What a day to break my silence on this blog! It’s been just over a week since I’ve added anything to cyenne.com, although not through choice… my ADSL connection has been cactus since Tesltra decided to perform some maintenance at my local exchange. How a 2-hour maintenance operation can turn into a 9-day outage is beyond me; still, depending on tonight’s results, there’s always the NBN!
So I’m back on the air, and it’s finally here. The Federal Election 2010 has arrived. I trotted out and voted earlier today; the Liberal how-to-vote guy at my local polling centre was pretty surly, but the ALP guy was quite chatty. Nice bloke, even if he was an Essendon supporter.
Sadly, our nation’s gambling woes had practically no air-time over the course of this election campaign. There was the occasional article, but certainly no major announcements from either of the major parties. One interesting thing I noticed from analysing the statistics on my blog, was the number of hits my site got from people in the past week looking for information on senate hopeful Stephen Mayne. Hopefully that interest translates into votes and preferences. Best of luck tonight, Stephen!
Now, naturally I understand that this election is not just about problem gambling… and I certainly took all the issues and policies into consideration before I dropped my green and white papers into their respective boxes. But at the end of the day, this blog is about problem gambling and gambling reform. So which party do I believe will have the most chance of making a difference in this area, should they win tonight?
After much deliberation, I came to the conclusion that at a Federal level, the ALP has more chance of actually doing something about problem gambling, than does the Coalition. Yes, I know the ALP has gaming venues in Canberra, just as I know that Liberal senator Julian McGauran has an involvement in a gaming venue here in Victoria. But in terms of the general focus of each party, that’s the impression I get. Mind you, that’s not necessarily how I voted; as I said, this election is about more than gambling policies. But it will be interesting to see what happens over the next few months, no matter who wins.
And should Mayne exceed his own expectations and make it through to the Senate, joining Nick Xenophon as another independent with an anti-pokies stance, then there will be a real chance for gambling reform to start happening.
