gambling

Just 2.7% of the billions made from poker machines reaches community organizations and charities although Australia has more than 200,000 pokies — 21% of all gambling machines on the planet! The largest Australian operator of pokies is Woolworths, which owns about 13,500 machines. Here is a way that pokies might be used to make Australia more self-sufficient and bring the banks back under local control.

All this money from poker machines, taken from the people of Australia! Well, why not let all the income from pokies, at present going to owners and government, go instead into a fund from which banks can borrow, in order to reduce their reliance on overseas money? Then banks can have less need to say they must charge highly in order to pay foreign lenders.

Only the winners and the administrative costs need be taken from this fund.

Australian money spent on pokies is staggering. It is money that should be used.

Australia has more than 200,000 pokies — 21% of all gambling machines on the planet, according to www.greenleft.org.au/node/49849

A glance at the 2010 annual report of one of Australia’s largest clubs, the Panthers Group, shows how hollow the argument about community benefits really is. Panthers raked in $91.7 million from gaming in 2010, Rooty Hill RSL, also in Sydney’s western suburbs. Its 2010 annual report features a prominent drop quote from none other than Donald Trump: “As long as you’re going to be thinking anyway, think big.” The club is certainly thinking big when it comes to poker machines: it enjoys “Australia’s largest non-casino installation of electronic gaming machines” with an amazing 726 gaming machine licences. Poker machines raked in $43.2 million www.crikey.com.au/2011/09/27/clubs-australia-campaignand-pokies-revenue/?wpmp_switcher=mobile The largest Australian operator of pokies is Woolworths, which owns about 13,500 machines.

Add in what governments take from pokies.

“Pokies or Poker Machines are an Australian pastime that is getting more popular as time goes by. Pokies are everywhere you turn here in Australia, whether you’re in a local pub, sports club or casino, you can’t get away from them. Pokies are very similar to their online cousins, in that they use electronic, virtual reels instead of real mechanical reels. Pokies are the biggest form of gambling in Australia – for every Aussie dollar that is spent betting on the horses there are five pumped into the pokies. Pokies also generate a huge amount of revenue for the Australian government, so while pokies are sometimes the cause of gambling problems amongst Aussie citizens, the revenue they generate is put back into worthwhile community and federal projects.” http://onlinepokies4u.com/

Over 70% of Australian casino revenue is generated from slots play www.onlinepokiesaustralia.org/. Pokie revenues in Victoria more than $600 per person www.crikey.com.au/2011/09/27/clubs-australia-campaignand-pokies-revenue/?wpmp_switcher=mobile

Clubs Australia waged a $20 million advertising drive that called the proposed reforms “un-Australian” and harmful to community organizations it supports.

Yet Clubs Australia admits that just 2.7% of the billions made from poker machines reaches community organizations and charities.

Ask, how do sports and clubs in the rest of the world, including Western Australia survive without pokies income?

Author:
Dr Valerie Yule, M.A., Ph.D, Dip.Ed., M.B.Ps.S. Teacher at all levels, from preschool to adult and migrant literacy and PhD supervision. Academic positions at Melbourne, Monash and Aberdeen Universities in departments of Psychology and Education; clinical child psychologist at the Royal Children’s Hospitals, Melbourne and Aberdeen; schools psychologist chiefly but not only in disadvantaged schools

(Skyhooks photo adapted from www.abc.net.au/rage/guest/2001/skyhooks.htm)

Article by Tony Ryan

Peak Oz music

There was a time when a thousand rock bands had four million young Aussies swaying and singing in pubs across the nation. We knew only good things and the gods smiled fully on this the sunburned country.

This was a time when mankind’s top twenty found redemption in inspirational Australian talent… AC/DC, Men at Work, Cold Chisel, 10cc, Australian Crawl, Inxs, John Farnham, Skyhooks, Icehouse, Gerry Rafferty, Hunters and Collectors, Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs. The world wobbled on its axis, and some believed the Second Coming had arrived, but happy youth had lost count.

