Cats slammed over pokies shift
Councillor slams club for handballing pokies licences, says ...
A GEELONG councillor has laid the boot into the Geelong Football Club, slamming it for publicly exiting the pokies industry while selling its gaming machine licences back into its own community.
Cr Anthony Aitken criticised the football club as councillors voted to fight a Clifton Springs Golf Club application to add 10 pokies machines.
“I think it’s very Pontius Pilate of the Geelong Football Club in that they’ve taken all the praise associated with getting out of gambling, but what they’re doing is inflicting and continuing to inflict the pain on the rest of Geelong,” Cr Aitken said.
A CITY councillor has laid the boot into the Geelong Football Club, slamming it for publicly exiting the pokies industry while selling its gaming machine licences back into its own community.
City of Greater Geelong councillor Anthony Aitken on Tuesday tackled the football club for washing its hands of the issue, as councillors voted to allocate $30,000 to fight a Clifton Springs Golf Club application to add 10 pokies machines to its gaming room.
“I think it’s very Pontius Pilate of the Geelong Football Club in that they’ve taken all the praise associated with getting out of gambling, but what they’re doing is inflicting and continuing to inflict the pain on the rest of Geelong,” Cr Aitken said.
“They have very publicly said they’ve got out of pokies machines, but what they have done is they’re selling them out to the broader Geelong community … there’s 110 of them the football club’s trying to flog off.
“They could have handed back these licences to the State
Government and the commission but they chose not to, they actually chose to sell them into the broader community.”
The Geelong Football Club did not respond to the Geelong Advertiser’s request for response yesterday.
In December the Cats confirmed they would sell a Point Cook pokies business, ending a dependence on gambling revenue that brought in up to $4 million a year at its peak.
Cats chair Colin Carter in December said the choice was a matter of principle.
“We understand that gambling is a legal activity. We understand that for a lot of people it’s harmless, but we also know that it’s not harmless for everybody,” he said.
“We want to be a positive force in the community, so making money out of something that is harmful to some people is not a business we wanted to be in.”
Alliance for Gambling Reform chief advocate Tim Costello this week praised the Geelong Football Club for its recent decision to exit the gaming industry, and lobbied for a decrease in the number of pokie machines across the region.
“One of the quickest boosts that could occur in Geelong’s economy would be taking poker machines out of the equation,” he said.
“They are designed to be deliberatively addictive and are really no different to cigarettes when you look at them from that context.”
Geelong councillors on Tuesday resolved to spend $30,000 on legal counsel and an expert consultant to fight the application by the Clifton Springs Golf Club, which hopes to increase its pokies offering from 40 to 50 machines.
The latest electronic gaming figures show punters lost $1.87 million to the Clifton Springs Golf Club’s 40 machines in the last six months of 2019.
The club had applied to the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation for the extra machines.
The city has opposed the two previous applications for more pokies from local venues, unsuccessfully against the Belmont RSL and successfully against the Geelong Polish Association.
In 2019 Geelong’s pokies swallowed a total of $120.3 million.