Will Canberra’s gambling revolt spill over to Labor’s national conference?

Are ClubsNSW and the wider gambling industry losing their grip over Australia’s politicians?

That was certainly the message at last week’s national general assembly of the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA) in Canberra when the following motion was passed by a majority of voting council delegates.

This national general assembly calls on the Australian government to address Australia’s world-highest gambling losses per capita and the intolerable harm $25 billion of annual losses inflicts on Australians, local communities and local and regional health and municipal service providers by:

1. Introducing a new dedicated federal gambling regulator which includes a mandate to implement and oversee a broad tobacco-style ban on gambling advertising.
2. Legislating for the complete removal of cash from Australia’s fleet of 200,000 poker machines as a national anti-money laundering measure in light of last year’s NSW Crime Commission report revealing widespread money laundering across NSW poker machines where criminal money launderers can still load up to $10,000 in cash into a single machine.
3. Establishing a national ACT-style buyback and retirement of poker machine licences with an initial budget allocation of $500 million, and make it conditional on the state and territory governments and the participating clubs, pubs and casinos agreeing to permanently retire the licences and remove the attached machines from their venues.
4. Negotiating a moratorium agreement with the Northern Territory government to cease issuing any new low-tax digital bookmaking licences to foreign-owned gambling operators such as Sportsbet, Bet365, Ladbrokes and Betr and instead transfer online gambling licensing and regulation to a new federal regulator.
5. Legislating to the effect that federally registered political parties are ineligible for federal per-vote political funding if they, or any of their state affiliates, own and operate poker machine venues.
6. Removing the [deductible gift recipient] status of any church or charity which continues to directly own and operate licensed gambling entities, such as poker machine clubs.

Without naming them directly, points five and six appear to be targeted at the Catholic Church and the ALP, which are both large pokies operators in NSW and the ACT.

Normally, a motion going after Australia’s richest church and biggest political party, respectively, would struggle for support, but the gambling industry is clearly on the nose, as demonstrated by the unity call of the federal teals for a full ban on gambling advertising.

Similarly, the more points you put in an aggressive motion the more likely it is to lose. A number of other less controversial motions on climate, sustainable transport and housing affordability were defeated over the two-day ALGA event.

Perhaps it helped by being motion 112 on a long, 259-page agenda. We only got to it at about 4.30pm on the second day as delegates were starting to think about the gala dinner at Parliament House on Thursday night where the prime minister was scheduled to speak.

Regarding arguably the most comprehensive political call for gambling reform ever put up, three speakers were in favour (Manningham, Darebin, Greater Dandenong) and two were against (Broken Hill and Hawkesbury). When it went to the electronic vote, 153 of the 313 voting devices that had been issued participated, with 109 votes in favour and 44 against.

The mayor of Broken Hill, Tom Kennedy, was the lead outspoken councillor at ALGA over the week. When it came to the gambling motion, he got up and pushed the tired old lines about how pokies clubs in regional NSW make generous donations to the community.

Perhaps he should have disclosed that Michael Boland, a fellow Broken Hill councillor, is the general manager of the biggest pokies club in Broken Hill. Indeed, the latest annual report of the Broken Hill Musicians Club reveals that $4.1 million of its $6.1 million in 2021-22 revenue came from poker machines.

The “Tom Kennedy for a better Broken Hill team” took control of the Broken Hill council at the last NSW local government elections.

The other speaker against the motion was Councillor Les Sheather, 72, who has been a Hawkesbury city councillor since 1986 and was reelected as an independent in December 2021. He also talked up generous community donations by pokies clubs that trade under the RSL name.

Sheather doubles as a director of the Windsor RSL, a pokies club that has built up net assets of $15.6 million from its gambling operations and pocketed $10.1 million in “net clearances” from its pokies division in the 2020-21 financial year.

Perhaps it would have made sense for Kennedy and Sheather to disclose these connections to the powerful ClubsNSW industry before they spoke against the motion wearing their elected councillor hats.

However, this was a national forum, and pokies-captured regional NSW councils just didn’t have the numbers.

Everywhere you go, people are sick to death of saturated gambling advertising — and when you’ve even got The Guardian banning all gambling advertising globally, the tide is clearly starting to turn.

After the conference concluded, I headed back to the Mercure Belconnen and checked out after four nights, which cost Manningham ratepayers almost $1000.

The hotel is owned by the Canberra Labor Club, a four-venue pokies outfit in the ACT that has twice rejected my membership applications over the past five years, sending refund cheques each time with no explanation as to the problem.

After trying to join again on Friday, the general manager said I’d been suspended, so I insisted on handing over the $66 fee in cash and requested that this time I’d like a written explanation from the board, which is supposed to represent a democratic organisation that presumably believes in looking after its regular hotel guests.

The Labor Party is clearly embarrassed about being in the pokies business and the Canberra Labor Club directors don’t want to face awkward questions at their AGM.

The only way Labor can exit its four Canberra pokies venue is through a national conference resolution, so I dropped into a “regional issues” panel forum on Friday and asked federal Local Government Minister Kristy McBain and Immigration Minister Andrew Giles if they would move and second such a motion at the upcoming three-day ALP national conference in Brisbane. 

Neither took the bait.

There will be 400 Labor delegates heading to Brisbane in August. Surely two of them would be prepared to move a pokies divestment motion from the floor and see how it goes. After all, there isn’t another major political party in the world that offers up hundreds of addictive poker machines for community use up until 4am, seven days a week, in their national capital.