Profits from misery

LIKE many Tasmanians, I know someone whose life has been ruined by an addiction to the pokies. She lost her home and savings.

The fallout from her personal destruction has since spread through her family and created years of grief.

It has triggered personal tension and bad blood between loved ones.

When you hear about this type of family tragedy, the potential for terrible harm that comes with gaming machines hits home hard. It’s real. It has an acute edge and a chronic persistence. It’s heart-breaking. When you consider that these machines are designed to prey on psychological weaknesses that are in all of us, to encourage us to keep playing, it adds a sinister element to the family breakdowns and personal devastation.

When you think that some people are so prone to the inbuilt psychological barbs that they become addicted and are willing to lose everything to keep playing the machines, it is seriously worrying.

The fact some people profit from all this misery is disturbing.

Most of us know of the carnage left by pokies addiction.

The fact we know this is the main reason independent member for Denison Andrew Wilkie is such an extraordinarily popular MP.

Wilkie’s political platform for the past seven years has been founded firmly on his tireless crusade against the pokies. Few politicians have enjoyed such popularity, even Labor’s Duncan Kerr, who held Denison for 23 years, could not boast Wilkie’s overwhelming peaks of support.

If the pokies issue assumes a significant role in the campaign leading to the state election, as Labor leader Rebecca White hopes, Will Hodgman’s Liberals will fail to get traction in Denison.

White’s policy to ban the pokies from pubs and clubs is a bold, but not extravagant, election strategy.

Yes, there will be voters who do not give a damn about the misery caused by the pokies and who are happy to let people suffer to maintain their right to feed a few coins into a slot at their local. Bugger everyone else. It’s a dog eat dog world, after all.

Yes, there will be other voters who will get bamboozled by the slick advertising campaigns headed our way that will predict ruin for the state’s economy and forecast widespread job losses if the machines are not allowed to stay in neighbourhood pubs and clubs. Some people are gullible. Y es, there will be others willing to buy the argument that to ban the pokies from pubs and clubs is part of an evil Greens conspiracy. Some people are easily spooked.

But most people in Denison are not that stupid.

Most of us know the horrid truth about the pokies. Many of us have seen the misery. And most of us care about our communities.

An incredible $11.6 billion is lost to poker machines nationally.

Tasmania’s losses are just short of $200 million, which is shocking in itself, but the most alarming aspect is that about $80 million of these losses come from problem gamblers. Glenorchy has 270 of the state’s 3596 poker machines. The Glenorchy machines rake in more than $21 million a year from gamblers every year.

As a rule, I support personal freedom. I regard myself a libertarian.

I do not like the state intruding on citizens’ freedom to conduct their lives as they see fit.

I feel many, if not most, attempts to legislate for these kinds of social issues fail to achieve what they intended. The intrusion of the Nanny State does not work most of the time.

I much prefer the use of education, social discourse and leading by example as the means to arrive at shared values and community visions. It’s a slower process, and it’s frustrating, but it works better in the long term.

People should, I think, be able to feed a coin into a slot if they want.

However, the case put by the anti-pokies campaigners in the past few years has been convincing.

People are profiting from misery caused by machines designed to prey on our psychological yearnings to the extent they are regarded the crack cocaine of gambling.

To get them out of our neighbourhoods to remove the ease with which vulnerable people can access them makes sense. It is not a great incursion into our liberties.

Labor’s policy is not a wholesale ban. Punters will still be able to play the machines if they are willing to travel.

I reckon there are many Denison voters who enjoy the occasional bit of fun on the pokies and who care enough about their neighbourhood and their community to be willing to travel a little further to have their punt.

POKER machines could dictate the outcome of the Tasmanian election in March.

With the Liberal and Labor parties neck and neck in the latest opinion polls, and the community anxious to see the removal from the suburbs and country towns of electronic bandits with their annoyingly intrusive jangling bells and flashing lights to camouflage the sound of pay-packets being emaciated, this promises to become an election fought on gambling.

Andrew Wilkie set the antipoker machine hounds running when he stood initially for the federal seat of Denison in 2010 and proved community concern about the insidious proliferation of slot machines was enough of an issue to get him elected.

With the malignant effects of poker machines still near the top of his list of social issues, Wilkie has managed to be twice re-elected, each time increasing his majority.

