Chris Berg, and the usual flutter on libertarian principles ...

(Above: Tamworth dreaming. The world famous, internationally reknowned, now fallen on hard times, Tamworth Workers Club).

And so to the vexed question of poker machines, and small dinkum battling Aussie clubs just trying to live a decent Aussie struggle street existence, and the ordinary humble Australian way of life of the average joe blow, threatened as always by wowserism and activists ...

First a declaration of interests. The pond doesn't attend clubs, has no interest in clubs, and doesn't care a whit or a jot for the survival of clubs, but does remember a strange, lost, ethereal time when clubs were actually dedicated to social and community or perhaps sporting activities, and had no reason to gouge their members by way of poker machines, joined as they were by a common interest sufficient to provide ongoing funding and community participation and involvement ...

In Victoria, in the old days, when introduced to the socially binding, community orientated notion of clubs, the boast was made that none had poker machines (and it's also true many didn't allow women as members or only as associates), and the mad scramble to go gambling along the banks of the Murray in sordid, devilish NSW clubs was viewed as pitiful, and against the spirit of clubbing. Try telling that to Crown Casino these days as it nestles in Southbank ...

Still, it has to be said that when long ago the Tamworth Workers ("the Workies") Club fell over, long after it had anything to do with workers, the pond didn't shed a single tear. In much the same way, the pond really didn't care about the closure of the Newtown RSL club, as it had bugger all to do with returned soldiers, but preferred in its dying days, to target pensioners and drum and bass fetishists. An interesting demographic mix ... and really, as it's a hideous structure, why not, in the Australian way, knock it down and build an even larger hideous structure (Losses force Newtown RSL closure).

Well it's a long and rambling disclosure of a lack of interest, but in the usual way, there's bugger all disclosure in Institute of Public Affair's Chris Berg's long and rambling introduction to the vice of poker machines in Morality and humanity in the gambling debate.

His piece is featured in the ABC's The Drum, which has now become a soap box for spruikers, mountebanks and charlatans of a political stripe, and so by stealth clap happy Mark Scott achieves a transformation of the ABC, since - like The Punch - the site is reliant on self-motivated lobby groups to provide a flow of copy ...

In his usual way - well much the same way as his libertarian take on the joys of smoking and drinking - Berg frames the poker machine debate as a matter of an aesthetic and moralistic critique of gambling. After all, everybody hates wowsers, even wowsers:

Certainly it's obvious that opposition to, for instance, poker machines, is not solely based on data revealing the relative incidence of problem gambling occurring on the pokies compared to other games.

A part of that opposition (we can disagree how big a part) is undeniably grounded on how the pokies look ‘sad’. Playing is solitary. Players appear joyless. A poker machine seems to be a mechanised and computerised tool of corporate manipulation; a metaphor of consumer capitalism made real. (‘People cannot seriously enjoy pokies, can they?’)

It's an interesting rhetorical trick, since the campaign in relation to poker machines has largely revolved around the relative incidence of problem gambling occurring on the pokies, compared to other forms of gambling.

Just today the indefatigable campaigner Nick Xenophon, punching on in The Punch, explains his basic concern on Coalition stance on pokies has nothing to do with pokies:

Stephen Ciobo’s piece for The Punch about this issue was a sad example of the knots the Coalition is willing to tie itself into, in order to ignore the bleeding obvious.

That is, that poker machines are an intensely addictive and dangerous form of gambling and that 40 per cent of all losses on poker machines come from problem gamblers.

And that's because a vast amount of human ingenuity has gone into the design and appeal of poker machines, from the flashing lights, and the whirling sparkling imagy things and the music and the sound effects, and the satisfying clunk of metal on metal as the beast disgorges its treasure.

Whenever I've played the machines, I've found them quite beguiling, a bit like video games without the difficult eye-hand coordination ...

Slip in a little alcohol, make sure the machines exist in a kind of cocoon, where you can hypnotically focus on the thing before you, station an automatic telling machine just down the corridor, and there's more than a few bob in the club's bank account.

