Greg Jericho of Grog’s Gamut used to be a casino croupier. He describes his own experiences of observing chronic gamblers and how poker machines are especially designed to exploit their addiction (even more than the rest of what casinos offer), and crunches some figures on what clubs with pokies don’t actually put back into their communities.
He doesn’t mention how poker bandits in pubs stifle live entertainment venues and thus contribute a large share towards making us all, collectively, that little bit more dull and socially shrivelled as more and more entertainment is corralled towards the lowest common denominator of the telly, but that’s another reason that I, personally, hate the damn things.
Wilkie, Xenophon and anybody else willing to make pokies less attractive as revenue raisers, and help make pubs and clubs more genuine community gathering centres again, gets a big thumbs up from me.
I used to work in a pawnbrokers (owned by my father-in-law), the pokies created customers for us and they weren’t the kind of customers who managed to redeem their goods. Poisonous machines.
The one job I’ve held which still makes me feel dirty when I think about it is a weekend job I had as a university student for a year or so. We ran raffles around the poker machines at a bowling club – every time they got three of a kind we gave them a raffle ticket even if it wasn’t otherwise a payout for them, and after a few hours of this we drew the tickets for a selection of meat trays. It was all just about getting the punters to put their money through the bandits faster.
I am extremely confused over the neutral-to-good press that Clubs Australia is getting in this instance. They’re an organisation of parasites; a fact which should be obvious to anyone familiar with pokies and the clubs that host them. It makes me wonder what the angle is for corporate-owned media.