THE former Prime Minister Paul Keating once said you should always back self-interest because at least you know the jockey is trying.
Right now quite a few self-interested parties are whipping their horses into a lather in an attempt to win the race for public opinion. I hope Keating is wrong and they lose. You can always tell when self-interest is not in the public interest. It is when self-interested parties use inconsistent arguments to oppose policies that might erode their incomes. Big tobacco, carbon-tax opponents and the mining industry have all been at it.
And now the clubs are arguing that poker-machine pre-commitment limits won’t work but at the same time the limits will cause club incomes to fall so their community work will contract.
The selfishness has spread to the Parliament. Selfish MPs urge their leaders to cave in to the well-resourced selfish campaigners because they might lose their seats. Why don’t they instead have the courage to argue the causes that would best serve the interests of a majority of their constituents?
The position of clubs, football leagues and hotels arguing against the poker-machine restrictions is immoral and inexcusable.
In our ignorance last century we might have had some justification for not worrying. We might have believed that cases of gambling addicts losing their homes, turning to crime, regularly losing whole pay packets or even committing suicide were rare.
Then, in 1999, the Productivity Commission gave us more information. And the exercise was repeated a decade later after the feeble response to the first report.
The commission found that about 15 per cent of poker-machine users were problem gamblers and they contributed about 40 per cent of the total spending on poker machines. Small wonder the clubs are arguing so vociferously against restrictions.
It’s blood money, isn’t it? Armed with this information unrestricted there is no excuse for continuing to take it – especially bearing in mind that about 20 suicides a year can be put down to addiction to poker machine gambling.
The Productivity Commission is not some leftie, hand-wringing outfit engaged in social engineering or political correctness. It is a hard-nosed research outfit that weighs up the costs and benefits of public policy.
Its conclusions are clear. The economic costs of exposing gambling addicts to such an easy method of losing so much money so quickly outweigh the very modest contribution that clubs make to the community.
Even if the clubs made a huge contribution to the community, the blood money would still not be justified – even on purely economic grounds. If you add the human misery, the case for restriction is clear-cut.
Nearly all the money clubs get from poker machines goes in state and territory taxes, administration and subsidies for club members’ meals and the like (which in turn attracts them to the clubs to pay the pokies). A small amount goes to furthering the clubs’ promotion of their own sport. And a tiny bit goes to general community causes.
The bit that goes to community causes is vastly outweighed by the economic cost and human misery inflicted upon problem gamblers.
On the Productivity Commission’s figures, we would be better off banning poker machines outright and have the government give money to the community causes. But that is probably unrealistic.
As in so many areas of public policy we need to strike a balance. Banning gambling, tobacco and other drugs is unworkable. Better to regulate to minimise harm.
Some gambling is relatively harmless. The Sydney Opera House was built on the profits of lotteries. But the lotteries did not consume people’s whole pay packets.
Poker machines are different. The Productivity Commission received evidence about the euphoric effect on the brain of a gamble a second – minor wins urge the addict to gamble more. Elementary mathematics, however, tells you that the more you gamble the more you lose.
In the old days of poker machines with trays of coins, an intelligent Martian arriving on Earth looking at a poker-machine player would quickly grasp the aim of the exercise: to put all of the bits of metal in the tray into the machine until there a no bits of metal left in the tray.
The big trouble now is that the clubs and the machine manufacturers have changed the gambling levels, and governments have turned a blind eye. We used to have 10 cent or 20 cent machines which required the coins to be inserted manually and a handle to be pulled for each gamble. It took enormous physical effort and a lot of time to shovel a week’s pay through such a machine. It was well nigh impossible. Yet they still satisfied the gambling addict’s pursuit of the golden egg, so harm was minimised.
These days, the players no longer put money in a coin at a time – it can be done electronically. And they just press a button, not pull a handle. Moreover, each press can be for an array of a dozen or more combinations, each costing one or two dollars — $20 or more every few seconds. A pay packet in very little time, indeed.
It is no longer harmless, recreational fun.
Now, it may well be that Independent Andrew Wilkie’s prescriptive pre-commitment system has some practical difficulties and is a costly remedy — though it could hardly be more costly than the misery and economic degradation of addicts and their families.
Whatever the detail, his arguments about the effects of the present set-up on problem gamblers are sound and backed up by the Productivity Commission. The arguments to impose major restrictions on how much money people can pour into these machines and how quickly they can do it are compelling.
It may be, incidentally, that the Commonwealth will have to use the expanded corporations power that it got with the Work Choices case, but it would be in a good cause.
In the meantime, the clubs should not be whoring themselves with specious advertising campaigns to retain a system that they have known for a decade to be utterly immoral. Rather they should change the voraciousness of poker machines and seek other sources of funding.
The world will not end. In Western Australia poker machines are banned outside the one Perth casino — yet sport flourishes. Indeed, the West Coast Eagles went from AFL wooden spoon last year to the finals this year and not one player was bought on the immoral earnings of poker machines.
More’s the pity that the Eagles did not make and win the grand final to put paid to the absurd claim by Collingwood manager and slick media performer Eddie Maguire that the proposed restrictions on poker machines are a “football tax”.
Who wants a premiership based on those tainted earnings? Who can look the schoolchildren on club sport outings in the eye and say: “Kick up, kids, 40 per cent of your funding has been extracted from the families of helpless addicts.”
CRISPIN HULL
This column first appeared in The Canberra Times on 1 October 2011.
Thanks,Crispin, this needs to be said more often.
It says something about the quality of our national life that sporting clubs and parents suppporting them are not coming out in large numbers to disclaim that their success is owed in any way to gambling.
This article is excellent and the points you make are spot on.