There are two good reasons why you wouldn't want to rely on the results of Julia Gillard's much-ballyhooed poker machine trial in the Australian Capital Territory: geography and history.

Politicians applauding the mandatory pre-commitment pokies trial in Canberra don't have much knowledge of either, it seems.

Alternatively, they do, and they're enjoying a little joke at the expense of pesky independent Andrew Wilkie, figuring Canberra's reliable Labor-voting populace will go along with just about anything.

Whatever it is, they're just about guaranteeing they'll reap suspect results from their one-year trial, which will cost a cool $37 million, almost all of it to go directly into the pockets of Canberra's numerous pokie clubs, the biggest of which are owned by the Labor Party and the powerful Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.

First: geography. There is a New South Wales city right on the border with the ACT - so close to Canberra itself that it's hardly more than a large commuter suburb with the grittiness of a real NSW country town. You can drive from central Canberra to Queanbeyan in little more than 10 minutes.

History informs what happens when governments try to impose different rules on Canberra residents than on those in Queanbeyan.

If you want to avoid Canberra's nanny-state rules, you simply cross the border.

Before 1976, Canberra had no poker machines in its clubs. Queanbeyan did.

The Queanbeyan Leagues Club, with several hundred machines, became rich catering to thousands of Canberrans who simply climbed into their cars in the evenings and tooled down the road for a spot of gambling and eating cheap steaks and parmigianas and listening to Col Joye and the Joy Boys.

Indeed, when the club burnt down in 1972, the management merrily rebuilt the place, bigger, glitzier and with lots more pokies, content that its cross-border members would keep tumbling in.

They did until Canberra went pokie mad in 1976.

Canberra now has about 5000 poker machines turning over more than $1.5 billion a year.

Queanbeyan's pokie club operators need get only a small slice of that to declare the good old days are back again.

The Queanbeyan Leagues Club currently has more than 350 pokies ready and waiting - about two-thirds of all the machines in Queanbeyan's pubs and clubs.

The period pre-1976 wasn't the first time that Canberra's residents preferred a night out in Queanbeyan to one in their own dour city.

The first legislation relating to the ACT was enacted on the orders of the flamboyant but teetotal Commonwealth minister for home affairs, King O'Malley, in 1911.

It decreed that the territory would face prohibition.

For the next 17 years, Canberra was to remain dry.

O'Malley called alcohol ''stagger juice'', and his decree meant right up until 1928, plenty of Canberrans blithely staggered back and forth between their sober homes in Canberra and Queanbeyan's pubs and sly-grog shops.

Prohibition, in short, didn't work because you needed only to cross a border just down the road to drown your thirst, even if the road was hardly better than a goat track.

The Gillard government says the poker machine trial will include a study of how much pokie revenue ''leakage'' might occur across the border, but you wouldn't want to hold your breath expecting reliable findings.

Who is going to provide the information - the NSW clubs, who hate what the Gillard trial represents, desperate gamblers themselves, who couldn't care less, or public servants, who would have to take a guess?

You'd need border guards, and even O'Malley would have baulked at that.

A Pokies Trial In The ACT Is Bordering On The Futile

Strong anti-poker machine legislation never stood a chance once the gaming lobby was able to put its spin on the wheel.

Julia Gillard has been accused of betrayal for her inability to deliver to Andrew Wilkie the promised mandatory precommitment technology on all poker machines, yet her actions are the direct result of her having been betrayed by a man who once was one of her closest advisers.

In May, James Packer appointed Karl Bitar head of government affairs for his Crown casino business. Until a few weeks earlier, Bitar had been national secretary of the ALP since 2008. He previously spent nine years with the NSW ALP in various jobs, including 11 months as state secretary.

Although Bitar said his role with Crown included responsibility for tourism (read attracting Chinese gamblers to the casino) no one doubted that his principal role was to ensure the federal government did not deliver on its promise to Wilkie.

It was the mother of all betrayals: the man whose old job had been to keep Labor in power had now undertaken to sabotage the deal that kept the minority Gillard government in office. We can be confident that in figuring out how to achieve this, Bitar sought at least unofficial counsel from his old boss in NSW, former state secretary and now Assistant Treasurer and federal Minister for Small Business and Sport, Mark Arbib. (The two of them are so close that their ALP nickname was "Karl Marks".)

It took just eight months. Last Saturday, January 21, Gillard announced that the numbers were not there to enable her to deliver to Wilkie. As a result, he withdrew his support from the government.

How did this happen?

