gambling reform & gambling harm awareness
Clubs NSW have announced today that they are dropping their defamation case against Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, just days after declaring they had commenced legal proceedings.
It’s been five years since the 2010 federal election. Five years since Julia Gillard shook hands with Andrew Wilkie and agreed to legislate poker machine reforms, thereby gaining his support and allowing Labor to form a minority government.
There’s a lot of talk going around at the moment concerning the GST. Will it go up? Will it be expanded? Some of this talk has focused on poker machines… which is no surprise, given the way the GST is allocated, and the amount of money lost on gaming machines every year. But do you know the whole picture?
Losses on Victoria’s 26,300 poker machines are rising. Three months into the new financial year, figures from the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation (VCGLR) show that we’re losing more money faster, and heading back towards record levels of spending.
Today is Melbourne Cup day. The day of the “race that stops a nation”. The day every man, woman and dog has a punt on the horses.
Today will see an awful lot of money wagered on the Cup. You could call it an obscene amount of money. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be bet on the race, most of it on losing horses. Some money will be won, but most of it will be lost.
