The looming regulation of online gambling has a Mataura Licensing Trust official concerned with the safety and prosperity of districts around the country.
Online gambling sits in a legislative no-man’s land without regulations and oversight over the estimated 3.6% of the population who engage in it.
Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden promised to change this, and licensing for up to 15 online casinos is set to start in February next year.
However, Mataura Licensing Trust general manager Mark Paterson said for the trust and the Gore district, this could be a serious blow to the community.
"When the online gaming comes on, and it’s easier for people to bet on their phones, they’ll stop coming to the pubs.
"That’s our biggest concern. Who then will look after sports clubs, all the people we fund, when there’s no money?" he said.
Mr Paterson said the current plan of allowing overseas companies to receive licenses would damage the country as a whole, and was counterintuitive.
"They’ll clip GST on the way past, the levies, but the money won’t have to be returned back to New Zealand.
"The profits will be funnelled out of the country and it could be hundreds of millions, and I don’t think it should be acceptable.
"It should be New Zealand companies that run it, and the money should be given back to New Zealand," he said.
Mr Paterson said licensing trusts around the country used the money from gaming and pubs for good, and communities would suffer without it.
"If we haven’t got 500-600,000 [dollars] to give away to the community, what happens to the Gold Guitars? The Fashion Awards? All we give away? Who knows?"
In terms of safety, there was no question the in-person gaming rooms were better for New Zealanders, Mr Paterson said.
"There are no checks and balances on your phone. It isn’t like us, where we do 20-minute checks in the gaming rooms. We have a lot of preventive measures in our operations.
"It’s absolutely [less safe]."
It was a necessary evil to legislate online gambling as the cat was out of the bag, but it was important to keep the money coming back to New Zealand, he said.
"I understand that they have to capture it, get some income off of it, make it legal.
"But I’d like to see it run along the same lines as class 4 gaming, so the money goes back to the community from the people who win the contracts," Mr Paterson said.
Ms van Velden said, in a statement, once the new regulations were in place operators would be vetted and monitored by the government, and pay into the offshore gambling duty and problem gambling levy.
"The contributions to the problem gambling levy are used to recover the costs of services under the Ministry of Health’s Strategy to Prevent and Minimise Gambling Harm, which funds clinical services, public health services, research and evaluation."
Operators would have requirements to prevent harmful gambling and underage gambling, with the government monitoring and enforcing compliance, with potential consequences for rule breaking.
"The Department of Internal Affairs will have multiple layers of enforcement tools available to enforce the licensing system, including the power to issue take-down notices to remove any unlicensed advertising or website.
"Gambling operators may lose their licence in other countries if they break the law in New Zealand, and the DIA will have strong relationships with regulators in other countries to report gambling companies that break the rules."
