Peter Kavanagh's pokies comments in parliament

Gaming licences: May 26, 2010

Mr KAVANAGH (Western Victoria) – In terms of this motion, I believe we should not be having an auction system for pokie licences because we should not even have pokie licences. As I have argued several times before, I believe pokies are a scourge on Victoria and indeed right throughout Australia. It should not be of any comfort to us that parts of Australia are in an even worse situation with respect to pokies than is Victoria.

There are almost twice as many machines per person in New South Wales as there are in Victoria. Having said that, most of the other states have fewer machines per person than Victoria does.

Pokies do a lot of harm to our society. They contribute to family breakdowns, bankruptcies and crime. I understand that when the temporary casino was built in Southbank the crime rate jumped enormously because people who went into the temporary casino and lost all their money would then come out and mug somebody for the cab fare to go home. Tragically it also leads to suicide. I have discussed this before, and I think there could not be a stronger condemnation of any activity than that it actually leads to people killing themselves.

Furthermore it leads to a culture of gambling. Part of the culture of gambling is to make prosperity appear to be a matter of luck.

That is quite a harmful and damaging thing in our society when people begin to believe that whether they have a high standard of living or not is a question of the roll of the dice, rather than a consequence of thrift, hard work, persistence and other virtues.

If we add up all the costs to everybody and not just the matter of the money to the government, as I said before, I think the pokies are already a bankrupt business. It amounts to exploitation of the relatively poor, the less educated and the lonely. Indeed that exploitation is concentrated on the poor because we all know the poor are much more likely to gamble than other people are. Immediately we should be issuing much stronger warnings to people about using pokies. We should, for example, ban all advertising related to the pokies, not just for poker machines but for venues that have poker machines. For example, I think Crown Casino should not be allowed to advertise anything on television.

We also should institute an immediate ban on simultaneously drinking alcohol and using a poker machine. From what I have seen of pokies venues, it is quite common to see people with a drink in one hand while they pour maybe their life savings into a poker machine with the other. We should work towards the elimination of all licences for poker machines, and the elimination of the machines themselves of course.

However, this motion is not really about the rights and wrongs of pokies in themselves but about the return to the state. The revenue appears to be less than half of what the government expected before the auction process.

In a financial sense it seems to be a failure, as many opposition members have argued. If we are going to have a financial failure, or if we have had one, is it not appropriate to investigate, not necessarily to attribute blame but perhaps to work out what to do differently in the future so that any mistakes are not repeated? On that basis I would be happy to support Mr Hall's motion, and I congratulate him for bringing it to the Parliament.

Casino legislation: December 8, 2009

Peter Kavanagh (Western Victoria) – Melbourne would be a more beautiful city and Victoria would be a happier, more prosperous and safer state if Crown Casino could be wrapped in toilet paper and dropped in a very large sewer. Melbourne would be a more beautiful city if that architectural abomination, in a style borrowed from trashy Las Vegas glitz, could be removed from what is otherwise a largely gracious, charming city.

Victorians would be happier if they, their family members and friends could be at reduced risk of the pernicious effects of problem gambling. Victorians would be more prosperous if they retained the billions of dollars that pour from their pockets into the poker machines and gaming tables of Crown Casino and other gaming venues. Victorians would also be at a lower risk of being mugged or assaulted or having their houses robbed if some of their fellow Victorians were not made desperate for dollars through losing money at Crown Casino.

I have argued before in this Parliament that the government's policy seems to me to amount to exploitation of the most vulnerable members of our society. I recall soon after Crown Casino's opening that the management complained about the socioeconomic status of its patrons. The complaint was that there were too many working-class people, too many people from Fawkner and places like that. The management said the casino wanted a better class of clientele. After getting their money the management of Crown said that that money was hardly good enough to take from those patrons – a case of literally adding insult to outrageous injury.

Members know that many who tend to frequent gaming venues are among those who are not so well off and perhaps not so well educated. Certainly they include people who are not familiar with probability theory in particular. Gaming brings money to the coffers of the Victorian government, but it brings misery, poverty and violence to many Victorians.

I have heard the same story from several different sources: new employees of Crown Casino are told to expect that the toilet blocks at the casino will be closed occasionally, because it is not very unusual for patrons who have lost all their money to go and kill themselves there. The inter-church gaming task force told us that it knows of many cases of people who are suiciding because of desperation resulting from financial problems caused by problem gaming, but this kind of misery represented by suicide is no doubt a small tip of a very large iceberg of harm, poverty and distress.