What's not to like, especially when the house takes a guaranteed ten per cent or thereabouts, and churns back ninety. Talk about a smooth, addictive, efficient way to shear the sheep, and keep them coming back for another experience. Even those who like to offer smart gambling advice can't offer much in the way of advice about the pokies, except how to help minimize your losses, because the point of the whole operation is that the punter will always lose in the end ...

Okay so you're a mug loser, so where does your cash go? To all those long suffering community minded clubs? Turns out there's not much joy there either:

Only about 2.7 per cent of the money clubs in NSW take from their poker machines is donated to the community, an analysis of the state's largest clubs by the Herald has found, while the cost of the industry's tax concessions is $6.5 billion since 1997.

When tax concessions are taken into account, the figure is far lower.

The survey reveals that 11 clubs took $438,953,965 in total from their poker machines, but returned just $11,678,358 to the community in donations over the last financial or calendar year. (Clubs hitting the jackpot and keeping most of the booty).

You don't have to read an academic thesis to work out the rhetoric has shifted away from the reality:

The original club goals of promoting and pursuing the social purpose and community benefit for which they were established became superseded by an emphasis on expansion, market share and profits. More recently, increased competition for the gambling dollar, reflecting a shift in government policy towards economically driven stimulation and expansion of commercial gambling, has further entrenched the commercialisation of clubs in their machine gambling operations, subordinating their social agenda to economic interests. This change in focus by club management has diminished the social contract that exists for clubs to operate gambling for community benefit, the very basis of the clubs’ legitimacy as major providers of machine gambling. Indeed, the implicit assumption that social benefit was built into club machine gambling has allowed the clubs to exploit their position of market dominance in such a way that exacerbates the negative social impacts of their core product. (But you can if you want in Nerilee Hing's 2006 A history of machine gambling in the NSW club industry: from community benefit to commercialisation, loads as pdf).

So who are these poker machine owners?

Why lordy, it turns out that just as there's big tobacco, there's big pokies, and no one pokies like Woolworths, with its hotels division the proud owners of more than 11,000 poker machines, and nary a mention in the Woolies results of its care, concern or regard for problem punters (and that was back in 2008, when Stephen Mayne scribbled Record Woolies profits but what about the damage?)

Right now, Woolies is eying off an increase in its poker machines from 12,100 to 13,300, and increasing its share of hotels from 286 to 326, as outlined in Woolworths in pokie grip talks. And if a deal between Woolies and Arthur Laundy goes ahead ...

...it would mean that Woolworths would surpass Las Vegas's top five casinos in terms of total poker machine ownership.

Ah the fresh food people at it again, just helping out ordinary folks in their quest to lead an ordinary healthy lifestyle ...

And so back to Chris Berg, who naturally is all for Woolies, and agin all this talk of poker machines being some kind of social evil.

Through gambling, people engage both the mathematical concept of probability, and the metaphysical concept of chance. It's a way to make light of risk; to tame uncertainty.

In other words, gambling is part of human nature.

Uh huh. Well we all love a flutter, but of course the point about poker machines is that it isn't a form of risk management or a way of taming uncertainty, it's a way to become a guaranteed, addicted loser, and if you play the bigger stakes machines, and play them hard, of dropping a month's wages in an afternoon session.

Okay, fair enough, shove all you've got down the throat of Woolies, but here's the kickback. Next thing you're off funding your addiction through crime, or the family is down at welfare hitting up the government for help, and so the tax dollars of the average worker are helping bail out a social issue created for benefit of clubs, Woolies and governments making an unseemly buck out of the turnover. Talk about an unvirtuous circle ...

Of course none of the sordid consequences make it through the Bergian filter.

Given gambling's cultural centrality, it's not clear why the Government should try to wall it off; to regulate gambling into an isolated and denigrated corner of the Australian consciousness.

Rather than treating gambling as alien and dangerous and not fit for children, why not treat it as a normal part of being and encourage it to be enjoyed responsibly?

