No B.S Friday: These things are pure evil.
If the devil had a mechanical form, it’d be a pokie machine.
For the life of me I can’t understand why we allow these things to exist. And I definitely can’t understand why we’ve let an entire industry be built up around them.
It’s sickening.
NSW completed a review last week, and found that not only are pokies destroy lives and a dangerous cancer on society (not their exact words), they’re also being used by criminal syndicates to launder drug money.
Wonderful.
Criminals are funnelling billions of dollars of “dirty” cash through pokies in NSW pubs and clubs every year as the machines remain a “safe haven” for money launderers because of weak regulation.
The NSW Crime Commission, which led the review, said it could not tell how much of the $95 billion fed through pokies in the state annually were proceeds of crime, but it was “many” billions, primarily from drug dealing.
NSW Crime Commissioner Michael Barnes said, “At the moment serious offenders can enter NSW pubs and clubs, sit down next to patrons in gaming rooms, and openly feed large sums of cash from their crimes into poker machines with no real fear of detection.”
The Crime Commission made a few recommendations.
For starters they want to see load-up limits drastically reduced.
At the moment in NSW, on some machines, you can pour $10,000 straight into the machine.
(It’s just a harmless flutter.)
How on earth did anyone decide that $10,000 would be an appropriate ‘limit’ to put into a pokie machine at any one time?!?
(NSW is lagging the country here, by a long way. In Queensland it’s $100.)
They also recommended introducing a mandatory cashless gaming system – like a card – so bets can be connected with betters.
And this is the one that really put a bee in the bonnet of the Australian Hoteliers Association.
Why?
Well, part of the reason is that they probably like the organised crime syndicates. They’re in the same industry. They go to the same conferences. They share tips on how to destroy the lives of poor people in order to make money.
Best friends foreva.
But the other part of the reason is that they just don’t want a light shone on just how much money some people are losing.
We don’t have a lot of data on problem gamblers (note how it’s the gamblers that are somehow the problem here?)
My guess is that it probably follows the 80/20 rule.
In business, 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers. I expect it’s the same for pokies.
For most people, it’s just an entertaining way to blow $50 bucks at the end of the night. (A massively stupid way, but let’s say there’s some entertainment value there.)
But for 20% – which ends up being an awful lot of people – they probably plough all of their available cashflow into those evil little machines.
They’re the ones gambling without a break. They’re the one wandering into the gaming lounge at 8 a.m.
8 a.m!!!
So of course the AHA doesn’t want us to see this.
Because we all know the truth already. We know that our discount snitzels and junior sports sponsorship is built on preying on financially vulnerable people.
But we all just like to turn a blind eye. Pretend it’s not true.
Enough.
Give us the data.
And turn those evil machines off.
JG.