Dozens of Victorian councils have launched a campaign to change the way new poker machine applications are decided, claiming that gambling venues are winning over regulators with “flippant and unreasonable” arguments that would not convince “the person on the street”.
Under the current “no net detriment” system, pubs and clubs must convince the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation (VCGLR) that the community benefit of installing new machines would outweigh their damage.
In one example cited by the Enough Pokies campaign, a pub in one of Melbourne’s poorest suburbs, Clayton, won permission to install seven new poker machines by arguing that higher gambling revenue would allow the venue to make renovations and increase the “accessibility” of pokies in the community.
Monash mayor Geoff Lake, a spokesman for the nearly 30 councils behind the campaign, said such decisions showed the system was “just fundamentally flawed and broken”.
Councils and community groups had successfully challenged just 7% of new pokies applications in the past five years, he said.
The campaign is appealing to both parties ahead of November’s state election to issue guidelines to the commission raising the threshold on what constitutes a “community benefit”.
“We would like to see the commission apply the test with common sense and the view of the person on the street, rather than in the biased and pro-applicant way that we see today,” he said.
Lake said the councils were not on “a naive quest to abolish poker machines”, nor trying to reduce the overall number of machines in the state, currently capped at 30,000.
“But the clear trend over the last five years is that big pokies operators are engaging in predatory conduct, taking their machines out of affluent areas and putting them into poor and vulnerable communities because that’s where they make more money,” he said.
“We’re drawing a line in the sand and identifying that there is a trend which, if not stopped, will decimate communities right across the state but particularly in the south-east and west of Melbourne.”
Research has shown that poker machines in metropolitan Melbourne are overwhelmingly concentrated in disadvantaged areas.
The state’s poorest area, Greater Dandenong, operates about 8.5 pokies per thousand adults. Boroondara, which takes in the state’s wealthiest suburbs, including Hawthorn and Kew, has just 1.4 machines per thousand.
The same trend has been identified in research focusing on Sydney, where a similar “no net detriment” system is in place.
