Now our Melbourne Cup flutters are out of the way it is worth investigating how it became valid political logic that the healthy fabric of Australian life would be shredded without big-scale gambling.
Not on horses, but gambling on pokies. Not by once-a-year punters or leviathan professionals, by low-income earners who can suddenly find their rent has disappeared down the maw of a gaming machine.
The glorified role of pokies is a political creation and it is total rubbish.
In fact a lot of rubbish is emerging from the crypt of stupidities where it should have been sealed for eternity. There is pro-pokie madness in the air.
Remember when Cate Blanchett was close to being burned at the stake for supporting a price on carbon in a TV advertisement in which she shared the screen with five others? How dare a rich woman advocate something that would increase household expenses.
But recently, billionaire gambling magnate James Packer turned up to make his thoughts clear on Government plans to introduce mandatory pre-commitment for bets on “intensive” gaming machines. The idea is to help problem gamblers keep their money.
There was no pillorying Packer for speaking out while being a wealthy owner of international casino interests. There was an obedient hush as - surprise, surprise - he objected to the policy.
What a shock.
Blanchett and Packer are perfectly entitled to make their minds known on important public issues, but it seems some elitists are worthier than others when it suits this climate of pro-pokie madness.
One reason the rubbish is being distributed so effectively is that the mandatory pre-commitment policy is not Government policy. It was forced on them by independent MP Andrew Wilkie as a condition of his support for a minority government.
The carbon pricing scheme also is a policy which belongs to someone else, in this case the Greens.
But the fact the Government doesn’t own outright the gambling policy is a more stark instance, and this absence of clear and unencumbered title is making the Government vulnerable to political campaigns.
Those campaigns are largely based on the proposition that suburban Australia would not have the facilities it does today without the massive amounts of cash delivered by row upon row of poker machines, configured to never lose at the end of the day, in local clubs.
This isn’t a national argument. The social fabric of communities in Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania seem to get along intact without the huge pokie concentrations of Queensland and NSW.
But apparently the Government’s proposals are a national affront, and a guaranteed wrecker of communities, say the clubs and their political allies.
Yesterday, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott visited a bowling club in the Canberra suburb of Turner.
“Mandatory pre-commitment is the price millions of Australians are having to pay to save Julia Gillard’s job,” said Mr Abbott, who about a year ago offered Wilkie a $1 billion Hobart hospital for his support of a Coalition minority government.
He said gambling paid for not only games of bowls, but also for facilities used by a local choral group.
“The interesting thing is that the bowling facilities here are funded at least in part by the revenue that is generated from the poker machines. You want to be as confident as you can be that people are only putting what they can afford through the poker machines.
“But we have to accept the reality that there are an enormous number of community facilities in NSW, Queensland and the ACT which are funded in this way, and if the funding source is no longer there, or if the clubs supplying the funding are burdened up with unnecessary additional costs it’s going to be much harder.”
Perth bowls clubs, apparently, are in “a different situation”, said Abbott.
“If you were starting from scratch you would probably do a whole lot of things differently,” he acknowledged.
So poker machines are not pivotal to community development, and are not an optimal revenue source for that development, Abbott concludes. Therefore, we can conclude they are vital only to poker machine clubs.
Now, here’s a radical view - at least radical for the current Liberal Party: What if all that money lost to poker machines instead was spent in the local high street where individuals not clubs were powering enterprise?
What if that dough instead went to the florist, the newsagency, the dress-maker’s shop, restaurants, the milk bar, book stores, the panel beater, the butcher, the baker, the quartz-halogen lamp maker?
This would be a superior, more effective, more socially safe way of spreading a community’s money and strengthening that community.
Poker machine money gets skimmed for taxes, club expenses and profits, and then maybe some makes it way to local sports groups or charities.
Same, to a degree, with local businesses, who would be hiring staff and adding life to moribund precincts. The difference is nobody has gone broke and been forced to sell their home to pay debts from shopping at a milk bar or a news agency.
But those small enterprises find survival difficult and in pokie-riddled areas it is because the pokie palaces are sucking the cash and the consumer interest out of a locality.
And that is what we are meant to be championing, it seems.
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