Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, the Greens move –
that the House has no confidence in the Premier for the following reasons:
- In September 2022, his government announced a policy for a mandatory pre‑commitment card to reduce the harm caused by electronic gaming machines.
- During the 2024 election campaign, the Liberals put out a vague, dishonest media release which appeared on its surface to reflect their 2022 policy.
- Meanwhile, the Premier made a promise to the Tasmanian Hospitality Association that a re-elected Rockcliff government would walk away from the policy.
- The Premier sold out the Liberals’ policy to the gambling lobby and deliberately lied to Tasmanians about it during the election
- During budget Estimates this year, the Minister for Finance, Nic Street, was unaware his Premier intended to back away from his policy.
- It appears on the evidence the Premier lied to his former Minister for Finance as well.
- The Premier is a liar who cannot be trusted by his own party room and Cabinet, or the people of Tasmania.
- The only people who can trust the Premier’s word are the gambling lobby.
The Greens take this matter very seriously. We have been trying for months, during the election campaign and since then, in Estimates, in questions in parliament and to the media, to find out the truth of what is going on with the Premier’s backtracking on the 2022 mandatory pre‑commitment card position.
What we have known from today from the media release that has been announced is that this government, this premier, through the Premier and through his actions and his words, are walking away, abandoning, finishing any intention of bringing in a mandatory pre‑commitment card. What we have in front of us is a Premier who, on multiple opportunities, multiple occasions, when given the chance to be honest with Tasmanians, has instead chosen to deceive, to mislead and to actively lie. On behalf of Tasmanians who are deeply concerned at our democracy and are protecting this institution, we have no confidence in a premier who is prepared to lie to Tasmanians to hide the truth of his actions and the actions of his government.
It is abundantly clear that in the election campaign the Liberals had already made a commitment to the Tasmanian Hospitality Association that they would abandon the pre-commitment card promise because when we heard the media release on that day, on the face of it, it did appear that they would maintain a commitment. The words were –
Importantly, we will also remain committed to harm minimisation and will implement a mandatory card-based system for electronic gaming machines as soon as reasonably practicable.
The warning bells were there by the absence of words. The word ‘pre-commitment’ was not in that statement and the time of bringing it on was not in that statement. On detailed questioning on multiple occasions from the media, the Premier said on 26 February 2024 that he promised he would introduce a mandatory pre-commitment policy and would not be abandoning the promise they made in 2022. It was a specific promise, it was not a generalised promise. It was a specific promise to implement the recommendations from the Tasmanian Liquor and Gaming Commission for a mandatory precommitment system that would prescribe maximum concurrent default loss limits and initially be set at a daily limit of $100, a monthly limit of $500 and an annual limit of $5000.
I want to draw you, Deputy Speaker, to why this matters. It matters because the community services who work with people addicted to gambling and the parliamentary inquiries and the debates we have had over decades in Tasmania have shown the truth that people who are addicted to gambling are vulnerable to predatory poker machines and electronic gaming machines that are designed specifically to addict people who are vulnerable to gambling and to hold them there until they continue to gamble well past the time it is good for them and their families. That is why we know that those specific changes are required to electronic gaming machines to protect problem gamblers.
This was the promise that was made by the Liberals in 2022 under Michael Ferguson as Finance minister. It was the reason that we had so many people in the community congratulate and welcome this change because it is something that the majority of Tasmanians want. We know that the majority of Tasmanians want to end the harm and damage that is done to individuals and their families from the losses by people addicted to gambling.
It is not too much to say the truth and it was said by the Alliance for Gambling Reform in their letter to the Premier on 13 November, just recently. They were concerned that this government and the Premier were walking away from the commitment. They were trying to stop him, trying to make a plea to his better self – ‘Please, Premier, be honest, tell us that you haven’t walked away from the promise that you made’.
The reason Michael Ferguson made that commitment was because he understood, and the rest of parliament understood, that people’s lives are at risk. It destroys people’s lives. People are dying as a result of problem gambling. Their families do not have food on the table today in Tasmania. These are real people’s lives and the harm that is happening to them is harm that is seen by people who work in our community services sector, people like Chris Jones on behalf of Anglicare Tasmania. All the people who are working in Anglicare Tasmania know, they see people who come to them for support because they cannot put food on the table or pay their bills because it is has all been lost on pokies.
