Which metaphor best describes the parasitic and perniciously harmful effect of the outsized gambling industry on Australian society and our body politic? In the sixteenth century Rabelais created a giant Gargantua with a relentless appetite for eating humans, and more recently his name was used for a vast destructive black hole in Interstellar.
Alp-Luachra is an Irish-Celtic newt-like fairy that enters a sleeping person’s throat to nest in the stomach, eating the host’s food until the victim starves. It can be forced out by eating salted food and refraining from water until the creature crawls out for a drink.
Folklore everywhere have vampires and blood-sucking demons. Or we could refer to real world parasitic fungi, mistletoe on trees and hook worms in human intestines to describe the gambling sickness.
All those metaphors can be used for the Gambling Industry (GI) and its successful lobby group Responsible Wagering (no irony) Australia (RWA), which uses that euphemistic verb instead of betting or gambling.
Gambling includes lotteries, pokies, racing, on-line betting and more. An estimated 65-73% of Australians gamble at least once a year, with 38% gambling weekly. Total legal gambling losses in the country are estimated at $25-35 billion or $1500 per adult p.a. Folks, this is a national public health problem of pandemic proportions that we choose to leave untreated, with catastrophic impacts on 15% of the population who suffer gambling-related harm.
The contagion infects our social institutions, sports and media landscape, in more pernicious ways. Clubs and pubs awash with poker machines prey on locals and then generously ‘sponsor’ sports teams from those same ill-gotten gains. For state and territory governments gambling provides 6% to 11% of tax incomes, so they’re on the teat too. Free-to-air TV networks earn 11% of their advertising revenue from GI. Our sacrosanct football codes, AFL and NRL, also rely heavily on GI sponsorships. So, it’s actually a chronic, whole-of-society malaise, with advertising slogans plastered on sporting venues and players’ bodies, and gambling is socially normalised and integrated in our sacred tribal activities.
These interlocking co-dependencies were on display with the recent roll-over of our Federal parliament in its long-awaited legislative response to the so-called Murphy Report, named after a deceased Labor MP, whose multi-party parliamentary committee concluded that gambling advertising on TV should be banned, along with inducements, commissions and other manipulations. The new laws limit some advertising periods and tinker around the edges of burgeoning new digital access and apps targeting young people. The government even admitted that the free-to-air TV business model relied on gambling advertising to survive, and therefore must be saved!
But here’s the rub: all this parliamentary effort and blah blah was about gambling advertising and inducements, and nothing to do with reducing the actual harm done by gambling, with nothing to say about reducing the physical and digital infrastructure of GI around the country.
NSW infamously has 90,000 or twenty percent of the world’s poker machines and 37% of those outside of casinos worldwide, with the highest per capita in the world. Rampant money-laundering continues in our clubs and pubs, after casinos were finally reined in after decades of flagrant abuse. Club Marconi in western Sydney has a VIP Diamond Suite for their gamblers with a minimum $500,000 outlay p.a, including a 62 y.o. welfare recipient and public housing tenant!
A recent NSW Labor party conference called for a reduction in the number of pokies, but don’t hold your breath. Present policy is a two-for-one reduction arrangement when poker machine entitlements are transferred, with current estimates of thirty-five years to reduce the total number by a half. Mandatory facial recognition may get up, but cashless gaming, identified years ago as a major fix for money laundering and harm reduction, is still waiting on the sideline. The NSW government’s modus operandi for gambling reform is capitulation plus procrastination.
Surprisingly the sandgroper state out west is an inspirational model: like most of the rest of the world, it does not allow pokies outside their casino, full stop. They have plenty of thriving clubs and pubs, and their gambling losses per capita are a fraction of the eastern states. The real poker machine fix is staring at the easties from across the Nullarbor!
The aforementioned GI lobby group RWA was recently shown to be a prominent sponsor of the Australian Parliament Sports Club, where they socialise with our Federal politicians, along with industry lobbyists from fossil fuels, alcohol and consultancy sectors. The uncontrolled lobbyist influence on our paramount decision-makers is a story of institutional corruption for another day, meantime check out the recent Four Corners program. The clubs and hotel associations are of course large donors to both main sides of politics.
The application of an Alp-Luachra cure of metaphoric heavy salts and water deprivation for the gambling monster parasite afflicting Australian society seems a long way off. Meantime, I reckon our collective acquiescence remains a dark blight on the mental landscape, indeed the soul, of this illusory Fair Go country.
I am ashamed for us, and ashamed of our gutless gambling-industry-captured political leaders: no pokies, pollies!
KOOKYNIE COURIER 