Gambling is, after all, just a game.

Yes, but poker machines aren't just a game, they're highly addictive. That's their point, that's their nature. It isn't being moralistic or wowserish to observe this. They're much like the machines used in the Japanese gaming device Pachinko, and if you've ever observed a pachinko parlor going hard at it, you've seen addiction in action ...

And if you read a history of the development of the slot machine, you see a relentless quest to perfect the addictive qualities of the now multi-armed bandits ...

Berg would of course rather talk about anything else than muse about the addictive power of poker machines:

Bookmakers are running odds on nearly every facet of the royal wedding: the first dance, the colour of the bride's dress, the colour of Victoria Beckham's dress, whether Prince Phillip will fall asleep during the ceremony, whether chicken tikka masala will be the main course, and whether Prince Harry will drop the ring and be too drunk to finish his speech (25-1, as of a few days ago). And, unsurprisingly, on the chances of divorce.

These bets do not detract from the wedding, which will be as painful as it would be in a world without wagers.

They do, however, make a game out of it - transforming the public from spectators to participants.

Oh dear absent lord, another appropriation of the wedding, and the sweet Chaser lads banned from sending it up, to the great pleasure of David Flint.

But you see gaming on a wedding, or even organising a sting on a rugby league match because of the sillier forms of betting allowed, isn't of the same order or consequence as the mass fleecing of punters as organised by Woolies for benefit of its bottom line.

And did we mention all the Catholic clubs? Are you wondering where you might find moral leadership from the Cardinal Pell heresy, seeing as how Berg likes to paint the whole affair as some kind of wowserism? Well you can read calls for Catholic action, as in Catholic clubs have moral duty on pokies, but naturally the Pellists have gone missing in action.

It's disingenuous, and a dissembling and misleading argument on Berg's part to conflate gambling on the royal wedding with poker machines, or to suggest that the current debate about their role is to do with a wowserish disdain for all kinds of gambling.

For moralist opponents of gambling like Nick Xenophon, such engagement only conjures up images of ruin.

But there is no need to be that pessimistic. The desire to play games of chance is a part of the human condition. Archaeologists have discovered four sided sticks - proto-dice - dating to 6000BC. In 2011, let's try not be so scared of it.

Uh huh. But it turns out that in the early days gambling started off as religious rituals, divinatory practices in early societies (as this fast and loose history of gambling explains).

As usual, as the pond has always suspected, all of humanity's problems began with religion, but only a dullard would seek to ban religion, or for that matter gambling, or as it's known in genteel circles, gaming ...

Which doesn't remove the right or obligation of government to regulate the shit out of the more socially disruptive, plague-like forms, like poker machines, and so make life hard for the Chris Bergs and Woolies of the world. Even if it costs them a little taxation revenue ...

Even if they banned poker machines and dedicated loser punters took up other kinds of self abuse, Woolies would still be there, making a motza out of its unseemly market power in the liquor sales arena.

Yep, each time you trot off to Dan Murphys you're helping Woolies achieve its 30% share of the packaged retail liquor market, and naturally Coles is in that game too. Woolies, the fresh booze people ...

As for the pond? We'll just keep walking past the shattered shell of the Newtown RSL without a care in the world, and certainly without a tear in the eye.

Talk about how clubs are central to the Aussie way of life, and how gambling is innate, and how addicted gamblers should just learn to be responsible proves yet again that there's a sucker born every minute, and quite a few are likely to be sold a pup by the libertarian Berg. If you think Berg is scribbling just for your right to choose to gamble, your right to bankrupt yourself, you'll believe anything ...

Just watch out for the bright flashing lights and the music and the sound effects as your cash disappears down the drain, and miraculously lands in Woolies' bottom line ...

(Below: astragali and dice from ancient times. The resemblance to the modern poker machine, as noted by Chris Berg, is both astonishing and astounding, and explains why gamblers routinely lost their shirts and/or blouses).