So do the other people who signed on to this letter such as Dr Peter Hoult, the former chair of the Tasmanian Gaming Commission, and Michael Kelly, the CEO of Relationships Australia, on behalf of the people he works with. He knows that people ring in desperation. Their lives are broken as a result of pokies gambling. Rowan Prior, the chairperson of the Presbytery of Tasmania for the Uniting Church, also spoke out and is part of the Alliance for Gambling Reform. The Gambling Impact Society of New South Wales, Lucinda Szczypior, the acting CEO of TasCOSS in Tasmania, TasCOSS, Anglicare, Mission Australia Tasmania, all of the other organisations, the charities, the food banks, all of the other community groups, they understand that it is people who are addicted to gambling who suffer so seriously and so do their families.
It is on behalf of those people that those community organisations and the majority of Tasmanians welcomed the Liberals’ promise to bring in a mandatory pre-commitment card, but what we have seen from the Premier is that he has given in to the pokies lobby, but we do not know for how much. We know that there is obviously the influence of the pokies lobby writ large. We could see from the fact that the Premier had no problem with the conflicts of interest in Finance minister Roger Jaensch’s office –
Mr Jaensch – Be careful.
Dr WOODRUFF – Do not tell me to be careful, Mr Jaensch, because I am speaking the truth. In minister Jaensch’s Finance office, one of his senior officers is a person who is married to the CEO of the pokies lobby. That is a disgrace. It is a problem that this person was not moved. It is not a problem with that person. It is a problem that the Liberals do not see this as a conflict of interest. When you have someone from the Hospitality Association having such a close connection with what is happening in the Finance minister’s office, that is a concern. When the Finance minister ought to be responsible for bringing in a mandatory pre‑commitment card, that is a problem.
Mr JAENSCH – Honourable Speaker, a point of order. I think we have all agreed here in the past that we need to be better at making this a safe place for people to work. I do not have a point of order to refer you to, but I am going to ask you, Deputy Speaker, to please consider the contribution that is being made, which goes to the professionalism of a member of our staff who cannot defend herself here. I will defend her, but I ask for the standard of debate to please respect and be safe to everyone who works here. This is not what we are seeing right now.
DEPUTY SPEAKER – Thank you, minister, and please respect the position I am in as well that I do not have a point of order to adjudicate on. I would ask for some civility within the debate, Dr Woodruff. That is as much as I will say.
Dr WOODRUFF – Thank you, Deputy Speaker. It is pretty obvious, just on the face of it, that a relationship between somebody in the Hospitality Association and a person who is working in the Finance minister’s office is a conflict of interest that should have been dealt with in the appropriate way. The fact that the Liberals do not see this as a problem speaks volumes about their relationship with the pokies industry.
It was Michael Ferguson himself who belled the cat. He spoke out in his talking point to the Mercury and he said it all. We are at a political and moral crossroads when we have a Premier who is leading a government that is incapable of standing up to the pokies lobby, but worse, is incapable of telling the truth about what is going on.
He should be a man of conviction. He should just say, ‘We are not going to introduce a mandatory pre-commitment card’. That is what he is doing, but instead, at every chance, he will not answer the questions. He has been deceiving. He has been lying. He has been directly lying to people under direct questions. He said it again when he said to Mr Bayley.
Mr Street said to Mr Bayley in Estimates this year – and I do not want to put you in a difficult situation, you were not aware. I believe that you are a man of honesty. I believe you are a man who tells the truth. When you looked Mr Street and Mr Bayley in the eyes and said, ‘I can sit here and look you in the eye and tell you that the government’s commitment to the pre-commitment gaming card has not changed’, we believed you.
We did not understand what was going on, because all the evidence was that the Premier had walked away from the pre-commitment gaming card. It goes to show that some people cannot be believed, and the Premier has shown by his actions that he is not a man of his words, he cannot be trusted and in fact he lies to people.
That is at the heart of this no-confidence motion. At the heart of the no-confidence motion is the fact that the Premier is a liar, and that his lies and the result of what he is doing is going to cause direct harm to people who are seriously addicted to gambling. It will put at risk their lives, their livelihoods and that of their family.
