CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | Contact
The NSW Government is this week bending over backwards to keep the pokie machine cartel afloat, after avoiding desperate calls for reform by recommending a new ‘cashless’ system that has been trailed on 14 people.
This issue of Australia’s cancerous poker machine culture became a state election issue last year, as the ousted NSW Premier was suddenly hit with unfounded rumours of him dressing as a Nazi at his 21st birthday. This coincidentally happened after he dared to imply that maybe it was time to do something about the ‘tax on misery’ – and help minimise the amount of low income Australians who blow their pay checks on the highly addictive machines.
The fact that a Liberal Premier was leading the charge against poker machines left many in the gaming industry confused, as it’s usually bleeding heart lefties that they have to blackmail with dirt files. Either way, the bloke that wasn’t anti-pokies ended up winning the election and once again the blood-sucking machines could return to robbing $22 million dollars per day from NSW residents.
But poker machines aren’t the only societal cancer that our politicians are able to look past – out of fear of upsetting very rich families or generous political donors. After all, this is how climate change ended up happening, as well as the subsequent denial of climate change that is still floating around our parliament like a bad smell.
Not to mention to industrial prison-complex. While Australia’s political and media class focus on fruitless political debates over political correctness and the Prime Minister’s habit of flying business class, the real causes of pain and misery for everyday Australians are constantly overlooked.
Here’s a list of 8 things that almost all Australians, from both sides of the political spectrum, can agree are destroying our society and quality of life for no real gain.
Starting off with public enemy number 1.
- Pokies
The fact that an estimated 1 in 6 dollars put through pokie machines are directly related to money laundering appears lost on our elected officials. As does the fact that Australia’s working class suburbs have more machines per capita than Las Vegas. Let alone the fact that our pokies pay out less than any other countries. With this kind of money going directly into the pockets of one or two villainous billionaire families, and the scraps going to the major hotel groups, you’d think they could lower the price of a fucking schooner? But they won’t do that, because pubs aren’t public houses anymore. The community aspect of a local watering has been replaced by dark air-conditioned rooms full of reverse-ATMS
2. Juvenile Sentencing
Many elections are fought over the issue of youth crime, but very few politicians want to acknowledge that there are ways of removing youth offenders from the streets without condemning them to the cruelty of juvenile correctional centres. The money spent on locking up children could actually pay for every single youth inmate to be appointed a full time psychologist and a full time security guard, as well as their own apartment to live in. But who would get rich from that? Certainly not the “trusted government and privatised corrections partners” like Serco. Juvenile sentencing has proven to do fuck all for rehabilitation, and achieves nothing but upskilling these little fucks on better ways to commit crime. That’s if they aren’t at the bottom of the pecking order and find themselves being brutally bullied to the point where they return to society as serial killers.
3. Casinos
I mean, sure a night out at The Cas can be fun, but it’s usually only a result of not being served a drink anywhere else. Everybody knows that binge drinking in a windowless shopping mall surrounded by cameras and security guards is nowhere near as fun as it was doing that same thing in the Kings Cross and Fortitude Valley before they were sterilised by gentrification and over-policing. The reason that these air-conditioned monstrosities are so welcoming to bucks parties and work junkets is because they want you to be drunk. You’re easier to fleece with one eye open. But wait, there’s more. Every city now needs TWO casinos. That means another boot for our government to lick, as they shut down pre-existing nightlife precincts and funnel partygoers into these fancy new buildings with no clocks and toothless regulatory bodies.
4. Foreign Mining Corporations
Aside from literally causing climate change, the multinational fossil fuels companies who rode high on the Australian mining boom have also pulled off a masterclass of tax-avoidance. Any politician who tries to make them pay royalties for the rocks they pull out of our earth end up being rolled. It’s the main reason we’ve had something like ten Prime Ministers in ten 15 years. Not only this, but the Foreign Mining Corporations have also destroyed our generational mining towns by replacing local workers with FIFO workers. Sure, the boys get paid more than they used to, but they spend weeks away from their families every month and are plagued by mental illness and isolation. The mining barons see this as a necessary cost, to both them and the worker’s personal wellbeing. Anything to avoid the bullshit that comes with miner’s wives demanding their husband’s bosses do something about the water supply they’ve ‘accidentally’ polluted, and the roads they’ve destroyed with 50 tonne graders.
5. Political Donations
Every other entrant on this list only exists because our politicians are so easily bought and sold. This is because of political donations. They need money to spend on campaigning, and they do better at elections when they have more money. All they need to do is alter their actual values to keep those people making the donations happy enough to keep making them. It’s only when a political leader is facing certain defeat do they act against the wishes of said donors. Like the recently ousted Queensland Labor Premier who decided to fight youth crime by offering free lunches in school – rather than his opponent’s plans to build more prisons and lower the age of criminal responsibility to 10. Or the aforementioned NSW Liberal Premier, who finally swung back at the pokie lobbyists and was immediately relieved of a promising political career.
6. Online Gambling
Sure it’s not as visible as pokie machines, or as glamorous as the casinos, but online gambling is doing just as much damage. With all this talk of gendered violence and a crisis in men’s mental health, nobody has thought to ask if the leading cause might be this online sportsbetting epidemic that has horribly damaged the reward systems in the average punter’s brain with flashy ads in between every horse race and every break of play in the footy? Or the 5 different apps pinging odds and bonuses directly into our hip pockets by tax-evading gambling behemoths who are simultaneously bankrolling the salaries of high-powered Canberra lobbyists who schmooze our elected officials into removing even more of the barriers preventing some halfwit from betting his family home on the Dubai trots at 3am while his pregnant missus snores next to him none the wiser to what’s happening on his iPhone which is being held down the side of the bed with the brightness turned to zero.
7. Road Tolls
Also known as the ‘Poor People Tax’ – while they do disproportionately affect people who live a significant distance from the CBD, they do bring misery to the overwhelming majority of Australians. Courtesy of decades of government handing lucrative contracts to private companies to run our infrastructure, countless Australians are exorbitantly slugged when trying to get to and from things like ‘work.’ It does however bring joy to people like Bob Carr, who hand-balled lovely Toll contracts to Macquarie Bank, who kindly offered him a very high paying job immediately after stepping down as Premier of NSW.