Two things were required: how to pressure Gillard into walking away from Wilkie's demands and how to ensure Wilkie's withdrawal of support would not bring down the government. The two were achieved in tandem.

On October 14, the Australian Financial Review revealed that a coalition of casino operators led by Bitar's boss, Packer, Clubs Australia and the Australian Hotels Association had precommitted $40 million to a massive grassroots campaign to target every NSW federal ALP seat to force members to pressure Gillard into splitting with Wilkie.

It was a threat, pure and simple, with gigantic money behind it. (Compare it to the $18 million spent by the Minerals Council against the government's original mining tax or the $30 million outlaid by the ACTU Australia-wide over several years to combat Work Choices.)

And the article's author, Pamela Williams, stated the role of Karl Bitar in the campaign "cannot be underestimated". Bitar's experience in marginal seats campaigning "makes him invaluable in the grassroots campaign" against sitting ALP members (at least some of whom undoubtedly won their seats when he was on their side).

No one in Canberra reading of this threat can have been in any doubt that the odds against the government surviving had suddenly grown very short.

It can hardly have been coincidence that four days after the article was published, the house speaker Harry Jenkins took the highly unusual step of entering into the public debate on poker machine reform, telling The Age newspaper, "There's got to be a time when government, on behalf of the overwhelming majority of the community, says 'no, enough's enough', because the overwhelming majority of the community are picking up the pieces."

Exactly how Jenkins was influenced to do what he did has yet to be revealed but five weeks later he resigned to return to the backbench and the Liberals' Peter Slipper became the Speaker, depriving the opposition of a vote and giving the government a buffer against Wilkie.

In retrospect, the Wilkie agreement was dead in the water that day, although Wilkie, as late as last week, could not bring himself to believe this. Nor could some members of the government, including Gillard, who continued until last Friday to try to persuade cross-benchers Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and rebel Liberal Tony Crook to support Wilkie's demand for mandatory precommitment technology to be installed on every poker machine in the country.

Windsor and Oakeshott both insisted the precommitment technology be trialled before it is made law and they refuse to budge from that position.

In November, the grassroots campaign against the NSW MPs was proceeding - and causing a lot of grief. "It was a very clever campaign," one MP told me. "It targeted members, and left the government alone. I can handle any campaign but I did not like this one. It was all done through the prism of Wilkie. 'You're only doing this for Wilkie', people would say to me."

The campaign was comprehensive and meticulous, with meetings, rallies, flyers and well-prepared material about the cost to jobs and to community organisations of the alleged assault on clubs' revenue if precommitment was introduced.

Many MPs felt torn. Deborah O'Neill, member for Robertson on the central coast, supports little clubs like the one at Mooney Mooney which, she says, has "a sustainable business model of 50 per cent food, 30 per cent drinks, 20 per cent pokies". Unlike ClubsNSW, which she feels "is addicted to a business model of addiction". O'Neill, who as a former teacher has seen children coming hungry to school because the family's income has gone into the pokies, is also sceptical of some of the clubs' community involvement. "It's not much for a club to support a kid with a number 17 jumper when the kid with number 15's father put money through the pokies to pay for it," she says.

"For me the challenge was people's jobs versus people putting their whole wages through a poker machine," another NSW MP says. The campaign sufficiently unnerved the MPs that they went as a group to talk to Gillard's chief of staff. Some of them also met Gillard individually.

Meanwhile, Kevin Rudd, the man who when he was prime minister had made poker machine reform a federal issue which he referred to the Productivity Commission, was whispering in the ears of any MP who would listen that he was not encumbered by an agreement with Wilkie. "He's been a first-class bastard on this issue," said one of his cabinet colleagues this week.

The presence of Rudd in the campaign became another pressure on Gillard. She has become increasingly unnerved by her predecessor's relentless chipping away at her grip on the leadership.

Early in the new year, the government realised it had just five sitting weeks to meet Wilkie's May 8 deadline of having the precommitment legislation through both houses. It became urgent to test whether the commitment could be honoured. A week of frantic lobbying by the Prime Minister and her colleagues revealed that it could not.

So what were Gillard's options?

Some have suggested that she should have tested the legislation anyway but that has not been the form of this government. Any bill, be it on the Malaysia solution or mandatory precommitment, that was likely to fail has not been introduced. This is a minority government that does not want to lose on the floor of the House and risk venturing into no-confidence territory. You can hardly blame it.

Instead, the government will bring in legislation (which Wilkie will support) to tackle problem gambling through a variety of measures including requiring precommitment technology be installed on all poker machines, ready to operate if the trial supports it. The trial to be held in the ACT, starting next year, is seen by sceptics as merely a tactic to bury the whole issue.

