To buy itself more time and escape the wrath – and campaigning prowess – of the state’s powerful clubs and pubs ahead of last year’s election, NSW Labor agreed to trial cashless gaming for pokies.
The party’s stance fell well short of the commitment made by former Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet, who went to the March poll vowing to rid the state’s 87,000 machines of cash by 2028. The Liberals lost the election and Labor premier Chris Minns stuck with the promise of a trial.
Many feared Labor’s trial was doomed to fail, arguing that it would be useful only if it were mandatory and statewide. Anything less would be useless in gauging the true cost to pubs and clubs, which was the whole point of the exercise.
NSW Labor’s new report into pokies will stoke more division as the government works out how to tackle money laundering.Credit: Peter Braig and Dominic Lorrimer
Nonetheless, the trial was swamped with interest at first, with far more venues signing up to be involved than expected. But when technology provider Aristocrat withdrew midway through, many venues could no longer participate. By the end of the trial, nearly half the venues and all but 32 of the active players had dropped out.
Now the government has both a failed trial and bitterly divided stakeholders who disagree on the recommendations of a long-awaited report into how the government should reform gambling.
The executive committee of the Independent Panel on Gaming Reform, set up by the government to conduct its trial of cashless technology, has proposed a central database for gamblers that would reduce money-laundering by requiring them to be identified.
The panel said there was “negative patron perception” around cashless gaming, so it has opted for the more bureaucratic-sounding account-based gaming, in which pokie players would need to have a card or a digital wallet linked to a bank account to play the machines. Small cash amounts could still be used.
It would need to be mandatory, the panel concluded, or else it would be pointless. It has proposed a phased implementation, ideally by 2028.
While the clubs had been very vocal about the Coalition’s intentions, which included the former chief executive of ClubsNSW Josh Landis losing his job for claiming Perrottet’s position on gaming was a result of his “Catholic gut”, the pubs were more muted. Publicly at least.
However, it was the pubs who have roared the loudest in their criticism of the recommendations of the panel, of which the Australian Hotels Association was a member. The AHA described the final report, released on Tuesday, as “embarrassing and not credible”.
Its criticism included there was “no assessment of the impact on industry and employment”, “no evidence to support a mandatory account-based system – because it was not trialled” and “no information on whether gamblers will bet more because they don’t feel the pain of losing cash – this was not considered”.
NSW Labor is back where it started. Its indecision on how to tackle the scourge of money-laundering and problem gambling in pubs and clubs has left it with even more problems than it began with.
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