Restore Power over Gaming to the People

The Bracks government has promised to re-regulate the gaming industry by banning 24-hour poker-machine venues outside Melbourne and by retaining the cap on the number of machines in the State. It has also expressed sympathy for the idea of restoring planning controls over the location and operation of licensed venues to local councils, meaning that communities such as the northern suburbs of Geelong would no longer be faced with the prospect of 24-hour ‘pokies’ without having any say in the matter.

This is good news, since the recently published interim Report of the Productivity Commission into gambling in Australia found that 15 per cent of non-lottery gamblers were problem gamblers and their losses made up one-third of the industry’s total market. More recently, the Vietnamese community has gone public about the devastation being caused to its members by gambling.

The industry’s defence that it creates jobs rings hollow when we consider that those jobs are in such a large measure the fruits of the devastating losses of other members of the community. The industry also argues that it simply supplies the demand of a market, particularly in locating its poker machines in poorer suburbs. In the light of the effects of gaming in those suburbs, our response is that all this shows is that markets are ruled by money, not morality. Governments must therefore regulate markets when the common good demands it.

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