"The clubs will ensure this fails," the Reverend Tim Costello told me this week. "Powerful vested interests can out-campaign anyone,'' he said.

ClubsNSW insists it supports the trial although the ACT clubs have yet to commit.

Minister Jenny Macklin, who is responsible for gambling reform, says, "My job is to design the trial. We'll get independent advice on how to run it. No way we are going to get a decent result if this is not a decent trial."

It is not encouraging that an earlier federal effort to trial the technology was stymied by vested interests.

In August, the Tasmanian Premier, Lara Giddings, suggested that the federal government run a trial of precommitment in her state. It would have been ideal, without the problems the ACT trial presents of leakage into nearby NSW towns and, had it proceeded, the results might have been ready in time to meet the Wilkie deadline. But then the Federal Group, the major operator of hotels in Tasmania including, crucially, Wrest Point Casino, refused to be involved.

The trial, its credibility and its outcome, has become the new battleground.

We can be sure that what remains of the $40 million war chest will be at the ready to steer policy in a direction that satisfies the gambling industry. Already the arguments are being sharpened ("it's a state issue", "precommitment is bad policy that does not help problem gamblers").

This is far from over.

Dice Loaded In Clubs Battle

When Labor MPs return to Canberra on Sunday for Julia Gillard's pre-parliamentary ideas session and knees-up at the Lodge, they will have ringing in their ears the views of their electorates where they have spent the past two months.

Just as fresh will be the results of the national opinion polls which resume this week. Traditionally, governments tend to go backwards over Christmas even without chaotic events, so no one is expecting anything resembling a rise in fortunes for the government.

After ending last year on a fizzer, Gillard's start to this year is no better.

The Prime Minister had little option but to deal with Andrew Wilkie early on, rather than let his divisive poker machine demands fester within the party until Wilkie's May deadline. Despite buying inner peace, the dumping of the deal was always going to have adverse side-effects regarding reputation - and it did.

The Australia Day debacle was not of Gillard's making but is probably more damaging.

At the very least, the revelation that the unedifying scenes outside the Canberra restaurant were prompted by a tip-off from one of her own staff has reinforced perceptions that everything this government does turns to custard.

''Momentum can work for you or against you,'' noted a senior MP yesterday who does not anticipate a reversal of fortune for the current administration.

On one thing everybody agrees: Gillard cannot afford any more disasters, be they self-inflicted or otherwise.

Factional bosses say they are sticking by Gillard but it is clear some support has leaked to Kevin Rudd over the Christmas break. More tellingly, many are rusted on to neither Rudd nor Gillard but have adopted a wait-and-see approach. Their own survival is becoming paramount.

The Rudd camp accepts nothing can happen until after the March 24 Queensland state election, an event Rudd will use to showcase his own campaign skills in his home state while Gillard will most likely have to keep a low profile.

Rudd must be careful not to over-egg his role given Labor faces certain defeat in Queensland, but at the end of the day any blame sheeted to the federal government will rest with Gillard.

The special caucus meeting called for Sunday in which Gillard will call for ideas is being regarded by MPs as an attempt by the leader to hit the reset button. After that, there's only the panic button.

Bruised Gillard Reassembles Despondent Troops

All bourgeois politicians lie. It is their way of squaring the circle between labour and capital.

With the collapse of profit rates in the developed world in the late 60s and early 70s and the failure of Keynesianism to address the problems that arose as a consequence, the rise of neoliberalism saw both conservative politicians like Thatcher and Reagan and social democratic ones like Hawke, Keating and Blair implement explicitly pro-capitalist policies. 

For the conservatives the story could be more direct and for social democrats it was often disguised as being reforms to benefit workers, but at best those benefits were an adjunct to  shifting wealth to capital and making society more and more a market based one and inequitable.

So the art of lying was to convince workers they would benefit when in fact the main game was benefiting the bosses.

Some politicians – Bob Hawke comes to mind – were consummate professionals as wordsmiths, story tellers or more prosaically liars. Others are amateurs. Julia Gillard is  pathetic.

She is so bad at lying she makes Tony Abbott seem like a saint. Of course Abbott is a liar too.

For example during the 2004 election campaign he promised that the Medicare safety net threshold - a protection for poorer families against health costs – would not be raised. This key election promise was, he said, “an absolutely rock-solid, iron-clad commitment.”

