Rattenbury promises tougher laws to curb problem gambling

Minister Shane Rattenbury said last Thursday the government had started "testing the market" for a system that would make it very difficult for gamblers to lose more money on poker machines than they had previously agreed to.

The government is also considering changing the rules for the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission to make it more open about investigations into allegations of poor behaviour by clubs.

His opinion follows the outburst of anger from the family of Ray Kasurinen because, four years after his death, the commission has not completed its investigation into whether the Hellenic Club encouraged the dead man's gambling.

Mr Kasurinen's son-in-law David Chambers had emailed the commission, saying: "I consider your agency to be completely incompetent and unworthy of public support or public funding."

In response, Mr Rattenbury said the commission should be able to communicate with families. "We need to examine how families can be updated on the progress of an investigation," the minister said.

The big change would be networked gaming machines and cards to stop gamblers exceeding their pre-determined losses.

"Testing the market" for systems to do this means companies will be asked what could be done and what it might cost. Testing the market would take about four weeks.

The results would have to go to the ACT cabinet. Mr Rattenbury reckoned such a system would then take five years to put in place. It could cost $70 million - or $14 million per year.

In his view, the clubs and not the taxpayer should pay for it.

"I think the industry should pay for it. They are making substantial profits every year. If they want to make the profits, they need to take responsibility," he said.

Mr Rattenbury said he would recommend to the cabinet that a central monitoring system should be put in place. "I think we should get on with this," he said.

The favourite mechanism is one where punters would need a card to play a machine. The gambler would decide what his or her limit on losses would be. Machines across the ACT would be linked in a network so if the gambler exceeded his or her previously agreed losses, all machines would block further bets.

Tasmania has just introduced a scheme which limits a player's losses to $100 a day, $500 a month and $5000 a year.

"We should be aspiring to that gold standard in the ACT," he said.

The Greens minister accepted the ACT had been slow to introduce measures to tackle problem gambling on poker machines - but he blamed the territory's tardiness on Labor because so many poker machines were in Labor clubs.

He said the ACT Labor government had once wanted to ban poker machines altogether but had been overruled by national Labor.

Since then, he maintained, attitudes had changed.

What is not clear is how central monitoring of networked machines would affect the profits of the clubs, and so their ability to maintain standards of entertainment outside the pokie areas.