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Wednesday 14 June 2017
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Pokies politics in play
It’s an honour OLYMPIC cyclist and gold medallist Anthony Marchant received an Order of Australia in this week’s Queen’s Birthday honours list. See story Page 5. Picture: Gary Sissons
Neil Walker neil@baysidenews.com.au A PUSH against pokies is being planned in the lead up to next year’s state election by a group trying to enlist councils to the anti-pokies cause. The Alliance for Gambling Reform wants councils to support a campaign calling on both sides of politics in the lead up to next year’s state election to act on pokies reform. Alliance media and communications advisor Stephen Mayne addressed Kingston Council at a public meeting to hear council budget submissions last week. He asked council to get behind the campaign to rein in pokies losses by joining the group as a “tier one” contributor and pitch in $25,000 to the campaign. “The fact that Kingston is in the top ten in the state for pokies losses is disappointing and I know it is a concern for your council,” he said at the meeting. Mr Mayne – founder of the Crikey news site, a former City of Melbourne councillor and shareholder activist – noted $83.4 million was lost to pokies
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across the Kingston municipality in 2015-16. “A very large amount of money. Australia runs the world’s most addictive and dangerous poker machines so you can lose thousands of dollars an hour on our poker machines.” He said Australians “have the lamentable prize” of being the world’s biggest gamblers per capita racking up $23 billion a year in losses including “about half of that” on pokies. Mr Mayne said the alliance effectively wants to run “an auction” and lobby the Liberal and Labor parties to publicly declare their position on gambling reform before the election. “Who can put up the best reform package? That’s everything from maximum $1 bets … [to] increasing the tax which is discounted for some pokies operators, reducing the hours, the marketing to children,” he said. The Alliance for Gambling Reform website states the group is “a collaboration of organisations with a shared concern about the deeply harmful and unfair impacts of gambling and its normalisation in Australian culture. Continued Page 6