When questioned by Laurie Oakes about this after the election and the Howard Government’s decision to raise the safety net so more poor people would have to pay, he said:

Well, I can understand why people feel unhappy about the Government’s decision to raise the safety net thresholds. But we took a decision that in the end it was more important to be economically responsible, and more important to maintain the safety net in the long term than it was to avoid embarrassing the Health Minister.

Oakes persisted: So honesty comes a distant second in this?

Here is Abbott’s informative reply.

Well, Laurie, when I made that statement, in the election campaign, I had not the slightest inkling that there would ever be any intention to change this. But obviously when circumstances change, governments do change their opinions, and that is actually the responsible course of action.

Circumstances change. That sounds familiar doesn’t it? That’s what Julia Gillard has said about the carbon tax, and now about poker machine reform.

It seems like they are all singing from the same song book.

We might be tempted to think Gillard is a Labor aberration. After all, Abbott was a member of what seemed to be the most lying deceitful government in memory, the Howard Government with its core and non-core promises, its children overboard lies, its medicare safety net lies and on and on.

But Howard continued a long tradition of lying from bourgeois politicians from both sides. 

In the run up to the 1993 Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating legislated tax cuts that came into effect after the election. They were, he promised, L-A-W tax cuts. After the election he repealed the tax cuts and put the money into superannuation, with the ACTU agreeing to forgo a wage increase for that. 

It was the death knell for Labor and that other liar won the 1996 election handsomely. Voters were famously queueing up with baseball bats to smash Labor in that election.

Maybe the solution for Labor is to find a likable liar, a feasible fibber. Gillard isn’t that person. Rudd probably isn’t either. Labor need a new Hawke. Is Bill Shorten that man? Dunno. Maybe the task of selling the shit sandwich is too great for any Labor politician these days. Even Hawke might fail today.

Gillard’s carbon tax has infuriated many sections of society, especially workers, and it bolsters the claim she lied before the election. There is a case to be made she didn’t because she did talk about putting a price on carbon, but prosecuting that is only likely to dig her own grave even more politically.

And now she has reneged on poker machine reform. So says Andrew Wilkie. So it must be true. Well actually, she has. The agreement is pretty clear.

Circumstances have changed. First the licensed clubs have run a cashed up campaign against Wilkie’s pre-commitment agenda and threatened a $40 million election campaign. 

The voters in club land have voiced their disapproval and Labor backbenchers have got the message. Poker machine reform means certain electoral death in working class seats in New South Wales especially.

Most clubs with poker machines are in those Labor heartlands. Heartlands is probably too strong a  word these days to describe many of the seats given that both Labor and the Liberals are infected by the neoliberal disease and so are virtually indistinguishable to most Labor voters and indeed to those of us on the Left.

Most problem gamblers are working class. They use gambling and often grog with it to escape from life’s torments under capitalism.

The house is against them. Poker machines are programmed to return around 90% of an investment. The more you play the more you lose. The winners are the clubs, pubs and casinos with poker machines, and the State and Territory Governments who tax the turnover.

With about 200,000 poker machines, Australia has about twenty percent of these gaming machines in the world. Half of all the poker machines in Australia are in New South Wales which means about ten percent of the world’s poker machines are there.  Hence the nervousness especially of NSW Labor members.

The Productivity Commission estimates that “the number of Australians categorised as ‘problem gamblers’ ranges around 115 000, with people categorised as at ‘moderate risk’ ranging around 280 000.”

Gambling losses in 2008/09 were round $19 billion, or over $1500 per year per gambler. Problem gambler lose about 40% of that.

The losses of problem poker machine gamblers were estimated at almost $5 billion or around $5000 per year each. For some you could lose that in a few hours such is the amount able to be gambled. 

About 400 people suicide each year because of gambling problems.

The recommendations such as pre-commitment, one dollar spin limits and ATM withdrawal limits at clubs address the symptoms, not the disease.

It may be addictive personalities are part of the mix of human nature. The thing about capitalism  – its exploitative nature, its limits on workers through wages and denial of the fruits of the earth and real democracy, its limiting of full human development – exacerbates and brings to the fore those addictive traits in some of us in destructive ways such as gambling and grog.

Certainly my own addictions have included in the past tobacco, alcohol and the pokies, to be replaced perhaps with more constructive or at least less destructive addictions like work, this blog, chocolate and soy chai. To that list we can now add aqua aerobics for 45 minutes every morning, a substitute high and poor memory of the hit I got from the 8 kilometres I used to run every day before children came along a quarter of a century ago and before my back and now knee surrendered.

