To borrow from their confected dinki-di lexicon, the Australian gaming industry must be officially up shit creek without a paddle if the best it can do is declare that a carefully-considered package of reforms aimed at helping problem gamblers is “un-Australian.”
If being Australian means turning your back on desperate addicts in the name of multi-billion-dollar profits, maybe we should consider moving overseas.
The good thing about moving overseas would be that we wouldn’t have to endure people rabbitting on about how un-Belgian, un-Mexican or un-Ugandan things had become. It’s a construction which seems peculiar to this country. It’s peculiar alright. We spend a lot of time in this country debating what it is that makes us Australian, yet it seems that the people who run the gambling industry have come up with their handy definition of what it is to be un-Australian.
Indeed the only parallel I can really think of is un-American, a word which has a special place in history as it was used in the 1950s to besmirch people’s names on the basis of their opinions, often regardless of whether they even held such opinions or not.
By the logic of the gaming industry’s committee of un-Australian activities, it is un-Australian to cap the amount of money which problem gamblers can wager at $250 a day. It’s also un-Australian to give problem gamblers the option of declaring in advance how much money they are prepared to gamble.
This daft and meaningless term is the last refuge of the person without an argument.
And the only honest argument the gaming industry has it that it does not want people to stop and think about how much money they will gamble, because people won’t lose as much money. It’s not much of an argument, certainly not a very nice argument.
So instead they cook up a hysterical fear campaign around the fabrication of something called a “licence to punt” - which will never exist, by the way, and has not been under consideration at any stage - and dress it up in knockabout everyman language which treats people like dills.
I wrote a column last month about the pokie debate in the South Australian National Football League which looked at the relationship between the social problems caused by gambling, and the role of the clubs in addressing the social problems they helped create. This was the logic behind the noble but failed push by Souths owners Peter Holmes a Court and Russell Crowe to rid the foundation rugby league club of pokies.
Off the back of the Productivity Commission’s report, I suspect that public sentiment is now even more firmly against vested gaming interests today than it was some four years ago when Holmes a Court and Rusty tried to get rid of the machines at Souths.
The campaign being mounted by the gaming industry is so banal that it may hinder rather than help their cause. Over the years a boy who cried wolf phenomenon has developed with the pubs and clubs, as they claim every effort to stem gambling will lead to their financial ruination. By and large they are still rolling in it. I have more sympathy for the clubs - which unlike the pubs are constitutionally required to return money to the community through sport and services. But over the years, especially while working at the Tele, I’ve heard too many trumped-up claims of financial collapse and mass job losses which have simply not eventuated. Many of the sob-stories have in the past come from clubs such as the Penrith Panthers, which is so big you can actually see it from outer space, or been made by clubs which have been riddled by nepotism in their business practices.
Playing the un-Australian card shows they haven’t really got much of an argument anyway - at least not one that they can put honestly without sounding like they’re simply driven by the bottom line.
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