Gambling and the state election

Both Labor and the Coalition have proposed gambling industry reforms, and a number of Teal independents are suggesting that their support for a Coalition or Labor government in a hung parliament scenario would be conditional on support for gambling reform. 

The immense gambling industry has been shunted into a corner. Having been put on the back foot, ClubsNSW was even forced to sack their chief executive on the grounds of a mild comment about Perrottet’s policies being driven by conservative Catholic beliefs. We say mild, because it seems fairly obvious that there is a politically influential strain of religious wowsers that oppose gambling on moral grounds. This tendency was likely behind former Premier Mike Baird’s brief decision to ban greyhound racing. 

This current balance of forces marks a change from previous political battles, like in 2012, where the gambling lobby mobilised large numbers of people and helped spike a deal between Andrew Wilkie and Julia Gillard, something that ultimately played a part in her downfall. 

As it stands, the Coalition is taking a harder line. Political donations from pubs and clubs would be banned, all pokies would become cashless by 2028, legislated breaks for players, optional pre-commitments (a walk-back from the infamous mandatory pre-commitments of the Gillard-Wilkie deal) and a currently vague proposal to have problem gamblers be barred from pokies at the request of friends and family members. The cash ban itself is most significant; while it is driven by standard moral concerns, it has also been pushed for by law and order bigwigs concerned that criminals are using gaming machines to wash money. 

While Labor leader Minns’ original proposal was weaker, involving only a trial of cashless gaming machines, he was prodded into welcoming Perrottet’s announcement. Exactly what Minns would do if he wins remains to be seen. Under Luke Foley, the ALP took a stance firmly against Baird’s greyhound racing ban. Though Minns would likely wish to get the guaranteed support of the gambling lobby, he knows it would be politically unpalatable to openly do so like Foley did.

The scope of the problem

Taking on the gambling industry means viewing the problem clearly. It cannot be underestimated how much the gambling industry, alongside the alcohol industry, has woven itself into everyday life. In countless working-class suburbs, the only public space for socialising is the pub, which is usually filled with poker machines. Even RSLs and bowls clubs are built around them – institutions that also amass hundreds of thousands in government grants. Generally, gambling is not alone as a social vice and rests comfortably alongside other forms of expensive, addictive and mindless entertainment, like binge drinking and collecting Funko Pops.

The gradual withering of community life that has taken place over the last fifty years or so has buttressed the position of the gambling industry, feeding back into that same decline. Once lively local sports clubs now wither on the vine, with the only genuinely popular clubs being rapidly corporatising teams like those in the NRL. 

Whereas the average rugby league team used to be sustained on gate takings and annual membership fees, they are now sustained on TV rights deals and gambling revenue, providing them with little real incentive to actually recruit members, encourage people to attend games or to make junior and reserve grade games a spectator event.

It was good news when tobacco advertising was banned years ago, but professional sports just replaced the loss of money from that with gambling advertising. Even the most “democratic” and community-driven major sporting clubs are dependent on gambling revenue: not just from the immense sponsorship packets and advertising windfall, but from the pokie-filled leagues clubs that many of these teams own.

Poker machines weren’t always the mainstay that they are now, either: they were only legalised in NSW in 1956, and in other Australian states as recently as the 1990s. Yet, they have become an essential financial stream for pubs and clubs in this state. This raises the prospect of gambling regulations and the resulting diminished profits being used by pub and club capitalists to attack their workers. They’ll cut jobs, force them to work longer hours for less, casualise their jobs further, close their workplaces and so on. 

While Perrottet has promised substantial grants for pubs and clubs to “transition” to replacing gambling revenue with money from other streams, like live music, this won’t mean anything for workers: as with pretty much every case of corporate “transition” programmes, the money will just line the bosses’ pockets before they make their inevitable decision to cut their losses and run. 

Just as it is with workers in the fossil fuels industries, unless hospo workers organise and take action with the support of other workers, they’ll end up as the losers no matter what ends up happening. This isn’t a small number of workers, either. Some of these pubs and clubs employ hundreds of people; a gambling megalopolis like Bankstown Sports would probably be the biggest single employer in the entire area, outside of the council itself.

Why we need a working-class fightback

Like all governmental approaches to dealing with vice, gambling reforms may also have the effect of driving the most severely affected people underground. Accessing “virtual casinos” is trivially easy, and when the sites are hosted overseas, there’s virtually no regulations whatsoever. 

The fixation on poker machines is in itself likely to have only diminishing returns, as newer generations of gamblers spend most of their money betting on sports on their phone. The traditional gambling style of spinning savings away down “Where’s the Gold?” in a cordoned-off section of a pub with a dozen sweaty pensioners is already becoming a thing of the past. The sweaty pensioners are dying and the people that would have previously replaced them are now sitting in the comfort of their own home making bets on everything from rugby league to professional table tennis.

In God and the State, Bakunin wrote that the “wretched situation to which [workers] find themselves fatally condemned” provokes a desire to escape, of which there are only three kinds, “two chimerical and the third real […] the first two are the dram-shop and the church, debauchery of the body or debauchery of the mind; the third is social revolution”. One-hundred and fifty years on, we see no reason to disagree. If you want to really deal with gambling you can’t be satisfied with legal reforms: you have to attack capitalism, and the hollow kinds of entertainment it promotes, at the root.

This isn’t a call to leave the problem until the revolution, but to refocus our strategies with that ultimate goal in mind. This isn’t something that can be dealt with by voting for this or that government policy. If we want to take it seriously, we have to situate our struggle on working-class terrain. That means supporting the organisation of workers in the hospitality industry, attacking the corporate power of the big capitalists in the arts and in sports, and fighting for support for gambling addicts from the bottom-up. It’s this kind of action that will move us from this society to the one we actually deserve.