Monday 29th of April 2024
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the art of gaming .....

the art of gaming .....

from Crikey …..

Did Joe Hockey and Barry O'Farrell watch Packer on 60 Minutes?

Stephen Mayne writes:

60 MINUTES, CASINO LICENCE, CASINOS, CHANNEL NINE, CROWN CASINO, JAMES PACKER, KARL STEFANOVIC

The first time I met Joe Hockey was 19 years ago in the back of a cab from Sydney Airport with my then boss, Victorian treasurer Alan Stockdale.

Joe was working for NSW Premier John Fahey and we were packed into the cab like sardines listening to the big guy rattle off all the things making life tough for the minority NSW government. One of them was Kerry Packer’s tactic of buying up various parcels of land around the proposed site of Sydney’s first casino.

As fate would have it, in the end it was effectively Stockdale’s actions that determined the long-term ownership of Sydney’s monopoly casino.

Packer missed out on the Sydney casino tender and later walked away from an agreed takeover. Stockdale floated Victoria's TAB on the ASX for $675 million in August 1994 and Tabcorp then bought Sydney’s Star City Casino for $1.8 billion in late 1999.

Fast forward to May this year and James Packer is openly campaigning on a range of fronts to secure control of all casino gambling in his home town.

While Karl Bitar might have been the national secretary of the ALP in 2010 who thought his NSW Right mate Craig Thomson would be a great candidate in Dobell, it hasn't stopped Packer’s Crown Ltd hiring Bitar to run the casino billionaire’s government relations campaigns in Canberra. This clearly includes a big Chinese gambler tourism message, which is assisted by having Crown director Geoff Dixon as chairman of Tourism Australia.

If given an opportunity, it will be great to engage with Hockey on these issues when we both appear on Q&A tonight.

You see, while Tony Abbott is worried the Gillard government’s latest cash splash will be spent on the pokies, it is Hockey’s great moderate mate Barry O’Farrell who currently presides over Australia’s slackest regulatory regime for poker machines and is encouraging Packer’s Sydney casino push.

When you consider all the evidence-based research on gambling addiction by the Productivity Commission, it is truly amazing O’Farrell recorded a three-minute video for the Clubs NSW website before the last election.

Indeed, an MoU O’Farrell signed with Clubs NSW basically gave them everything they wanted. The Clubs described it as follows:

"The NSW Liberals and Nationals have signed a Memorandum of Understanding that represents an outstanding statement of support for clubs, large and small, and provides much needed certainty in all our key areas of operation. The centrepiece is a commitment to reduce club tax by $300 million over four years and to introduce a ClubGrants scheme (replacing CDSE) to boost club support of worthy local community programs and organisations, and to fund major projects around the state.

The MoU also commits the NSW Liberals and Nationals to: supporting a precommitment system that is voluntary for the player, venue-based, and cost effective; maintaining existing conditions for maximum bets, reel spin speeds, cash insertion, ATM placement and withdrawal limits, and payment of prizes by cheque; and rescinding section 41X of the Registered Clubs Act and introducing a "reasonable steps" defence for club managers into the Liquor Act."

One interesting element of the four-year agreement with Clubs NSW is that the O’Farrell government will "not allow additional casinos". That runs smack-bang into Packer’s campaign to build a tables-only high-roller facility at Barangaroo aimed at Chinese tourists.

The Packer campaign went mass market last night when 2011 Gold Logie winner Karl Stefanovic proved once and for all why he’ll never win a Gold Walkley with an appalling pro-casino puff piece on 60 Minutes. It’s hard to know where to start, but SBS Insight host Jenny Brockie was putting it mildly when she tweeted:

"Staggering puff piece on 60 mins pushing James Packer's casino plans. Tourism problems so easily solved. Nature out, casinos in."

You’d have thought Nine would have learnt the lesson after the backlash about the Clubs NSW scripts that were read out on prime time slamming mandatory precommitment during an NRL final. Yet here we had a guffawing Packer arguing 13 casinos and 190,000 poker machines is not enough for Australians, already the biggest gamblers in the world.

The 60 Minutes piece demonstrates Packer doesn’t need to own a television station to benefit. It is far cheaper to have your best mate David Gyngell installed as CEO by the same private equity wood ducks that handed over $5.5 billion for PBL Media.