It will be a foolhardy party that ignores the sentiment being expressed by the Tasmanian electorate — that slot machines have no place in hotels and clubs, which until the 1990s managed to survive quite nicely without them.

The evidence is overwhelming that poker machines — designed to take players’ money as quickly as possible by delivering small wins to disguise much bigger overall losses — have enormously harmful effects by vacuuming millions of dollars out of communities where it would otherwise be spent in local businesses that provide the essential goods and services of family life.

Exaggerated screams about prospective job losses have already started from the cashed-up Tasmanian Hospitality Association and Federal Hotels.

Wayne Crawford

But on the opposite side will be a coalition of community organisations that wants to see poker machines restricted to casinos.

Paradoxically, the conservative Australian Christian Lobby and the Leftleaning GetUp! movement — which until a couple of weeks ago were fiercely advocating opposite positions on gay marriage — have joined forces. The ACL has endorsed Rebecca White’s policy on phasing out poker machines as “the type of leadership the community is looking for”.

GetUp! is among a formidable list of community groups that has long supported the “Pokies Out” movement, also including bodies ranging from municipal councils to churches, Tasmanian Council of Social Service to the CWA, from the Council on the Ageing to Youth Network Tasmania, Lifeline to Hobart City Mission.

“Rarely has there been such a strong collective voice for change in our state,“says Anglicare’s Meg Webb.

The campaign has pitted Glenorchy local hero Mona’s David Walsh against the Sydney multi-millionaire Farrell family, which owns Federal Hotels and Wrest Point.

It sets popular new Labor Leader Rebecca White against one of her predecessors Paul Lennon, who moved from the premiership to signing up as a lobbyist on the payroll of Federal Hotels.

While the Tasmanian Hospitality Association describes itself as “the peak industry body for hotels, restaurants, cafes, pubs and clubs in Tasmania,” the poker machine issue has split the organisation.

Author and anti-poker machine campaigner James Boyce makes the point that only about a quarter of the state’s hotels have poker machines and that 70c of every $1 lost to slot machines in pubs and clubs goes straight to Federal Hotels, which is the monopoly owner of all pokies in Tasmania.

Little wonder Federal Hotels is screaming blue murder with exaggerated claims that the policy will “decimate” the industry.

Haven’t we heard the same overblown rhetoric before?

When it was proposed smoking be banned in hotels, the warnings were that the pubs would all be ruined and social life as we know it would end — whereas businesses and customers simply adapted. Life moves on. Surely businesses that rely for survival on fleecing customers with poker machines need to have a good look at their business plans.

As for Federal Hotels, if it cannot make its business work while still guaranteed a monopoly on casino gambling and poker machine operation in the event that slot machines are removed from other pubs and clubs, then there is something very peculiar.

In fact, Federal Hotels chief Greg Farrell has done a spectacular backflip. He was remarkably prescient in his submission to the Legislative Council select committee in 1993 when opposing the outrageous notion that pubs and clubs should be allowed to compete with his casinos by introducing poker machines. His unambiguous warning to the committee was that the spread of pokies to the suburbs and regions “would have a disastrous effect (on) the social fabric and special culture of Tasmania”.

That was, of course, before Federal was handed a monopoly on ownership of all Tasmanian poker machines and guaranteed a multimillion-dollar return whether the buttons are pushed and the lights are flashing in pubs, clubs or casinos.

Slot machines were introduced by stealth and against community opinion. Although Tasmania was the first state to allow legal casinos, the original legislation explicitly forbade poker machines, which were considered by both Labor and the Liberals in the 1960s and 1970s as the crack cocaine of gambling.

Only more sophisticated casino games such as roulette, chemin de fer and blackjack were legalised initially in Wrest Point and the Launceston Country Club.

What were at first highclass casino venues became what Boyce describes as “pokie barns” — similar to Sydney western suburbs leagues clubs — in the 1980s when poker machines were introduced by stealth under the misleading description, Electronic Gaming Machines.

Rebecca White and her state Labor colleagues knew full well their audacious policy to remove poker machines from the suburbs and country towns would be met with howls of protest from the vested interests.

It was a brave decision to break the decades-old nexus between politics and pokies after years of politicians of all