In March 2024, the AHPA NSW/ACT Branch collaborated with The Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation (CHETRE) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW) to present a joint submission on the NSW Government ClubGRANTS Scheme Review and provide recommendations to address serious issues with the current Scheme design.
Our organisations advocated for fundamental reforms to the NSW ClubGRANTS Scheme to address the underlying issues contributing to gambling-related harm. Our recommendations follow:
- Reallocate Funding: Allocate at least 3% of poker machine tax revenue to a centrally managed, locally governed program focused on addressing gambling harm and promoting health equity.
- Enhance Governance: Remove clubs and industry bodies from the grant allocation process to ensure impartiality and accountability in funding decisions.
- Prioritise Disadvantaged Communities: Allocate funding based on independently derived indices of disadvantage and gambling harm, ensuring that resources are directed towards areas most in need.
- Minimise Gambling Harm in program design: Require all grant applications to address the minimisation of gambling harm in their program design, although this need not be the primary purpose of the program.
- Spanning Projects: Retain a proportion of funds to support projects that span more than one Local Government Area (LGA), focusing on criteria addressing social disadvantage and gambling harm, administered by the NSW Office of Responsible Gambling (ORG).
- Administrative Support: Allocate a portion of the public service savings from no longer needing to verify tax deductions to fund administrative support for local committees and their representatives.
The submission was prepared on behalf of AHPA NSW/ACT Branch by Mr Glen Ramos and CHETRE by Mr Andrew Reid.
Read the full submission here.