It also shows the power of the pokies lobby and the craven lapdog capitulation by the Premier to the pokies lobby, as every Liberal and Labor premier has done before him. Every single time since the pokies have been introduced in Tasmania, Liberal and Labor premiers fall down and bow at the knees of the pokies industry. We never know how much money comes in, but we know that millions rolled in in 2018. We know it rolled in to shut up Labor and to stop them from their position.
We knew that that happened. We could see the blue signs all over the state, and we never found out how much. We found out that ‘Love Your Local’ was an organisation set up to funnel money in by the Federal Group hotels and the THA to make sure that the money would flow, and the campaign led to the Liberal Party being elected. Labor went back after that election on their knees to the Tasmanian Hospitality Association and signed a secret deal, and it only came out by accident in 2021. It showed that Labor signed a secret deal and was prepared to do whatever is required to get elected.
This is at the heart of what is stinking in Tasmania. Vested interests run the Liberals, and the Premier, through this, is trying to lie to people. He is trying to pretend to people that he actually cares and is going to introduce something that he is never going to introduce. It is never going to happen. It is an abuse of his role as Premier, to continue to pretend he is going to do something and to actively lie and to refuse to tell Tasmanians what is going on.
The Deloitte report which they are getting to cook up something – they will not even be honest with Tasmanians. What are the terms of reference? What are the guidelines that he gave to Deloitte to get them to do the report – another report that we do not need because we have had so many? All the evidence is there. We do not need to know any more about the harms of electronic gaming machines. We do not need to know any more about the benefits of mandatory pre-commitment cards. It is abundantly obvious that they work, and the reason that they work is because it is the only thing that will stop people from continuing to put the money in, time and time again. They have to have a default loss limit. It has to be there for them, otherwise they will not stop spending the money.
Let us not be under any illusions that the majority of money that goes from people into poker machines goes to the gambling industry, the pokies industry, to Federal hotels. That is exactly why the Hospitality Association is trying so hard to discredit these incredibly essential and overdue reforms, because they are reforms that will put the power back, as Michael Ferguson said, into the hands of players so that they get to decide in advance how much money they are going to lose.
It is this failure of the Premier to be honest with Tasmanians about what he is actually doing which is at the heart of our reason for having no confidence in him anymore. How can he continue to tell Tasmanians, just as he did this morning, at the same time as he refused to say how much money the Liberals got from the THAA and from the pokies lobby in the last year, he continues to try and rest on his legacy. His legacy is not enough if it is not real. We are calling on him to be honest with Tasmanians and to stand aside, because we have no confidence in him in his role.
How can it be that he continues to lie, apparently, to his former minister for Finance, Mr Street? It is clear that there is utter division in the Liberals on this matter. There is no doubt that there are those among them in the Cabinet, probably a majority in Cabinet, who find this broken promise disgusting. It is abhorrent. It stands against everything that people who genuinely care about the most vulnerable in our society should support. There is division, and it is because the Premier has chosen to go with vested interests instead of the people that he says that he will represent.
This is something that the people of Tasmania strongly believed the ship had turned on. The majority of Tasmanians want electronic gaming machines to be reined in. They want the predatory nature of pokies to be reined in, but most of all they want to have a Premier who is honest about what is going on. If there was to be a change to abandon the pokies pre‑commitment policy, which is what has happened, they want him to be honest about it. We have no confidence in a premier who cannot be honest with Tasmanians. We have no confidence in a premier who is clearly speaking the talking points of the gambling industry. What we have before us is a premier who has decided to walk away from the people of Tasmania and to walk away from the things that really matter.
This has a long history in Tasmania. The pokies industry has splashed money around for decades, and in the first vote that allowed pokies in Tasmania in 1985, it is on the record that Dr Bob Brown was the only person in the lower House who voted against bringing those destructive machines into our state. They were not going to happen, and then the Liberal and Labour parties caved in. We have seen over the decades both parties give money to the Federal Group. They have given Federal a monopoly licence for pokies for free.