The creative momentum of Australian music was engulfing the known universe; when suddenly… someone turned the volume down; not just to Country Rock, or to Folk; or even to the profanity of Dead People’s Music; but to funeral ante-silence.

Then The Horror emerged. Intimidated publicans across the nation were visited by an army of faceless figures draped in sinister red tape, brandishing unstamped liquor licences, and who delivered the chilling edict that henceforth rock music shall be Noise Pollution, and forever banned. No drums. No amplifiers.

Without live gigs, nature’s roaring powerhouse of Australian talent shrieked down the scale to a barely audible whine, with a lucky handful of bands struggling to hold the holy OzRok banner to a visible height. Today, music is in crisis, with bands restricted to CBDs. A malignant and terrible darkness has visited our once happy land.

Overflowing clubs have become the profitable killing fields for alien drug lords; and are now the meeting houses for devotees of late night street violence. Private transport becomes essential survival gear but, every year, hundreds of young people complete a wonderful night out amongst the more harsh glitter and colour of broken glass and twisted metal.

Meanwhile, the yob brigades, alien to nightclub ambiance, and deprived of pub rock outlets for their wild energy, gatecrash youth home parties. When police arrive, there is the now-traditional rock and bottle throwing ceremony. When police fail to arrive, violence escalates to beatings and stabbings.

How did this happen? Why did Paradise end?

The End began with hard-eyed men in lumpy dark suits. We have no idea what transpired in certain conversations, but evidently unrefusable offers were made and politicians flew into power on election campaign budgets that would have strained the seams of Montgomery’s money bin.

We are sure these are but silly rumours but, it is whispered by fearful warehouse shift-workers that, one darkest midnight, certain politicians were seen dancing in the midst of a circle of gliding poker machines which were chanting metallically in unison exterminate, exterminate, while 666 whirred orgasmically on their barely focussed screens. What could this mean?

We asked the publicans and they finally agreed to talk to us secretly, in the sacristy of a disused Brisbane cathedral. It transpired that with the casting out of OzRok, the income derived from joyous free-spending rock fans was gone, and bankruptcy loomed like a black end-of-times tempest. As if acting on a signal, armies of Pokie Enforcers came visiting that very night, and installed their gambling machines, until there was only room for the rattling and singing, ringing and grinning monoliths; and their weeping and degraded victims.

But the Australian ANZAC spirit could not be crushed forever and rebel musos and their freedom-loving fans huddled and whispered in groups wherever the Pokie Enforcers dared not patrol.

Eventually, the brave OzRok Resistance was born and an intelligence network spread throughout the now-degraded land. Finally, the Pokie Enforcer’s darkest secret was exposed and revealed; that revenues had fallen calamitously; their pokie-addicts reduced to poverty, and upper-age Aussie income’s bled white by the corporate and banker barons.

Word has spread and the prophets are calling. The time has come for youth and its allies to gloriously rise up and, exerting the infinite power of profligate spending, as only youth is so congenitally entitled, repopulate the pubs; cast out the pokie idols, and replace OzRok to its rightful place of worship… the Suburban Aussie Pub (or beach or park).

Aussie politicians, harken wisely to our call. Purge your secret sanctums of conscientious liquor licence inspectors and replace these with hearing-impaired age pensioners; for this is their time-honoured vocation. And prove yourselves worthy as Guardians of the Great Aussie Destiny; that of realising the higher purpose of Human Evolution; which is, of course, to create the Perfect Riff.

So, dear reader, every time you pass a politician’s office, drop in and explain that Youth Music; always the people’s most popular music, can never be noise pollution.

And Queenslanders, the Chosen People, know that this great epiphany had its genesis on our own Sunshine Coast. Come ye all as pilgrims and open up this sacred Gympie tablet to Gig Guide. If, due to forces of darkness, it is revealed you can’t dance to driving music in the local xxxx temple, then the path to musical redemption leads to your nearest publican. I say unto you, as a vast multitude, get down on your knees and pray to him to cast out the pokie idols and bring back the bands. Amen.

See also: The truth about live export of 20 Jun 11 also by Tony Ryan