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June 19, 2000 CAPE TOWN, South Africa (PANA) - By international standards, South Africa has a unique regulatory model for its gambling industry, which effectively differentiates the role of its regional and national gambling authorities.

Addressing the 11th International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking - the world's largest and most significant policy-making gambling conference - South African National Gambling Board chairman Chris Fismer said that it was apparent that the country had developed a public policy model for the gambling industry which was at the forefront of new thinking in terms of "leveraging the public interest."

The conference involves some 600 regulators, policy makers, politicians, industry leaders, and academics from 29 jurisdictions.

"Our policy framework sees provincial authorities - in charge of adjudication and licensing - with an understandable interest in developing a healthy industry, functioning compatibly with a national board fulfilling an oversight function in terms of country-wide co-ordination and the uniformity of standards. No other country has a comparable system," he said.

"While provincial authorities have an obvious interest in encouraging new investment and the concomitant health of the gambling industry, we at the national level need to have a more dispassionate perspective on broad issues of common relevance, such as the inevitable social impact of gambling," he added.

Brian Kantor of the University of Cape Town said at the dedicated South African session - the only one focused on a single country - that South Africa was making a "major contribution" to new international policy development in terms of advancing the public interest through the government-controlled award of gambling licenses.

"South Africa understood early on that to limit gambling as a principle was to empower government to maximise the public interest through the capture of economic rents arising out of the industry," he noted.

"In the Western Cape, for example, this saw the successful bidders being required to fund innovative tourism infrastructure, such as a convention centre, a tourism precinct developed around a navigable waterway within the city, as well as new tourism services. Thus there is a sense in South Africa's public that government have delivered through the gambling industry a tangible return for its tax payers by requiring much of those who would aspire to a casino licence," he said.