Devoted Anglican Roger Corbett always knew he was getting Woolworths into bed with a knockabout larrikin when he formed the 70-30 ALH joint venture with pokies billionaire Bruce Mathieson in 2004.

However, you can only imagine what the former Woolies CEO and the current directors thought when Alan Bond’s former business partner went on Jon Faine’s 774 ABC Melbourne morning program on Tuesday and declared the anti-pokies movement was driven by “three imbeciles”. Have a listen to the extraordinary interview.

The men in question were Senator Nick Xenophon, World Vision CEO Tim Costello and Paul Bendat, who runs the www.pokieact.org website.

Costello in particular was singled out by Mathieson for not concentrating on resolving issues with religion: “Why doesn’t he fix up his own?” Mathieson asked. “Is there any trouble in the world with religion? Why doesn’t he fix that, get his own backyard in place?”

Faine interviewed Costello yesterday morning and then “the three imbeciles” got together and fired their biggest shot later in the day through this Nick Xenophon press release declaring their intention to call an extraordinary general meeting of Woolworths shareholders that would seek the removal of chairman James Strong and long-serving director Leon L’Huillier.

Strong is an obvious target given his belligerence about there being any problem with Australia’s largest pokies empire at last year’s AGM while Melbourne-based L’Huillier is presumably copping it because he chairs the ALH audit committee.

L’Huillier’s defence will be interesting given that he was last in the public eye for trail blazing with all those hard-hitting road safety messages as executive chairman of Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission 20 years ago.

L’Huillier was widely revered for saving hundreds of lives and turning Victoria’s roads into the safest in the world. Now he’s under attack for being involved in the biggest pokies operation in the world’s most gambling-addicted country.

The Sydney-based Woolworths media machine also belatedly kicked into action yesterday when this terse press release was distributed without any ALH branding or quotes from Mathieson.

There was no repeating of the Mathieson claim that the Sunday Herald Sun package about aggressive tax structuring around partnerships with various clubs was in the hands of his lawyers.

Litigation against The Sunday Herald Sun would be a strange course for Mathieson given that Woolworths is News Ltd’s biggest national advertiser and the Murdochs have even contracted ALH to run the pokies operations controlled by its Melbourne Storm rugby league franchise.

As was explained during this interview with Lindy Burns on 774 ABC Melbourne yesterday, the key to the attacks on Woolies relates to the Richmond Tavern, a venue that looks very much like a traditional hotel that should pay the 33% pokies tax rate that applies to all Victorian hotels.

However, the pokies at the Richmond Tavern are nominally operated by the North Melbourne Giants basketball club, which has been defunct for several years but still qualifies for the lower 25% tax rate on its pokies revenue.

The Sunday Herald Sun’s James Campbell summed it up nicely towards the bottom of this very strong comment piece when he pointed out:

The (North Melbourne Giants) company has only two directors, one of whom told me he thought it was a shelf company that did nothing these days. However, Ross Blair-Holt of the Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group — the club’s landlord at the Richmond Tavern — insisted to me it has 120 members, though he was somewhat vague when I asked him how I went about joining. Contacting the club is somewhat difficult as ALH is listed as the contact with ASIC and it isn’t in the phone book.

Whilst the Woolworths press release denied any wrong doing, it did not address the issue of the North Melbourne Giants, nor the instances where club lease and management payments exceed what the “club” takes out. And it is hard to know the truth of this issue because these club agreements in this supposedly tightly regulated industry are approved in secret and kept secret.