Julia Gillard reneged on poker machine reform because her backbench were in revolt. For those millions who have the occasional flutter on pokies the idea of pre-commitment is anathema. Half a million of them alone play the pokies every week without any problems. It is their little escape.

Add in a duplicitous campaign from Clubs to protect their vested interests and it is not surprising that the punters were revolting.

The consequences for Gillard of the pre-commitment back down will be catastrophic.

The idea of her being someone who can’t be trusted will be reinforced. All those punters relieved by this backdown aren’t suddenly going to revert back to her and Labor.

They will stay with the liars from the Coalition who have yet to show us the calibre of their deceit or whose dishonesty is lost in the sands of time. They are rejecting neoliberalism and Labor’s version of it by voting for the Coalition and its neoliberalism.

Second, Gillard has lost Wilkie’s vote and trust. He could now possibly vote against all Labor’s key legislation or some of it at least.

After the defection of Peter Slipper from the Coalition and his elevation to the speakership, labour had a buffer of two votes over the Coalition. Now with the loss of Wilkie it is one.

The Labor Government depends for its existence now on the erratic (to be polite) Peter Slipper, the under criminal investigation Craig Thomson – he of alleged union credit card spending on prostitutes – and the likes of Adam Bandt from the Greens, and independents Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor. In the Senate they are dependent on the votes of the Greens. 

This puts the Greens in a special position to be able to demand more of Gillard than they have been prepared to do previously. Unfortunately they don’t have the political backbone to demand a more radical program from labor on social issues let alone economic ones.

Wilkie’s obsession with poker machine reform seems misplaced. While  the issue is important it is unclear why this is or should be a deal breaker. Aboriginal disadvantage, the ongoing genocide against indigenous Australians, the shift in wealth to capital at the expense of labour,  the disgraceful downward spiral of mistreatment of refugees, the creeping privatisation of public health and education, the failure to really address climate change, the possible forthcoming explosion in unemployment consequent, the failure to tax the rich, the crap levels of the pension and newstart allowance, all of these could and should be at the forefront of concerns about the here and now and the future.

A progressive party or politician could take these and other important issues and fashion a program for Labor support in exchange for votes in Parliament. That neither Wilkie, nor more importantly the Greens, have done that, tells us a lot about the inadequacies of parliamentary politics in Australia today and how far it has shifted to the right.

After 18 months, what major progressive  initiatives has the Greens/Labor agreement produced?

Maybe it is time the Greens threatened to join Wilkie unless Labor begins to seriously address issues like refugees, equal love, Australia’s participation in the war in Afghanistan, the wealth shift to the rich, jobs and the need for real action on climate change, such as taking over the car plants to produce buses, solar farms and wind turbines. They won’t. 

The task to win progressive reform is too important to be left to politicians. Only pressure from below – mass campaigns and strikes – can force the paid popinjays of profit to implement a program that benefits the 99%, not the 1%.

Of Pokies & Porkies

from Crikey …..

Mayne: Wilkie and Gillard should put the band back together

Stephen Mayne writes:

ANDREW WILKIE, JULIA GILLARD, PETER SLIPPER, POKIES REFORM, PRE-COMMITMENT FOR POKIES

Sometimes in politics, less is more.

Andrew Wilkie refused to give media interviews yesterday and instead directly engaged with Tony Abbott’s chief-of-staff and government ministers on the question of resurrecting meaningful pokies reform. The result: a truckload of coverage in today’s media with pokies reform again front and centre in the political debate.

Julia Gillard’s calculated decision last December to trade her allegiance with Andrew Wilkie for a sordid pact with Peter Slipper is arguably the biggest mistake she has made as Prime Minister. And it can’t be blamed on bad luck or bad staff.

As factional strongman Stephen Conroy blurted out during the Kevin Rudd leadership challenge, Gillard was concerned that Rudd was building numbers by promising NSW and Queensland MPs that he would ditch pokies reform. This is what Conroy told AM on February 23:

STEPHEN CONROY: Well let's be very clear about this. What's been revealed last night on television and over the weekend with Andrew Wilkie is a complete and utter fraud by Kevin Rudd. He has been pretending that he supported the pre-commitment technology, pretending he supported reform in this area, but his key numbers man just happened to have two meetings and tell Clubs Australia that he would kill it. And we all know last year, late last year Kevin Rudd's supporters ...

TONY EASTLEY: But if I can bring you back, Alan Griffin denies that.

