Clubs Australia plans pokies reform fight

Transcript
TONY JONES, PRESENTER: The licensed club industry is about to launch a $2 million TV and radio ad campaign portraying clubs as the architects of responsible gambling.

With anti-pokie legislation unlikely to pass the Senate and a promised ACT trial of mandatory pre-commitment for pokies stalled, Clubs Australia has seized the initiative, claiming it's now the only body trying to help problem gamblers.

Kerry Brewster reports

KERRY BREWSTER, REPORTER: This is the ad four million-plus viewers will see when they watch the grand final of The Voice on TV next Sunday evening. Clubs Australia is spending millions of dollars placing this feel-good message into high-rating TV programs for the next four weeks.

ANTHONY BALL, CLUBS AUSTRALIA: We want to speak to every Australian about our view of the world. Again, over the last 18 months people have been talking about magical solutions to problem gamblers - on problem gambling. We want people to understand what we've been doing and that we're committed to helping problem gamblers. We want to put the politics behind us and explain that clubs are community institutions that care about their people.

KERRY BREWSTER: So you want to be seen as the good guys?

ANTHONY BALL: Well, I think we are the good guys in many ways. If you go out to Deniliquin or our to Dubbo, most people there would say that they love their club, they vote with their feet, they keep going, membership is increasing.

CHARLES LIVINGSTON, PUBLIC HEALTH & PREVENTATIVE MEDICINE, MONASH UNI.: This is, in my opinion, window dressing. This is an attempt by them to get on the front foot and purport to be the good guys when in fact what they've done is derail effective gambling policy reform in this country and postpone it into the near future, which is exactly the tactic utilised by tobacco, alcohol, asbestos and other dangerous industries who just want to keep making as much money as they can for as long as they can.

KERRY BREWSTER: Australians lose $12 billion a year playing the pokies. 40 per cent of that comes from problem gamblers.

RICHARD DI NATALE, GREENS SENATOR: They've fought every step of the way to prevent real and meaningful reform on poker machines and this is a really cynical exercise by an industry that wants to protect its profits at the expense of problem gamblers.

KERRY BREWSTER: Fierce lobbying by Clubs Australia and other gambling industry groups preceded the collapse last year of the Government's mandatory pre-commitment deal with independent Andrew Wilkie.

Now Clubs Australia says it's identified measures for promoting what it calls harm minimisation and responsible gambling. They include a ban on all forms of credit betting, school-based education and awareness programs, an advertising campaign to promote responsible gambling, the introduction of voluntary pre-commitment technology and third-party interventions whereby venues would offer assistance to a gambler at the request of a family member.

CHARLES LIVINGSTON: The two main and glaring omissions from their policy document are firstly, any attempt to consider $1 dollar maximum bets, that is, substantially reduced maximum bets, which the evidence shows would have a very strong effect on curbing expenditure and harm done to problem gamblers. And, pre-commitment in a mandatory sense, what Mr Wilkie agreed with the Prime Minister was the way forward when she reached agreement with him in 2010. Neither of those are included because both of them would be effective.

KERRY BREWSTER: An idea that failed is how Clubs Australia describes mandatory commitment technology.

ANTHONY BALL: I think in the end just about everybody decided that mandatory pre-commitment was a stupid idea. How do you help problem gamblers by giving them a card to gamble? I don't know that anyone is actually speaking up in favour of that. That's why Nick Xenophon and the Greens and others have gone over to the $1 maximum bet, the next another silver bullet solution. Well again, there's reasons why that won't work.. This is not about any war that was won. This is about us being serious about dealing with problem gambling.

KERRY BREWSTER: The Greens want amendments to proposed legislation ensuring poker machines can be switched to $1 maximum bets.

RICHARD DI NATALI: If we want to achieve meaningful reform, we've got to do something about the poker machines themselves. They're the semi-automatic weapons of the gambling world. We have to put some limits on them. The best way to do it is to put a $1 bet limit on each machine. But failing that, at least get the mandatory pre-commitment technology turned on onto all machines, so that way when a problem gambler goes to have a flutter on the pokies, the harm that will be inflicted on them will be greatly reduced. That should be the aim of any legislation.

KERRY BREWSTER: The terms and conditions of the planned trial of pre-commitment technology is a matter of ongoing negotiation between ACT clubs and the Government.

Kerry Brewster, Lateline.
http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3525566.htm