Those who are proponents of gaming might dismiss the concerns I have raised as being based on or coming from moral concerns, but I am in no position to lecture people on morality, and certainly I am no paragon of moral virtue. The reason for opposing this bill has very little to do with morality but has to do with the harm that this bill will cause the people of Victoria.

The coalition has decided to support this bill, even though in a press release of 4 December its spokesperson admitted that the effect of this bill is likely to make problem gaming significantly worse. The press release explains that the coalition will support the bill because of the extra funding to tackle problem gaming, which it has been able to negotiate. As a person who is often accused of being naive, maybe I have some expertise in naivety. I believe the coalition's view is indeed naive. It may be easy and very tempting to say to a person with an addiction, 'The answer is simple, you simply stop the addictive behaviour'. As Shakespeare said, each man's grief is easily overcome, except for he who has it. This is a case of not understanding the difficulty that people go through and how powerful an addictive habit can be. It is difficult enough for an individual, if he musters every ounce of energy and determination he has, to overcome an addiction. How much less likely to be effective is intervention by third parties in the form of counselling?

In Melbourne and Victoria we do not need more gaming options, we need fewer gaming options.

Tax changes: February 6, 2008

In terms of gaming revenue, in 2006-07 the government collected, according to the figures David Davis gave us, $1508 million. What are the costs of that revenue?

The costs of that revenue to the community, to families and to individuals include people not eating well because of the money that is being put into poker machines; broken families; bankruptcies; depression and – I am reluctant to say because it is not a good thing to talk about, especially as a political point – it even includes suicide.

As I have said before in this chamber, in my opinion it is not entirely a bad thing to obtain gaming revenue, but that revenue should be gained from people who understand that they are likely to lose the money that they are putting into poker machines: people who know that the odds are against them, and soberly they decide to enjoying gambling with money which they can afford to lose. That is not the situation at present.

There are alternative sources of revenue, good sources of revenue, and there are examples of government waste and inefficiencies where not only the taxation total pool could be cut but it could be collected more intelligently and with much less harm to the economy and to individuals.

I understand that there are difficulties for the government and there are lots of pressures. In our federal system, unfortunately, there are not so many options for state governments to collect revenue. We now have the situation where every state and territory government and the commonwealth are controlled by one political party. Many people see some danger in that, but as the Chinese say, 'In crisis there is opportunity', and it does present an opportunity for perhaps a degree of cooperation to resolve some of the problems of federalism that need to be solved, and to renovate, renew and update commonwealth-state relations, including the tax base of the states.

I am concerned about the way in which Victoria's taxation revenue is collected, the balance of revenue and the harm that particular taxes may do to our state, to individuals and to families. We all need tax. We all get our wage here from the tax take, but I think that things could be improved. On that basis I would support the motion to express concern about taxation in Victoria.

Appropriation Bills: June 6, 2007

Mr KAVANAGH (Western Victoria) – I rise to make some comments on certain aspects of the budget in light of the values of the Democratic Labor Party and the interests of the people of Western Victoria Region, both of which I represent here.

Australia is enjoying unprecedented prosperity, and this has provided the Victorian government with bountiful revenue. The government has marginally reduced certain taxes in this budget. In my opinion, however, the modest tax relief offered is not wisely targeted.

The budget includes more than $1 billion in revenue from gambling, much of it from poker machines. In my view the social cost of this revenue is too high a price to pay for the money.

If we were to estimate the real cost to Victorians, and not just to the government, of this revenue, including broken homes, wrecked lives and suicides, we would find that this business of government is already bankrupt. Pokies were introduced as a desperate response to a financial crisis. Victoria is no longer facing a crisis, and I suggest that the appropriate response is to reduce Victoria's dependence on pokie revenue by taking measures to end the exploitation of those least able to afford it and retaining only that part of the revenue that is derived from people who are sober, who understand their chances of winning and losing and who nevertheless decide to bet money that they can afford to lose.

Helping people, especially families, to buy their first homes has long been a very high priority of the Democratic Labor Party. Indeed many of the schemes that exist throughout Australia today are the result of initiatives taken by the DLP decades ago.

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