Packer would have a bit more credibility if he returned to his original opposition of separating Crown from the clubs and pubs spread across Australia. At the 2009 Crown AGM, Packer slammed the pubs and clubs on problem gambling when he declared:

"No one else in Australia has introduced a precommitment scheme across their gaming machine operation. In fact, the rest of the industry is still debating whether a precommitment system should be adopted in the years to come."

However, the Andrew Wilkie proposal united the entire industry, with Packer and even Woolworths signing up to the anti precommitment campaign co-ordinated by Clubs NSW.

In light of everything that has happened with Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper, surely Julia Gillard and the broader Labor movement now realises it would have been better to stare down the captured politicians in the NSW Right and deliver on her pokies deal with Andrew Wilkie.

Instead, they again listened to Bitar who is pocketing plenty of Packer cash for his efforts.

 

dancing in the dark .....

That people have lost faith in the political class and its doings is one of the truisms of our time.

Have our expectations been unreasonable? Probably not.

Presumably most of us ask little more of government than that it represent and pursue our best interests, individually and collectively.

That sounds tidily self-evident, anything but unreasonable. And then you look around at the various shards of shattered public policy that litter the ground about us and you wonder.

Too often politics can pursue the narrower interests of its practitioners rather than the broader concerns of the people that it nominally serves. Disappointing, and yet we get that. It's just self interest after all.

It's not as if the political class was actively pernicious. Malignant. Predatory. Is it?

The Age did a pretty good data crunch of numbers from the ABS yesterday, looking at poker machine use across Victoria. It found that overwhelmingly, by weight of numbers and presumably misery, the greatest losses to the pokies were felt by the poorest people in the state.

Adults in Greater Dandenong, in Melbourne's south-east, lost more on the machines per person than those in any other local government area in Victoria during the 2010-11 financial year.

For every adult who lives in the area, $1,110 was lost on poker machines. While this figure may include losses of people who live outside the area, it stands starkly against the local average income of $426 a week.

There are 944 poker machines in greater Dandenong at 15 venues. Applications have been lodged for more. Access is easy, with 8.9 machines per 1,000 people. Contrast this with leafy Boroondara, a middle-class nest of suburbs in Melbourne's inner east.

Here: 

... the median individual income per week was $836 and the amount lost to pokies per adult was the lowest of any Melbourne municipality - $153 in 2010-11, or almost 20 per cent of weekly income.

Boroondara, which encompasses the suburbs of Balwyn, Kew and Ashburton, has just 1.6 machines per 1,000 adults, or one machine for every 645 adults.

So there we have it, poker machine numbers and losses, like obesity, violent crime and long-term unemployment are a function of socio-economics. Which may be the way in which our system of markets and opportunity gravitates: to take most from those least equipped to resist. One might almost imagine a prophylactic role for government here ... if one assumed benevolent intent of governments.

But no, our governments, state and federal, of all complexions, merely regulate the flow of the pokies, and shy away from any action or law which might obstruct the access of this industry to its markets.

Imagine, at some point, the idea of the poker machine must surely have been pitched to the relevant authority...

Minister, this is what we have in mind. We have developed a device the entices people to gamble small but quickly snowballing amounts against impossible odds, machines weighted mechanically to favour the proprietor in preposterous proportions. Machines will be operated in their thousands by some of the country's largest corporate interests, sub-let to community organisations and local entertainment hubs.

The machines will be physically and psychologically enticing. We will commit vast resources to ensuring that they are irresistible. We will locate them primarily among the disadvantaged, people with few recreational options, whose lives are marked quite often by a sense of either purposelessness or quiet desperation and ennui.

They will extract vast sums from these communities. They will be addictive.

What's in it for you minister? Well revenue. We estimate that by 2012 some 10 per cent of state revenues will be derived from poker machines. They will become an intrinsic, inextricable component of your fiscal structures.

And there we are, government convinced to betray the interests of its most needy citizens. They should have read the fine print.

Should you resist at some point, should you attempt tighter regulation of our business to ease some of its obvious social harm, then we will campaign vigorously against you. We will argue that the revenue from these machines is in fact the lifeblood of the communities that host them. Absurd of course, since the relationship is entirely parasitic, but we will make the case stick.

Which leaves us with an industry worth billions that has defined its most lucrative markets among the poor and disadvantaged. An industry licensed by government. An industry that in turn diverts a fraction of that vast, socially regressive revenue stream to government coffers.

And we wonder why people lose faith with the people elected to represent them and guard their interests. It is perhaps just a matter of lost common decency. A betrayed hope that there might be some moral sense guiding their actions.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.

Government Betrays Its Most Needy Citizens