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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-06-10 Daily Xml
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SkyCity Adelaide

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:12): My question is to the Premier. Will the government hold a royal commission or independent inquiry into SkyCity Adelaide following their recent statement on and AUSTRAC's concerns of, and I quote, 'management of customers identified as high-risk and potentially exposed persons'? Does he now consider it a mistake to have dismantled the office of the independent gambling regulator when so many probity issues have now arisen with Australian casino operations?

The Hon. V.A. CHAPMAN (Bragg—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning and Local Government) (15:13): In response to the member's question, I have perused a number of questions and answers that have been provided in the other place in relation to this issue. Just to be clear, the issue of the Hon. Patricia Bergin SC's inquiry, on which she prepared a report, was back in 2014, at a time that preceded this government. Nevertheless, the Independent Gambling Authority was actually in existence at that time. There was a concern raised that its being dismantled subsequently may have caused—just to be clear, this issue was raised back at a time when it was actually in existence.

Since that time, just to explain to the house, there have actually been two royal commissions instituted in relation to other services that are provided in Australia as a result of her report. For the benefit of members who haven't read this report, it essentially looks into the whole question of organised crime, and money laundering in particular, that may operate in casinos. They are a place at which there is a high level of movement in relation to cash and therefore can be vulnerable to that type of behaviour.

AUSTRAC, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, is the federal regulatory agency that monitors those transactions and obviously has to try to detect and respond to any criminal abuse in the financial system. Of course, that relates to trying to deal with money laundering, and to deal with that they have a number of programs and guidelines they expect casinos to operate under. Some of those relate to the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Act and the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorism Financing Rules.

Those things culminated in a disclosure by SkyCity recently that they had had a request from AUSTRAC regarding some investigations as to whether there was customer due diligence and whether there was compliance with some of those guidelines; in particular, to be able to identify what they call these 'persons of interest' or PEPs, as I think they call them colloquially in all the language that occurs with this. They are basically politically exposed persons.

I don't know whether there have been any in South Australia or who they are. That would be like asking the police officers investigating Operation Ironside to tell us who they might be investigating before they arrested them all the other day. We don't do that. We let those agencies get on with that work.

In the meantime, our Liquor and Gambling Commissioner, as soon as he was alerted to this report, started looking at the matter himself. He has a role in relation to obligations under the Casino Act and agreements for compliance, and he keeps a check on things. For example, just in recent years this parliament passed laws relating to note acceptor reforms in poker machines—I think there are something like 800 poker machines in the Casino—and with that came an obligation to have electronic detection in relation to facial recognition technology. They have to monitor the implementation of those so he has an active role, and I think on a daily basis his agents go through and check in relation to casino compliance.

He has continued to work with AUSTRAC in relation to their inquiry. Once it appeared that AUSTRAC said, 'Look, we're taking over the investigation,' he announced, 'Well, we won't be reviewing this ourselves.' Obviously he is continuing to support and assist AUSTRAC in relation to their investigation.

If and when something comes from that that we need to act on or support the prosecution or implementation of any action, of course we will do that as a government. However, at this stage we are awaiting that investigation. If there is anything to come from that we will, of course, act on it.

Time expired.

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