Page 2636 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 25 September 2007
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pubs and taverns across the territory, indeed to the casino, would change that aspect of the nature of Canberra. It is interesting in the context of this debate that the Liberal Party continues to advocate for the spread of poker machines to hotels, taverns and the Canberra casino.
Clubs have become integral to the way in which we socialise and interact with each other. The ACT government is fully supportive of the longevity and continued success of the ACT club industry. The government, evidently unlike the opposition, recognises the enormous benefits that the club industry contributes to the ACT community and to our economy. Employment alone is in excess of 2,000 staff, not to mention the staff employed by other businesses on which the industry depends. In terms of employment, the industry provides for full-time and casual employment opportunities for many of our young adults, the significance of which may not have received the recognition that it deserves.The workplace training and organisational experience these young adults gain are important aspects and undoubtedly, to them, so is the remuneration.
From a direct government perspective, gaming machine tax for the 2006-07 financial year was around $31.4 million in a budget now approaching $3 billion. This is, however, no drop in the ocean and it goes a long way in providing other essential community facilities such as schools, hospitals and roads. But it seems that this revenue is revenue that the Liberal Party believes, if its rhetoric is to be believed, is tainted money, money it would presumably relinquish if it were elected to government. There would be $31.4 million to add to Mr Mulcahy’s missing millions in forgone revenue, which I think at the last count was somewhere around $200 million a year.
The Liberals cannot have it both ways. They cannot say that the support the Labor Party receives from the Canberra Labor Club, the club it had the foresight and the energy to establish, is somehow tainted, while the $31.4 million that flows to consolidated revenue from the same source is somehow clean. Today we saw Mr Smyth doing gymnastics with clean coal. Clean coal is, of course, a renewable source and it is clean; therefore it is okay for the Prime Minister to include clean coal in his renewable energy targets. Certainly Mr Smyth has an issue around “clean” in the oxymoronic way in which it is used to describe renewable energy. The Liberals have boxed themselves into a corner on this one, all in pursuit of a few cheap political points.
Expenditure on gaming machines represents 1.3 per cent of ACT household disposable income, well below the national average of 1.8 per cent and almost half the New South Wales percentage of 2.5 per cent. While annual per capita expenditure on poker machines in the ACT is higher than the national average, it is well below that of New South Wales. The ACT is less reliant on gambling tax revenue than all other jurisdictions except Western Australia. In fact, the Commonwealth Grants Commission assesses, and effectively complains, that the ACT is making a below average effort in raising revenue from gambling taxes. According to the Commonwealth Grants Commission, we do not try hard enough to raise revenue from gambling and they indeed take that into account in determining grants to the ACT.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics taxation revenue data for 2004-05 shows that revenue from all gambling taxes represented 6.7 per cent of total ACT taxation
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