In New Zealand, a new bill has been presented that could change the way pokie funds are distributed across the country. Introduced by Internal Affairs Minister Peter Dunne, the changes could bring in an additional $10 million in pokie funding per year. The bill will address the concern that profits from pokies in low-income areas are being distributed as grants to programs in well-to-do areas.
Dunne’s bill ensures that pokie profits will be distributed throughout the region from which they were derived. Local committees will be entrusted with the task of making sure that pokie profits are kept within the community.
“People are quite keen to support local projects but often feel frustrated that the money they invested in a pokie machine or a game doesn’t get back to that community,” he says in an interview with Mihingarangi Forbes on Native Affairs. “That’s what we’re tidying up”. Dunne has two major goals for his bill.
The first is to make the laws easy to understand so that pokie trusts can easily comply with them. Recently, there has been quite a few cases of trusts breaching the terms of pokie grant laws, and the new bill aims to stop this from happening. Poker machine operators will also be required to publish more information about their grant recipients to increase transparency and maintain the integrity of the gaming market.
He would also like to see his bill ensure a much greater return back to the community. Dunne noted that many smaller projects tend to miss out on funding because there just isn’t enough money to go around. The bill would increase the return from 37% to 42%, which would result in an additional $10 million being returned to local community projects across New Zealand.
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