Wednesday, 7 February 2024

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Gambling and Liquor Regulation in Victoria: A Follow up of Three Auditor-General Reports

Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (10:23): I rise to talk on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee report Gambling and Liquor Regulation in Victoria: A Follow up of Three Auditor-General Reports. This report was delivered in November 2023. I am surrounded by members of PAEC at the moment, so I had better get this right. Being a member of the committee myself, it is an important thing to do.

Firstly, I would like to acknowledge the chair Sarah Connolly and Dr Caroline Williams, the executive officer, both of whom spent a really significant amount of time making sure that this is the quality report that we expect from a committee like PAEC. There are almost 200 pages of reporting here about things that are really important to the lives of Victorians. I will come back to the rest of the committee and also the secretariat and their work a little bit later, but I imagine I am going to be speaking on this report several times.

The report looked into the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office’s audits on the follow-up of the regulating gambling and liquor audit – that was a follow-up report; the second time that VAGO had had a go at that one – and reducing the harm caused by gambling. The inquiry also considered online gambling but excluded Crown Casino. Of course we excluded Crown Casino because they had just been inquired into by the Royal Commission into the Casino Operator and Licence, and they did an important body of work which the government has started to regulate and legislate around.

The committee inquired into the 2019 recommendations of VAGO on regulating gambling and liquor, including licensing, industry participants, assurance, compliance, measuring performance and collaborative enforcement. I was particularly pleased to see the Victorian Gambling and Casino Control Commission’s active enforcement in the gambling sector, and I will come back to that a little bit later. The 2020–21 recommendations of the Auditor-General were on reducing the harm caused by gambling, understanding gambling harm, preventing gambling harm and treating gambling harm.

One of the things that I thought were quite innovative for this committee was to hear from young people at a roundtable event here in this Parliament House. One of the things that really struck me was the participants talking about the loss of time through gambling addiction. They said to us, ‘We can always get the money back.’ You can get the money back, a lifetime of earnings. You can always do that. But they could never get the time back with their friends and their families and for building relationships. That is one of the things that addiction steals from people. It steals from them time, and you cannot get time back. I just want to thank all those young people, who made a real impression on this report and made a real contribution, and I hope PAEC continues that tradition of inviting young people to participate in the regulation of our state and the legislation of our state.

We know that of course gambling and alcohol consumption increased over the course of COVID-19, and it has actually continued to increase since that time. That is why the committee considered these reports so important. The Victorian government over the course of the committee hearings actually introduced the Gambling Legislation Amendment Bill 2023 in October, so just before we reported, and this was a really significant step on gambling reform. It was to set out load limits on gaming machines, and what that means is how often it spins and how much you can put in, and particularly the compulsory closure of all gaming venues between 4 am and 10 am. What we heard in the inquiry was in certain suburbs, and suburbs represented by many people on this side of the house, you could gamble for 24 hours a day, because people would stagger their closing times. People who were addicted to gambling would know about this, and they went from one venue to the other, just reinforcing the behaviours that had led to their addiction and led to poor outcomes for them and their families. That was a really important piece of legislation that was put forward, and I thank the Minister for Casino, Gaming and Liquor Regulation for bringing that forward now, because it is important for our communities, the communities we represent.

The committee made 61 recommendations, and we believe that if they are implemented we will have a safer community in Victoria. In the follow-up areas of the report – and I can see I am going to run out of time by a substantial margin here, so I will come back to this – 13 recommendations were made in 2017 and 2019 audits, with work on four of those still to be completed around liquor licensing checks. I am going to sit down now, but anticipate that I will be back on this one, have no doubt at all.