Page 1660 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 July 2020
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I say to all the club staff who are in stress over this situation, “I am sorry that Mr Rattenbury does not appear to care about your job. I am sorry that Mr Rattenbury wants to do whatever he can to stop you going back to work. I will do whatever I can to stop him.” Without the generous JobKeeper payments established by the Morrison government, quite a number of our clubs would have already gone under. A number of our clubs, irrespective of the JobKeeper lifeline, are sailing very close to the insolvency line.
You have to ask why Mr Rattenbury does not care about all those workers and their families. This could be the answer: a little under two years ago this Assembly established a new gambling levy, the point of consumption gaming tax for online transactions. At the time, they estimated that this would raise $2 million annually. There were calls for some of this money to go back to the racing codes or to harm minimisation or to community groups, but the Barr government made the call to keep it all for themselves, to just channel it into consolidated revenue. I believe that we are the only jurisdiction in the country that does not return some of the POC money to the racing codes; but that is a whole other story.
They predicted that this point of consumption gaming tax would raise $2 million. It turns out that they were wrong. In the financial year just completed, it raised more than $10 million. At a time when Mr Rattenbury is nobly coming into this chamber with a motion which would effectively close many clubs, his government is making a killing out of gambling money, absolutely making a kill. Tom Waterhouse would be proud of what the Labor-Greens government are doing. They are the biggest bookmaker in town, and it is no wonder that they want to shut down any of their competitors because this really is the goose that has laid the golden egg.
When it comes to online gaming, it has gone through the roof in this period. In fact, it cannot possibly be ignored. Mr Rattenbury states in his motion that people can lose $1,000 an hour playing poker machines. There is no limit to how much you can bet online. Indeed, if I had not left my phone over there and if, indeed, Madam Deputy Speaker, you were not keeping an eagle on me as far as props are concerned, I could have taken my phone out of my pocket here in the chamber and placed a bet online. I could have pulled my phone out and, in a couple of simple steps, while giving this speech, I could have placed a $20,000 bet, a $50,000 bet, a $100,000 bet on a race through the TAB app. It can be gone in 60 seconds.
How much do you reckon was the biggest single bet made through Tabcorp on Winx? What do you reckon? What would it have been? Would it have been $50,000? Would it have been $100,000? Indeed, Tabcorp reported last year that it was half a million dollars. It was $550,000—over half a million—and it could be gone in 60 seconds. I am not saying that that is a good thing; I guess what I am reflecting on is that poker machines still are one of the slowest ways to gamble money, when you compare them to all the other avenues. It is just a fact of life, Mr Rattenbury.
During this experimental period, with gaming machines closed here but open in Queanbeyan, we have seen the futility of legislating in this way here, in that we are an island inside New South Wales. We have seen, I guess, a return to those days in the
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