Pubs and clubs pocket the pokie money but play by different rules

The head of NSW’s casino watchdog, Philip Crawford, has called a spade a spade and said there is little difference between casinos and the poker machine venues that litter our state.

Crawford said they were essentially the same business and proposed there ought to be a state-based body to regulate wherever poker machines are played, including casinos, registered clubs and pubs.

Wesley Mission chief executive and gambling reform advocate Reverend Stu Cameron said, “We have dozens and dozens of suburban casinos.”

“We need to treat them for what they are…if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck. They are casinos for all intents and purposes. Treat them as such, regulate them as such and don’t give them a free pass like they’ve been having for decades.”

Crawford’s comments in an interview with the Herald’s Riley Walter, came on the eve of his retirement next week from his role as the inaugural chief commissioner of the NSW Independent Casino Commission, a post he has occupied since 2022.

Crawford laid into the Minns government’s inaction on poker machine reform. “Government have a fair bit of evidence around the damage of poker machines… . You’ve got to have bravery and the political climate now for bravery is limited because of re-elections,” Crawford said. “There’s no bravery in government at the moment.”

Gaming and Racing Minister David Harris announced reforms in August, including the use of facial recognition technology in gaming rooms, a third-party exclusion scheme and the scrapping of gaming VIP programs, but the changes did not include mandatory carded play and allowed players to continue gambling with cash.

Harris defended the reforms, which he said were the most comprehensive introduced by any NSW government to reduce gambling harm.

To that, we can only give muted applause.

The NSW Labor Party long paid its dues to the gambling industry and Harris has conveniently ignored the decision by the Carr Labor government in 1997 to allow poker machines in pubs. It was intended to put them on equal footing with licensed clubs. It also turbocharged the social damage wreaked by gambling in NSW.

Harris fobbed off the introduction of cashless gambling, saying NSW’s gaming machine network largely relied on legacy technology and, before any account-based system was implemented, it was necessary to upgrade and modernise the core technology infrastructure.

Historic bipartisan collusion between Labor and Coalition parties in kowtowing to the moneyed interests of the gambling industry have seen politicians continue to dance around poker machine reform, even when the NSW Crime Commission delivered a damning report in 2022 that found they attracted significant amounts of dirty money, and highlighted the enormous social problems that resulted. The Perrottet government finally committed to cashless gaming but failed to get re-elected in 2023.

As the Band-Aid solutions applied by successive governments have done little to stem the festering sore, Crawford’s clear-eyed suggestion to regard casinos, pubs and clubs as one and the same when it comes to regulation is sensible and welcome.