Gambling on our future

Doing the right thing by problem gamblers? Don't bet on it. 

Unless you have been locked in a shed for the past few months, you can't have failed to notice the avalanche of propaganda on our television screens in support of the gambling industry. Andrew Wilkie, the abrasive independent member for somewhere in Tasmania, has made it a condition of his support for the Gillard minority government that it enacts laws designed to help problem gamblers, mainly those who piss billions of dollars a year down the necks of the ubiquitous poker machines.

It is a hideous industry that preys on vulnerable people and Hoopla has already run a first-hand account of the damage this is doing to the community. Only recently any hope of bipartisanship on this was destroyed when Tony Abbott unleashed his wrecking ball promising that if he got to government, he would wind back anything that would get in the way of clubs and pubs exploiting problem gamblers http://bit.ly/se1wbe. His partner in this, shock jock Alan Jones, told ABC AM: "Pre-commitment gambling will erode the fabric of Australian life

But as this blog here shows, the nonsense being sprouted about the damage to the community in pre-commitment is twaddle. Just 2.5 per cent of the money they make out of gambling goes back to the community.

A little point I came across while reading up on this is that the take rate of our pokies is the highest in the world and most countries won’t have a bar of what they call “Australian machines”. Reverend Tim Costello said recently: “Australia has the highest number of poker machines per head in the world. There are 197,000 of them nationally and around half are in NSW. We’re not talking about the one-arm bandits of old that took 20 cent pieces. It’s possible to feed $12,000 an hour into modern high intensity machines. The machines are designed to increase playing time and addiction. “

May I add a couple more articles to your reading list to bring you up to speed on what is occurring out there in clubs and pubs?

The first is from The Sydney Morning Herald last Saturday http://goo.gl/QBtSy It takes a bit to shock me but this knocked my socks off.

Another that has stuck with me since I read it months ago is from blogger Or this one from Grog’s Gamut which not only chronicles the despair and horror of the trade but it also fleshes out the sort of money that this industry scoops up http://goo.gl/IdzdW

It is pretty clear that the business model being used by the clubs relies on these poor, sad people churning their life savings, borrowings and anything else they can lay their hands on through the pokies. But the clubs feel they have some sort of moral right to do this, claiming the money from pokies goes back into the communities.

Closer examination reveals this to be bullshit, too. It is hard to know how much the community gets back. But the point is this money would be in the community anyway if it hadn't been poured into the hungry maw of the pokies. The clubs claim the pokie laws could see their incomes drop by between 20 and 40 per cent. Imagine if only 20 per cent of the billions they rake in was circulating in the community and not dropping into the their treasuries. “

The theme of the campaign is that it won’t work. This to me says they know very well it will work and they are spending a lot of money to keep the gravy train rolling.

Fair dinkum, if they were dealing drugs out the back of the clubs, they would probably cause less misery than they do with their unfettered pokies.

More than 61 per cent of Australians want some curbs on the pokies but their voices are not being heard. Instead we are besieged by a small, very wealthy bunch of people who are trying to win the argument by essentially buying the politicians. And if you won't be bought, then the promise is you will be destroyed.

The new NSW Liberal Government is so in bed with the club industry that it looks bought already. Tony Abbott, the family-values man, is against anything that will put a stop to this pernicious industry. I'm putting him down as giving all the appearances of a man who has been bought by the club industry and also Big Mining, as he has said the Labor Government’s modest resource rent tax is for the chop should he get into office.

Is this intimidation? Is it anti-democratic? It’s sure starting to feel like it. In the past year, we have been hit with a barrage of advertising from well-funded special-interest groups who are trying to protect their interests − which in most cases are not the public interest.

Kevin Rudd's resource rent tax was one of the first cabs off the rank. The campaign against that, funded by companies which at the time cried poor but later in the year unveiled astonishing profits, was clearly designed to intimidate and cow the elected government. Lost in the debate was the fact that these companies mine our resources and, when there is no more to mine, they will be out of here like a shot, leaving us to fill in the holes. The idea of the tax was for the country to benefit from this one-off windfall and to use it to get the economy ready for a post-resource-boom environment.

The idea of the tax was that it would be spent in the non-mining sector to lift profits there and to alleviate a growing problem of a two-speed economy. This was to be done with company tax cuts and a rise in the super contribution to 12 per cent.

But Labor Party was spooked by the tsunami of advertising and caved in to big mining and watering down the initial proposal. The ongoing anti- carbon-price ads are astonishing in their duplicity and you wonder if a law requiring a little truth in advertising would alleviate the torrent of bullshit that has poured down on our heads. It has been so effective that some people seem to believe the “carbon tax” will be coming out of their pay, so announcements like this http://goo.gl/k25cN and this http://goo.gl/ws35c are lost under the piles of manure.

And now for the clubs. Their ads are raw in the threats they are circulating through Labor electorates. They have the name and face of the local Labor candidate and just say: vote for poker machine reform and we will unleash a torrent of negative ads on you. It looks and feels like intimidation to me, as well as contempt of parliament. Where is the voice of the 61 per cent of the population being heard?

We have reached a sorry state when it appears governments can be thugged by narrow sectional interests. In a way, it is what the Occupy Wall Street people are on about. The lobbyists and legislators have such a cosy relationship, the rest of us are just left looking in through the window. Soon it may seem that the only way to get there will be to throw a brick through the window. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.