Tony Abbott described the events in Canberra yesterday surrounding the speakership of the Parliament as a bad day for democracy. Abbott was right, but for the wrong reasons.
The most undemocratic outcome of yesterday’s events could now be that a reform aimed at making life more bearable for problem gamblers, which is supported by a majority of Australians, will now be dumped because Labor has the numbers in the house to get away with pulling it, thus avoiding a fight to the death with powerful gambling interests.
Labor might have been cock-a-hoop at yesterday’s developments but the people who will be even happier are the cashed-up, morally ambivalent multi-millionaires in the gaming industry, who have been escalating their self-interested campaign to knock off suburban Labor MPs lest the Government support the proposed pokie reforms.
Their deceitful campaign is now much closer to victory because the Government no longer needs the support of anti-problem gambling independent Andrew Wikie to remain in power.
The Government can now water down or even shelve the proposals for mandatory pre-commitment, whereby gamblers have to state in advance how much money they are prepared to wager per session on the pokies. There are many people in the ALP who want the proposal modified or scrapped, nowhere more so than in the vast marginal electorates of suburban Sydney, where these mega-clubs have become the dominant if not sole venue for social interaction in so many communities. With tens of thousands of members, the club bosses can easily mobilise the community to knock off its local members with ease. Walk into any of these clubs right now in Penrith, Revesby, Mt Druitt, and you can’t move for ludicrous signage about the so-called Licence to Punt we will all need under this totally unastrayan attack on our civil liberties.
This is the issue for democracy out of yesterday. Not what Abbott was saying, nor what Gillard was saying, as they argued about the mechanics and merits of the change in the speakership.
The Coalition’s anger and Labor’s undisguised glee at Peter Slipper’s decision to rat on his party is all about politics at its most raw, about politics as gamesmanship. The identity of the speaker will have no discernible impact on anyone’s quality of life.
That’s not quite true – it will have a discernible impact on the quality of Peter Slipper’s life. It is worth stressing that there is no grand issue of principle behind his decision to quit. Far from it. Peter Slipper wants the payrise, the flash car, the pomp that comes with the job. He is a seriously unspectacular MP, famous almost solely for falling asleep in the chamber, and who is deservedly under fire for preselection in his Sunshine Coast seat from the vastly more talented and intelligent former Aboriginal Affairs minister Mal Brough. It is probably his last term, and he knows it, and he’s grabbing some extra dosh before he returns to a life of appropriate anonymity.
Abbott’s talk about democracy was all about party-political self-interest, in the same way that Labor’s covert wrangling to shunt Harry Jenkins aside and coax Slipper into quitting was all about improving its own position in this most precarious of parliaments. Improve it Labor has. It now has a buffer of 76 votes to 73 on the floor, a vast improvement on its position where it was at the mercy of every independent MP who has agreed to support this government.
It is here where the genuine damage is done to our democracy if the Government goes down the cowardly path of dumping the pokies overhaul. Its handling of this issue has been sadly wanting from the start. It lost control of an issue which it originally owned, and has allowed the completely false perception to emerge that it is only looking at the question of problem gambling because it is hog-tied to independents such as Andrew Wilkie in order to stay in power.
The factual reality is completely different. The examination of the gambling industry and, particularly, poker machines was something which the then Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd promised ahead of his 2007 election landslide. Rudd wanted to make it a hallmark of his prime ministership and Julia Gillard inherited that policy challenge when she wrested the leadership from him last year. Andrew Wilkie is sincere and driven on the issue, and the circumstances of last year’s non-result at the election meant it became a valuable bargaining chip for his support. But it was in its inception always going to be a Labor plan.
If pokies reform becomes the first policy casualty of the vagaries of this minority government, and the horse-trading over the speakership, then democracy is in every bit as much trouble than Tony Abbott said it was yesterday, only not for the partisan reasons he gave. It will confirm that the bleatings of a bunch of Les Paterson impersonators from the leagues clubs in Sydney’s west, with all their cant about the money they channel back into the community after first leeching it off the pokie-addicted working class, counts for more than the demands of a community who want something done on a genuinely shocking social problem.
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