STEPHEN CONROY: Yeah well you'd have to believe in Santa Claus that a Victorian backbencher who happens to be Kevin Rudd's key numbers man happens to suddenly take an interest. I mean Clubs Australia have been absolutely clear that they believe what everybody else in the caucus was being told. Kevin Rudd's supporters - just go back and check the record - Kevin Rudd's supporters were walking around caucus saying "look, dump Wilkie, I'll make this go away. Kevin doesn't need Andrew Wilkie in Parliament. He can get Bob Katter".

The Australian public needs to know what's been going on here. And this has been a long fuse, you've all heard that phrase they've been using, the Rudd supporters, this is a long fuse to destabilise the Prime Minister.

As we now know, the destabilisation all ended with Gillard’s crushing 71-31 defeat of Kevin Rudd. Such was the belting dished out, Gillard could quite easily ditch Slipper and embrace meaningful pokies reform again without the risk of being knocked off by her chief rival.

Given the public’s hatred of political rorting - plus homophobic elements in Labor’s blue-collar case and the importance of taking sexual abuse claims seriously - it is simply not viable for Gillard to remain in partnership with Slipper, who is copping the full symphony from the Murdoch media machine.

All Slipper does is make Gillard look untrustworthy and unethical. And this is precisely what the public thought when she ditched Wilkie, turning her back on some of the most vulnerable people - pokies addicts and their families - in the community.

What Gillard underestimated was the strength of the language that Wilkie would use in tearing up his agreement - especially the focus on trust.

She also underestimated the level of community support for pokies reform, something re-affirmed today by research released by the Stop The Loss Coalition, which involves everyone from Tim Costello to Neil Lawrence, Sue Cato, Paul Bendat and, of course, Nick Xenophon.

Despite considerable support in Coalition ranks, including from Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott’ chief-of-staff Peta Credlin again rejected the idea of embracing $1 maximum bets during her meeting with Wilkie yesterday. This was a strange decision given Abbott will need the vote of Slipper and Wilkie to trigger an early election.

First, Abbott needs to get Slipper to resign as speaker or be sacked by the parliament, something that can happen immediately with a majority vote on the floor of the house. If Labor votes against such a measure but the independents and Coalition push it through, it’s a fair bet that Slipper will sit on the crossbenches and prop up the Gillard government. Under these circumstances, the parliament will probably go full term.

Therefore, Abbott needs Gillard herself to engineer the Slipper departure - but she can only do this and stay in government by re-aligning with Wilkie.

Faced with a choice of $1 pokies bets or the stench of Slipper, surely a principled position tackling the world record $12 billion a year in pokies loss is the way to go. After all, who wants to end up looking like Anna Bligh?

from Crikey .....

With Thomson teetering, Gillard's $1 pokies option remains live

Stephen Mayne writes:

CRAIG THOMSON, JULIA GILLARD, PETER SLIPPER, POKIES REFORM, PRE-COMMITMENT FOR POKIES, TED BAILLIEU, TONY ABBOTT, WILKIE

When Julia Gillard ditched Andrew Wilkie for Peter Slipper in order to abandon serious poker machine reform, it was Craig Thomson who came out with this opinion piece in The Daily Telegraph celebrating a victory for the pubs and clubs.

Fast forward four months and Gillard's stocks have plunged from bad to worse. Breaking the pokies promise reinforced the PM's untrustworthiness and Wilkie went on to vote with the opposition on the question of suspending Thomson from parliament.

It was this move - along with pressure from the other independents - which forced Thomson's hand yesterday and today we've now even got The Australian Financial Review joining News Ltd papers in editorialising in favour of an early election.

Amid this political circus, the push for serious pokies reform has not stopped, as can be seen in this provocative GetUp! ad attacking Woolworths, which Channels Seven, Nine and Ten refused to run last week. Indeed, there is gathering momentum around the Productivity Commission's recommendation of $1 maximum bets, something Gillard refused to embrace in the original negotiations with Wilkie.

When representatives from 63 of Victoria's 79 councils gathered at the Sofitel Hotel last Thursday for the state council meeting of the Municipal Association of Victoria, there wasn't a single speaker against this opening motion:

Resolution

That the MAV advocate to the Minister for Gaming:

(1) To amend the Gambling Regulation Act 2003 to:

a) Require decision-makers at the Victorian Commission for Gambling and Liquor Regulation to consider the social and economic impacts of increasing densities of EGMs in vulnerable communities at the local level or Census Collector District level;

b) Require community benefits to be genuine (i.e. to benefit those at most risk of harm from EGM gambling) and require the applicant to prove that there is positive community benefit if increasing the number of EGMs (as opposed to the current "will not be detrimental" test);

c) Prohibit applications for new or increased numbers of EGMs in communities with below average SEIFA scores where the EGM density is currently above or will become above the state average.

