Wednesday, 12 August 2026

 Mathew HILAKARI (Point Cook) (11:04): Deputy Speaker, let me take you back three years. You will remember well the discussions on Gambling and Liquor Regulation in Victoria: A Follow up of Three Auditor-General Reports, a report which was delivered in November 2023. You would remember me getting up in this chamber and speaking on this issue before, and it is an issue that I remain passionate about and something that I hope is achieved by government. It is around recommendations 4 and 5 of this review, and it relates to the review of the purpose of the community benefits arrangements related to pokies and what percentage of gaming revenue is being redirected into the community as opposed to being spent on the operational expenses of pokies and increasing their clientele. Recommendation 5 is around the taxation discount that pokies venues receive as a result of the supposed community benefits that they are providing. That taxation discount is an 8.33 per cent discount to gaming revenues of clubs with electronic gaming machines or pokies.

I just want to take you to the community that I represent in the City of Wyndham. Net gaming revenue in the community that I represent was almost $60 million. That is an extraordinary amount of dollars for the community that I represent. Of that, the pokies venues, seven of them, reported that they had provided almost $11 million of community benefits. I just want to break down what those community benefits are. I am using a particular club here as an example. They said that they provided $1.3 million worth of benefits in the community. About 1.2 per cent of that $1.3 million, or $15,000, was actual community benefits. According to them, they were donations, gifts and sponsorships. So that extraordinary 8.33 per cent tax discount they had got actually related to a $15,000 series of gifts and donations and sponsorships, but that was certainly subsumed in a substantial way by the more than $580,000 that they spent on wages that they purported were a community benefit. I would suggest to you that when you spend $580,000 on wages, it is not related to your benefit to the community; it is a benefit to your business. It is actually a requirement of you running your business to have people at the business, cooking the food, serving the drinks and being at the pokie machines. The tab wagering wages of 10 grand and the management wages of 106 grand are meant to be supposedly community benefits. It is an absolute outrage that we allow this to continue on.

That $15,000 in donations, gifts and sponsorships is dwarfed by the interest that they pay on their loans to the bank account, on their bank loan fees, on fees to ASIC, a requirement by law – that is not a community benefit; that is something they have to legislatively meet – their licensing fees and their cleaning fees so there are not rats and mice running around the building and cockroaches in their kitchen. This is extraordinary that they say that these are community benefits, not costs of running their business or requirements by law. I do not know why we stick with this. Their superannuation payments, $80,000 of them – I am glad to see that they are paying their super, but they are required to do so by law, not because it is some sort of community benefit, some benevolence from this club. Their WorkCover payments – I mean, this is extraordinary stuff that we allow to continue, and we should cut it out.

If they are going to get a discount on their taxation from the Victorian government, they should have to provide genuine community benefits. If they cannot, and they have demonstrated they are not doing so over the last three years and over the years before that, then we should cut this system out and return that money to the taxpayer, who is much better at spending this money in the support of the communities. Communities that I represent need their football ovals, they need their sporting clubs, they need their basketball courts and they need their swimming pools. They need their community services.

It does not mention here at all support for people to minimise their risk and cost of gambling. That is very often one section that they leave as a zero dollar in these organisations. I say that we have got to end this. We should end it. It is important that government acts on this. These are recommendations that are outstanding from three years ago. We have the opportunity to act. I commend these recommendations to this house, and I hope to see them acted on.