What we have now is the possibility of change – a possibility that the majority of Tasmanians supported – and a Premier who has been steadily crab walking back from that quietly ever since before the election. Now we are in a situation where we have had it confirmed today that that is exactly what he has done. The whole time since 16 February, when that policy announcement was made, at every opportunity the Premier has chosen to deceive, to mislead, to deliberately make Tasmanians believe that he was continuing with the mandatory pre‑commitment card policy. He was asked at the election, and it was obvious that he had made a shift. The Greens were concerned. Community services were concerned. The Alliance for Gambling Reform was concerned.
It could be read in the weasel words and the absence of words in that media release by the Liberals in February during the election, that there was a shift in their policy. Of course, there is a shift in the policy because we just had Mr Abetz make comment to that earlier. He said refining – I think your words were, minister – ‘refining the policy’. It has been refined so that it is an abandonment, effectively. When you are pushing something off into the never‑never that is effectively never going to happen.
This is a policy that should have been in place now. It should already have started. It should already have happened in 2022. It was meant to be in place now. It has already been pushed off to next year. Now, we know it is never going to happen. It is never going to happen because the Premier pretends that we need to do more and more studies, more and more evidence. He says we have to look at the evidence of impacts on the economy. But we know from Mr Ferguson’s comments that that is a lie, too. It is a lie to pretend that it is actually going to harm the pokies industry.
The money has been flowing into them, as he said, over the last period of time. He made it really clear in his talking point in the Mercury that in just one month, December 2023, the vast majority of pubs were up by between 40 and 60 per cent. The highest additional retained revenue was an additional $73,000 in one month alone, in just one venue. There is so much extra profit coming into the industry. Thanks, as he says, for the policy announcement.
It has not done any harm. There is no harm to the pokies industry from the Liberals’ policy. The harm from the pokies industry is to the people. The harm to the people from the Liberals policy is to the people who are addicted to gambling. It is to them and it is to their families. It is another lie to pretend that we need yet another study to look at the impacts on businesses as though they will be harmed.
We have been here before. This was always about being a delaying tactic. It obviously always was. The Premier could not even be honest by giving Tasmanians the terms of reference and all the information and correspondence that they gave to Deloitte. Why not? Why not just tell us? Yet again, hiding information.
We cannot have a premier who continues to go on and say to Tasmanians, ‘Trust me, what I am doing is the right thing, trust what I am saying’ – that is a dangerous place to go. It is dangerous to pretend that you are actually working in people’s interests when at the same time out the back, you have vested interests in your back pocket and they are the people for which you are working.
It is pretty clear since February that the Premier of Tasmania, Jeremy Rockliff, has been working for the pokies industry, working for their interests, working against the interests of Tasmanians, refusing to be honest with people about what he is really doing, and refusing to even respond in good faith to the Gambling Alliance, for reform, to all the community sector who are so concerned, to the individuals who have written and spoken up about the change in the Liberals’ policy.
We have had it confirmed today with the news that the Liberals will be abandoning their pokies mandatory pre‑commitment card policy. This is an absolute lie by the Premier to pretend it is otherwise. He has lied at multiple opportunities. He is not putting the interests of Tasmanians first. It is not okay to continue to have a Premier who is untrustworthy. It is not okay to have a premier who is not true to his word. It is also terrible to have a person who continually stands on his own label for himself as a man with heart. It is actually sickening to hear him continue to say that. I have seen his track record, but it has to mean something. For people who have watched Jeremy Rockliff, it has come to a full stop, because you cannot continue to say you are a man of heart if you cannot be honest and, ultimately, if you cannot put the people who are most vulnerable first.
You have a premier who is choosing to put the interests of the pokies lobby above the interests of vulnerable Tasmanians addicted to gambling and their families, whose lives and livelihoods will be lost, who will not be able to put food on their tables. This is a large number of Tasmanians in a cost‑of-living crisis. When you are choosing to go with the ultra‑rich profit-making pokies industry over vulnerable Tasmanians, I call shame. We have no confidence in a premier who does that. It is absolutely the rock bottom he could go.
We cannot have him in that role any more. We need a person in the important role of premier who is going to be honest with Tasmanians and put the most vulnerable people first because, if that is not his core job, what is? His core job should be to defend Tasmania, defend this place, these people, to look after and defend our democracy. A premier must be honest and able to be trusted by the people in order for that to happen. We have no confidence that Jeremy Rockliff is that man.
Time expired.
