“There’s a news picture I’d love to see: gambling lobbyists crying. That’s so much better than the misfortunes that flow throughout our community from their unchecked success in peddling misery,” writes HUGH SELBY.
“United we stand, divided we fall” is such an obvious reflection upon life that our failure to observe it would be puzzling to anyone who didn’t understand that “me, me, me” was a much stronger impulse long before the Donnie made it an all-conquering mantra.
There’s a price to be paid for that selfishness and we are all paying it now, albeit that the coinage is still fear. It is not yet starvation. (Selfishly, I am not turning our attention to the innocent dead, wounded, homeless, short-of-food people in war zones.)
In late March the local ACT Liberals (our occasional opposition) picked up on a good idea and called for 50-cent public transport rides.
Sadly, our local megadebt government recoiled at this proposal, but called on their mates on the hill to step up with funds.
Unsurprisingly, our independent senator David Pocock supports the cheap fare idea. He and his team seem to understand the world we live in and the need to have clear policies.
It’s a good idea because no one knows when fuel shipments will resume. Maybe good things will happen next week; maybe next month; maybe next year.
So we need to conserve and we need to do it now.
I applaud Barnaby Joyce for calling it out early. That’s a first for me.
There’s no better reason to encourage people to board our electric buses and the red things than a pending national fossil-fuel disaster.
If the trucks don’t move the food shelves will be bare.
There’s no better immediate inducement to use public transport than making it easy on the purse, so easy that the ACT Government could say (if it had any credibility): “It’s reliable. It’s efficient. You’ll have more funds to combat the rising costs in other parts of our lives”.
For its part the government could provide free commuter parking. But it won’t.
“United we stand. Divided we fall” is something that so many of our politicians (and their supporters) are incapable of understanding.
We saw it recently with the Greens’ membership rejection of any alliance with the Liberals in the local Assembly.
The art of politics is to know how to negotiate agreements that bring about viable alliances. An inability to do that internally consigned the Labor Party to many years in the wilderness. An ability to do it, exemplified by Liberal leader Bob Menzies and National Party leader John McEwen, gave those parties power which would otherwise have been out of reach.
Partners don’t have to agree on everything. On some topics they can be opposed until the end of time, but, and but again, they can agree on how to call a failed government to account. They can demonstrate a capacity to be an effective opposition.
A competent government, a credible government, would have embraced the concept of a cheap fare and said: “Let’s get an urgent briefing for all members of the Assembly from our finance and transport people on the pros can cons.” They would then have ensured that the briefing was well-reported in local media. Any vote would have been well informed. Ain’t that a novel idea? It’s called win-win.
That’s a win for all the politicians and, more importantly, for us.
Everyone has a price, but it varies from one to another
Recently there was a late-night session in the Tasmanian Parliament on minimum requirements to save gambling addicts from themselves.
The proposals were hardly revolutionary or new. If enacted lives, families and jobs would be saved.
The speakers were three independents and a Green who spent a couple of hours detailing the proposals, why they would work, how one or other of the major parties had for a time endorsed this or that part, and how they now both sat silent, refusing to do anything, save for a proposal put by the gambling lobby because they knew it wouldn’t work.
The session was a waste of time. There was no media attention. It was an echo chamber.
One of the Ministers in our ACT government wrote a thesis on gambling. Calls herself Dr Paterson because of that. She asserts that she is, “a leading social policy researcher”. Before going into politics she was the director of the Centre for Gambling Research at the ANU. Now she is the Minister for Gaming Reform and Minister for Corrections, and a failure in both roles.
At the national level Labor has been less than impressive. As reported on March 24: “Late Labor MP Peta Murphy handed down a report into gambling harms in June 2023, which recommended phasing out online gambling advertising, curbing inducements and setting up a national framework… None of the 31 recommendations had been responded to 1000 days later.” See here for more depressing details.
But on Thursday the PM announced a range of obvious steps to stop our children being brainwashed into gambling. Some spine is better after 1000 plus days than never,
Which leaves those in the ACT who are addicted to gambling.
Gambling addicts lose the money that could fund industry-wide curbs on their addictive behaviour to the gambling entities that donate a fraction of those receipts to the major political parties to ensure that there are no effective controls.
It’s a throwback to the way in which the tobacco companies mounted successful advertising and lobbying to encourage smoking, using the profits taken from their dead or soon-to-die customers.
Today’s gambling entities understand what addiction does, just as drug dealers, legitimate and criminal, understand it. The political parties crave funding. The entities pay just enough to ensure that the pollies do nothing to stop the much vaster flow of addicts’ cash to the companies and clubs.
The amounts paid to the political parties are not equal. The pro-gambling lobby know that every addict has a different capacity to pay.
It’s a sweet system. Everyone gets what they want, even if that’s not what any of us need.
To break that cycle there must be a political partnership that starts with the two major parties going cold turkey on gambling industry donations.
Then they must agree on how to end the gambling curse and do it.
Dr Paterson has the knowledge to brief every member of our Assembly on what needs to be done to curb and manage gambling addiction in our community.
To date she’s kept pokies out of the Molonglo Valley. She has called for, but not achieved, cashless gaming. There’s a laughable poker machine cap of 1000 poker machines by 2045.
The only way to get those machines out of ACT gambling sites is for the Labor and the Liberals to act together. While they act separately the gambling lobby spins the wheel of fortune and dictates the plays. Their house wins. We all lose.
There’s a news picture I’d love to see: gambling lobbyists crying. That’s so much better than the misfortunes that flow throughout our community from their unchecked success in peddling misery. United we all can stand.
Hugh Selby is a former barrister and CityNews legal columnist.
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