After more than a decade in politics, I have sadly grown used to watching the often bizarre stances taken by other pollies and wondering why they are doing what they are doing.
The response of some members of the Coalition to the poker machine issue is a case in point.
To truly understand the Coalition’s current position on pokies, you need to know it has nothing to do with pokies.
It’s about power. They want it (who can blame them), and they think they can use this issue to get it.
And if the hundreds of thousands of Australians have their lives ruined through lack of reform, is that a price the Coalition seems willing to pay.
Stephen Ciobo’s piece for The Punch about this issue was a sad example of the knots the Coalition is willing to tie itself into, in order to ignore the bleeding obvious.
That is, that poker machines are an intensely addictive and dangerous form of gambling and that 40 per cent of all losses on poker machines come from problem gamblers.
I know there are members of the Coalition who care deeply about this issue.
But it seems, officially, politics has trumped good policy, and the Coalition has seen this issue as an opportunity to try and drive a wedge between Andrew Wilkie and the Labor Government.
It is a condition of Andrew Wilkie’s support for the Labor that it introduce better protections for poker machine gamblers.
But rather than focussing on any solution, the Coalition seems to have decided that if they can block reform, Andrew will be forced to withdraw his support for the current Government, and the Opposition will be one step closer to the trappings of power.
Even in a cynical world like politics, this seems to be a new low.
Stephen Ciobo, whose seat incidentally contains Jupiter’s Casino, seems to want to argue that the problem is with the addicted gamblers, not with the product.
This is a stupid argument.
It’s a bit like saying people die in car crashes no matter how safe the cars are, so why bother with seatbelts and airbags.
His selective use of experts and information from the Gambling Reform Committee seems right out of the Clubs Australia play book.
He quotes the Warfield and Associates investigation which found that poker machines were the most common way to gamble stolen money.
But rather than proposing ways we can better regulate the industry to reduce the problem gambling that can lead to crime, Stephen instead mounts the flimsy argument that ‘Hey if they’re desperate enough to steal, they’ll find ways to get around any player protections.’
By that logic, I assume Stephen is against speed limits, because some people are going to speed anyway.
Can we also assume it will be Coalition policy to legalise heroin because ‘druggies’ as Stephen so delicately labels them, will shoot up anyway?
No-one is pretending anything any Government does will wipe out poker machines addiction completely.
This is about reducing the harm. This is about making a dangerous product safer.
Stephen also quotes Dr Sally Gainsbury from Southern Cross University, without including the pertinent fact that she actually supports the Government’s policy of mandatory pre-commitment as one of a number of measure to reduce gambling addiction.
Stephen also quotes Professor Alex Blaszczynski from the University of Sydney. Interestingly the industry love quoting Alex, and have funded significant amounts of his research.
Using Alex’s quotes Stephen argues that the focus on federal player protections might take away from “the current measures that have helped reduce the rate of problem gambling.”
Those “current measures” are deliberately ineffectual measures like little signs, and lame websites that the industry has agreed to because it knows they don’t work, and won’t reduce revenue.
And in case you don’t think this is all about politics for the Coalition, Stephen completely gives the game away in his final paragraph by writing the increased player protections are “the ransom demand of a rogue MP – and Julia Gillard and Labor are prepared to pay what ever the cost in order to cling to power.”
But let’s not forget who will pay for this Coalition’s cynical power play.
It’ll be the children who go hungry, the small businesses that are robbed, and loved ones who suicide because these unsafe product weren’t made safer.
That’s the potential price of this power play, and conveniently for the Coalition, someone else will pay it.
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