CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
The cold-blooded online bookmakers that snuck into our lives during the GFC have created a world where working Australians now have up to ten different sportsbetting accounts pinging bonus bets and special odds directly into their pockets at every minute of the day.
However, the government remains firm that these tax-dodging sportsbetting giants are not above the law, because they made the extremely brave decision to ban punters from betting directly from the credit cards.
But this doesn’t change the fact that millions of depressed Australian men are still holding their phone down the side of the bed at two in the morning with the screen brightness turned down to zero so as to not wake their pregnant wives who are none the wiser to the fact that their savings account has been pillaged by the Dubai trots.
Unfortunately, any further regulation of the hard-lobbying and politically protected gambling industry would cause an existential crisis for the limping legacy media companies who would gladly go down in a blaze of glory by ensuring any government that turned off this final revenue stream would be replaced by a far-right
If you didn’t watch Monday’s ABC Four Corner’s expose into the death rattle of Channel Seven, you might not know that Australian media has been run into the ground by delusional executives who think it’s okay to pay junior reporters $60k a year to spend their lives attending the scenes of horrific car accidents and DV murders. Meanwhile, boomer executives continue lunching at at high-end restaurants on the gambling dollar that pays for full-volume advertisement during every break of play in the footy.
While the big-brain libertarians – who still think Martin Bryant was just a one-off – now insist that this sportsbetting epidemic is purely a matter of personal responsibility, even the most upstanding members of our communities continues to ruin their lives after being brainwashed by non-stop larrikin advertisements telling him to be a good bloke and enter their card details directly into their state-of-the-art betting apps and blow money they don’t have on an incessant stream of algorithmic odds on anything from the Melbourne Cup to the Bachelorette.
Yet, the fact remains. The punters never asked for any of this. And those that have traditionally enjoyed our beloved national past time of having a punt would be just as happy to go back to the days of a form guide in the newspaper, and a bricks and mortar betting shop between the train station and bakery in the main street of town. A place where they can have a flutter in full view of the wider community – without the ability to hide their shameful online addictions with a couple swipes of the finger.
MORE TO COME.
