair for gambling studies. From memory, the ACT government provided about $1.1 million, which was matched dollar for dollar by the ANU. That was to provide the seed funding. Over a 10-year agreement, extra funding would come its way by way of the Gambling and Racing Commission directing its research load through that organisation so that the organisation could go out and do other gambling research as the need and the opportunities arose.
What we did was for the first time put front and centre, not just in the community but in academia, the importance of understanding how gambling works and the impact that it has. The first work on that was done by Professor Jan McMillen, which was a population study and a survey of the number of people in the ACT who were affected by problem gambling, and a survey of their population profile, which I have alluded to, where the largest number of people were young, relatively unskilled men. This is still an ongoing case.
When I was preparing and thinking about what I might say here today, I went back and looked at what was happening at the school of gambling studies. Imagine my surprise. I know that there is a 10-year agreement between the ACT government and the ANU for this and that there was substantial money sunk into it by the ACT. I went to the school of gambling studies at the ANU website. You click on the web page and you get a little message that says, “This web page is no longer operative. Return to the ANU.” I knew that the school of gambling studies, the chair of gambling studies, was established under the RegNet organisation which in the past has done a great deal of work. So I went to RegNet and started looking there. Suddenly, Mr Speaker, there is no mention of gambling.
So I have done a little bit of digging around today, and as far as I can tell there is no longer any relationship between the ACT government and the ANU in relation to gambling studies. I would like to ask the Chief Minister or the Treasurer, or whoever is responsible, to account to the Assembly for what has happened to the MOU that existed between the ANU and the ACT, which still has some three or four years to continue. What has happened to the seed funding that was put in place in 2001 to establish the school, and what is the ACT doing to further the study into what is happening in gambling?
There is something that is happening—it was advertised around the ANU recently. The ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences and the Research School of Social Sciences are now not in the RegNet area, but they are looking for a level 3 research fellow to, amongst other things, look at the gambling industry with regard to government policy in the area, government regulation, economic analysis of gambling, industry analysis of gambling and the patterns of gambling consumption. It is interesting that in this new job, which perhaps seems to be taking the place of the work done by Professor McMillen and her predecessors in the chair of gambling studies, there is no mention of problem gambling. This is a proposal to really look at the economic impacts. It looks like a proposal put together by another eco rat. It is all about economy, it is all about the industry. None of it is about the people.
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