(2) To adopt the following recommendations from the Productivity Commission Inquiry Report on Gambling:

a) Lower the bet limit to $1 per "button push".

b) Make shutdown periods for electronic gaming machines (EGMs) commence earlier and be of longer duration.

c) Require better warnings and prominent information in venues.

The resolution received a thumping majority as Victorian councillors from across the political divide were united in their support for poker machine reforms, which have now been dis-owned by Tony Abbott and Gillard.

Indeed, even the blue-blood councillors at Boroondara, based on Robert Menzies' old seat of Kooyong, this month passed a motion calling for maximum $1 bets. Check out page seven of the minutes that disclose that the councillors even supported an investigation of "differential rates" on pokies venues.

Boroondara takes in the state seat of Hawthorn, held by Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu, and Kooyong is currently held federally by Josh Freudenberg, who distinguished himself last year by running interference for the Liberals on the Wilkie-chaired parliamentary committee into pokies reform.

Abbott assigned the job of undermining pokies reform to Freudenberg and fellow Liberal committee member Steve Ciobo, whose seat takes in Jupiters Casino on the Gold Coast. You can see an example of their work through this February 2011 column in The AFR attacking mandatory pre-commitment.

So what does Frydenberg think about $1 maximum bets now that his local Boroondara councillors have adopted it?

The same goes for Gillard's great backer, Simon Crean. When Crean eventually retires, he is expected to be replaced by lawyer and former MAV president Geoff Lake, who has long controlled the numbers at the City of Monash, which takes in part of Crean's federal seat of Hotham.

However, the City of Monash has one of Victoria's highest intensities of poker machines and last month the council followed the lead of Moreland, Darebin and Manningham in slugging its pokies venues with double rates to pay for mitigation programs. Monash mayor Stefanie Perri even featured on 7.30 Victoria last Friday night.

Lo and behold, the Herald Sun had a story yesterday quoting state Labor and Liberal sources suggesting there may be legislation to bring an end to special rates by councils.

Such a move would fly in the face of an explicit commitment made by the Liberals in opposition when they said rate setting was a question for councils.

Look no further than this article in The Age which quoted Ted Baillieu's current gaming minister as follows just a few days before the 2010 election:

"The Coalition's gambling spokesman Michael O'Brien ruled out overriding councils.

"'The setting of rates should be a matter for Moreland rather than the state government, we have no intention of interfering in the setting of rates,' he said.

It's one thing to oppose Wilkie, but surely the Victorian Liberals wouldn't wilt to pokies industry pressure and break an explicit promise along the way.

As for Gillard, one option for salvaging something from the wreckage of her leadership would be to dispatch Slipper to the crossbenches and embrace serious pokies reform.

After all, why should federal Labor care now that it is conservative state governments in Victoria, NSW and Queensland who will suffer the biggest budget hit from reducing the $12 billion a year Australian lose playing state-run poker machines?

*Disclosure: Stephen Mayne is a councillor in the City of Manningham, which has approved a double rate on pokies venues for 2012-13. He was not paid for this item.

Federal independent MP Andrew Wilkie has announced he will support the Government's poker machine laws.

However, the legislation is unlikely to pass the Lower House, with the Coalition saying it has grave concerns about the bill and the Greens saying they would not support it, labelling it a "wasted opportunity".

Mr Wilkie ended his automatic support for the Government in January when it reneged on a deal to introduce pre-commitment technology on all poker machines.

Families Minister Jenny Macklin has since proposed a trial in the ACT and promised that all poker machines will be equipped with the technology nationally if that trial succeeds.

Mr Wilkie says he gives the Government his "reluctant" support.

"I make this announcement reluctantly and I'll give the Government's bill reluctant support," he said.

"Frankly, the Government's reforms are but a shadow of the reforms that were agreed after the 2010 federal election between the Prime Minister and myself."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-05-22/wilkie-to-back-gillards-pokies-laws/4026010

from Crikey .....

GetUp! hits Woolies with EGM tactic from Packer playbook

Stephen Mayne writes:

ECHO ENTERTAINMENT, JAMES PACKER, JEFF KENNETT, POKER MACHINE REFORMS, POKER MACHINES, POKIES REFORM, STAR CASINO, WOOLWORTHS, WOOLWORTHS LIMITED

After James Packer blazed the trail and demonstrated how a full-on media campaign, combined with the calling of an extraordinary general meeting, can destabilise a public company, activist group GetUp! has followed in his footsteps by calling an EGM of Woolworths shareholders.

