Renu­ka Singh

The Gov­ern­ment could stand to lose $250 mil­lion if they out­law gam­ing ma­chines.

Op­po­si­tion sen­a­tor Damien Ly­der gave that fig­ure dur­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the Gam­bling (Gam­ing and Bet­ting) Con­trol Bill 2021 de­bate in the Sen­ate yes­ter­day.

“By out­law­ing these ma­chines, these roulette ma­chines con­tribute $120,000 per year to the Gov­ern­ment cof­fers and that is 2,000 bars. So the Gov­ern­ment stands to lose a po­ten­tial $250 mil­lion,” he said.

“And if the Gov­ern­ment is not cur­rent­ly col­lect­ing that $250 mil­lion, well that is where they should get the rev­enue.”

He said out­law­ing the gam­ing ma­chines would add to the Gov­ern­ment’s short­fall in rev­enue.

Ly­der said that the bill shift­ed the gam­blers from the or­gan­ised and reg­u­lat­ed gam­ing fa­cil­i­ties to the il­le­gal ‘Whe Whe’ men.

He said if it were not for the lock­down, peo­ple would be protest­ing this bill out­side the Par­lia­ment and de­scribed it as a “hur­ri­cane” im­posed on the cit­i­zens by the Gov­ern­ment.

Min­is­ter of For­eign Af­fairs Dr Amery Browne chal­lenged Ly­der’s de­scrip­tion of the bill and said that it was in fact crit­i­cal and im­por­tant to have the prop­er reg­u­la­tions and con­trol to pro­tect peo­ple.

Browne de­scribed a sce­nario where a crim­i­nal put large sums of mon­ey on a bet and then cashed that in for clean mon­ey. The in­no­cent per­son sit­ting next to that crim­i­nal would be an un­wit­ting ac­com­plice to a crime, he said.

“When we have a naive ap­proach to these dis­cus­sions, you might feel we’re talk­ing about pet­ty crimes. What we are seek­ing to con­trol here is linked to glob­al is­sues, to po­ten­tial ter­ror­ism, to mon­ey laun­der­ing, to or­gan­ised crime, to the mafia,” he said.

Browne said that Ly­der had cre­at­ed a “straw” ar­gu­ment and pro­ceed­ed to bat­tle it in or­der to ap­pear that he was more in sup­port of small busi­ness­es than the Gov­ern­ment.

“I want to con­front that,” he said.

Browne said large and small busi­ness­es were be­ing pro­tect­ed by this bill.

“The re­al­i­ty is that the play­ing field is not lev­el. In an un­reg­u­lat­ed en­vi­ron­ment that cur­rent­ly ex­ists, or­gan­ised crim­i­nals could eas­i­ly open a large sports bar in the neigh­bour­hood and swal­low the small bars in an un­reg­u­lat­ed en­vi­ron­ment,” he said.

Browne said the prop­er leg­isla­tive frame­work pro­tects all busi­ness sizes.

He de­tailed in­stances where women with gam­bling debts were traf­ficked in­to an­oth­er coun­try and forced in­to sex­u­al slav­ery, where chil­dren were thrown in­to the trunk of a car and warned that their gam­bling fa­ther owed mon­ey.

“I want to make the link be­tween heavy casi­no debts and death,” he said.

“Does this sound fa­mil­iar?” he asked.