However, while billionaire Packer used the tactic against Echo Entertainment Group to try and further his casino gambling interests, GetUp! is seeking a completely contrary outcome by forcing Woolworths to embrace the $1 maximum bets on poker machines recommended by the Productivity Commission.

Fairfax's Richard Willingham had the GetUp! EGM story exclusively this morning but Woolworths is yet to formally advise the ASX.

While listed companies themselves regularly call EGMs to approve share placements and equity incentive deals for CEOs, it is rare for external parties to gather up the necessary 100 signatures from small shareholders or secure support from interests who represent more than 5% of the shares on issue.

GetUp! claims to have more than 200 signatories so Woolworths will have no option but to respond within 21 days and then call an EGM with at least 28 days notice. They could quite easily get on with it and call shareholders together for a vote in the last week of July, four months before the scheduled AGM on November 22 in Senator Nick Xenophon's home town of Adelaide.

Melbourne would be the most appropriate city to stage such an EGM given it has the highest concentration of Woolworths poker machines and has only received one AGM visit from the company in the past decade.

Deciding the time and venue for such a meeting is entirely at the board's discretion. Echo was apparently considering forcing Jeff Kennett and Packer to run the gauntlet of a parochial Queensland crowd at Jupiters on the Gold Coast.

Maybe the directors will let pokies-free Perth enjoy its first Woolworths shareholder meeting. There is also nothing stopping the meeting from being held in the tiny Tasmanian town of Penguin, the home  of new CEO Grant O'Brien.

Rather than exploring venues, Woolworths is instead already running a cost argument for delaying GetUp!'s EGM petition. A company spokesman told Richard Willingham: "The AGM, which is just a few months away, is the appropriate forum and would avoid the unnecessary and considerable cost to our 432,000 shareholders for staging an extraordinary general meeting."

Echo Entertainment never tried this tactic with Packer. Instead, the board effectively negotiated away the EGM by rolling chairman John Storey.

Woolworths, which is the largest pokies operator in Australia, could always enter into negotiation with GetUp! on reforms that reduce the social damage caused by the $500 million-plus that punters lose playing its 13,000 high-intensity poker machines each year.

Australia has the most concentrated grocery duopoly in the world, but Woolworths enjoys a huge lead over its key competitor Wesfarmers in the liquor, hotels and poker machines markets. Wesfarmers acquired about 3000 pokies when it overpaid for Coles in 2008 but the company is based in Perth where only low-intensity poker machines are allowed, and at one single venue, Packer's Burswood Casino.

Wesfarmers has also taken a completely different approach to Woolworths when it comes to reaching out to critics and adjusting operating settings at its venues. Indeed, company executives are apparently meeting in Perth with representatives of GetUp! today.

Woolworths shareholders have raised concerns about the company's giant pokies operation ever since former CEO Roger Corbett teamed with pokies billionaire Bruce Mathieson to buy the old Foster's hotels business ALH for about $1.4 billion in 2004.

I ran for the board on an anti-pokies platform at the 2006 and 2010 AGMs.

In 2007, then CEO Michael Luscombe made the following extraordinary claim at the AGM: "A recent study that I've seen - in fact, two studies - also said that problem gambling is not purely associated with electronic gaming machines. Equally, it applies to those that buy lottery tickets, wager on horses, and gamble in casinos. The percentages of problem gamblers are exactly the same."

Actually, poker machines are the cause of more than 80% of problem gambling issues in Australia.

In 2009, Senator Xenophon teamed with anti-pokies campaigner Paul Bendat to gather the necessary 100 signatures for what is called a S249P statement calling for Woolworths to get out of the poker machine business. This was a 2001 amendment to the Corporations Act, which forced companies to distribute a statement of up to 1000 words to all members attached to the notice of meeting.

While the Xenophon statement caused the Woolies pokies business to become the dominant topic debated at the 2009 AGM, there was no attached resolution to vote on.

That is where the GetUp! proposal is difficult. Shareholders are being asked to formally mandate that Woolworths completely transition to machines with $1 maximum bets by 2016. This is what the Productivity Commission recommended and what Senator Xenophon, Andrew Wilkie and the Greens are all now unanimously supporting.

While Clubs NSW is regarded as the most intransigent players in this debate, it will be very interesting to see whether Woolworths or Wesfarmers makes a bold move in this direction over the coming weeks