When Senator David Pocock was expelled from the Parliamentary Sports Club for questioning its gambling sponsors, it wasn’t just a bureaucratic overreach; it was a moment of pure Canberra surrealism. The former Wallabies captain, environmentalist, and moral irritant in a city allergic to integrity was asking the heretical question: why is a parliamentary club registered as a lobbyist, funded by Responsible Wagering Australia and overseen by the Prime Minister as its honorary president?

For this act of high treason, Pocock is summarily deleted from the WhatsApp group and banned from the field. In old-fashioned political terms: in the bin.

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From Rugby to Re-Education Camp

Let’s not pretend this is about sportsmanship. This is about discipline. Canberra’s new sporting code forbids fouls against the sponsors. “Fair play” means never asking who paid for the goalposts. It’s a logic straight from Trump’s playbook: redefine dissent as extremism, protest as thoughtcrime. Australia’s version is quieter; we don’t need militias, we have committees; but the principle is identical. You can still wear a Wallabies jersey, just not your conscience.

Pocock’s only sin is noticing the soft coup taking place in real time: the colonisation of our public life by the gambling lobby’s velvet tentacles. In Canberra, as in Washington, suspicion of influence is now itself grounds for exclusion. In the bin, ya commie bastard. Don’t look at me in that tone of voice.

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The Great Australian Doublethink

The Parliamentary Sports Club is, of course, registered as a lobbyist organisation. Its major sponsor, national oxymoron Responsible Wagering Australia (RWA), represents gambling behemoths such as Sportsbet, Ladbrokes, and Entain. Yet it insists, with a straight face, that its function is “purely social.” Of course. And Crown Casino is purely architectural.

Orwell’s term “doublethink”; holding two contradictory beliefs simultaneously; perfectly describes a club that’s both “purely social” and registered to lobby.

Albo says he hasn’t attended a meeting in 18 months? More revealing still. That’s like Pontius Pilate claiming he’s technically a subcontractor. Influence doesn’t require attendance; it’s ambient. As Upton Sinclair observed, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Substitute “salary” with “parliamentary club membership.” Canberra runs on air-conditioned corruption: no smoke, just mirrors. And a lot of watering holes.

Lonsdale Street in Braddon even has multifunctional planter boxes lining the pavement; installed well before former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce’s famous tumble, the same lucky, lucky, lucky, Barnaby whose Pilliga land holdings (a thousand hectares of “mongrel country” bought between 2006-8) are now worth a fortune thanks to coal seam gas. He says he had no idea at the time. The planter boxes serve multiple purposes: beautification, seating, and risk management barriers for cabinet ministers after last drinks.

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The New Thoughtcrime: Doubting the Odds

We are, in effect, outlawing scepticism. Pocock questioned the odds and was ejected from the game. This is how “responsible wagering” now operates: you can bet on anything except the integrity of the system itself. And here’s the irony: the gambling industry’s favourite phrase is “Game On.” But when everything becomes a game; politics, policy, public ethics; there are no referees, only dealers.

Pocock’s heresy? He wants a cashless gaming card and advertising restrictions; modest reforms that the industry treats like existential threats.

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Two-Up, or Two-Faced?

How long before the gambling lobby sponsors Anzac Day’s Two-Up? Imagine it: “Brought to you by Ladbrokes; lest we forget to bet.” In the mythology of national mateship, Two-Up was a bit of innocent larrikinism; a single day of chance, memory, and honour. Now, that flutter of egalitarian risk is being industrialised into an ideology: a national theology of odds, stakes, and house advantage. If the gambling industry had its way, we’d replace compulsory voting with a flutter on who wins the seat. “Why cast a ballot in Braddon when you can place a bet?” Democracy becomes an app, not a right—the digital roulette of consent.

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The Numbers That Don’t Lie

From 2010-2020, Canberrans lost $1.7 billion to poker machines alone. Despite cutting machine numbers from around 5,000 to just over 3,500 in the last decade, losses actually increased from $176 million to $188 million annually. Each remaining pokie now extracts about $54,000 per year from punters, up from $36,000 a decade ago. The machines didn’t get less addictive; they got more efficient.

Just 1.4% of gamblers account for 45.5% of all money lost to gambling in the ACT, while the least-educated 10% of the ACT population contributes almost one-quarter of pokies revenue. Those without Year 12 spend six to seven times more on average than those with degrees.

Picture the regular at the Canberra Labor Club, feeding $50 a week into the machines that fund the party of the working class. That’s $2,600 a year; roughly 5% of a minimum-wage income; extracted to finance the political organisation theoretically devoted to protecting workers from exploitation. The irony isn’t just rich. It’s calculated.

Here’s the political punchline: the Labor Party’s club group made 63-68% of its revenue from pokies; more reliant on gambling than almost any other club in the territory. Three-quarters of the Labor clubs’ $32.6 million revenue came from gamblers’ losses. This isn’t hypocrisy; it’s entrapment. Labor clubs are financially dependent on pokies revenue, which makes reform not just difficult but institutionally suicidal. The party can’t easily kill the machine that funds it.

And then there’s Pocock himself: the former Wallabies captain was kicked out of the Parliamentary Sports Club after raising concerns that gambling lobbyists were “buying access” to parliamentarians through $2,500 sponsorships. The club’s president? Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The satire writes itself: a city where reducing machines makes the problem worse, and where questioning gambling’s influence gets you ejected faster than you can say “house always wins.”

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The Prosperity Casino: The Billionaires’ XV Set the Odds

But the Parliamentary Sports Club is merely the local franchise. The real game is global, and the real team is the Billionaires’ XV; the world’s fifteen richest men, who now control more wealth than the poorest three billion people combined. Fifteen men. One global playing field. No referee.

If Pocock was expelled for questioning a $2,500 sponsorship, imagine what happens when you question the $2.5 trillion in the owners’ box.

This isn’t competition; it’s choreography. They don’t play the game; they set the odds. Their portfolios move markets, their algorithms price our lives, and their foundations launder inequality into virtue. They are the house, the sponsor, the scoreboard, and the rulebook rolled into one. As Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity,” the gambling lobby is its more respectable Australian cousin; same tentacles, better PR.

What Chomsky called “manufacturing consent” has been perfected as “manufacturing odds.” It’s a familiar sporting arrangement: the same team always wins because they wrote the fixture list. Governments play defence while the super-rich rack up unearned points in tax havens, property bubbles, and privatised infrastructure. We call it prosperity. They call it good odds management.

In a world where the gambling lobby sponsors parliamentary sports clubs and billionaires bankroll democracy itself, the word “competition” has lost all meaning. The rest of us aren’t even spectators anymore. We’re collateral in the business model. George Carlin’s line echoes: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” He was talking about America’s ruling class. Same club, Canberra franchise.

If this were a rugby match, the billionaires wouldn’t be on the field; they’d be in the corporate box, adjusting the scoreboard and selling ad space on the referees.

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The Canberra Cup: Betting on Credibility

Pocock’s banning isn’t about his fitness for sport. It’s about his unfitness for corruption. The message to the crossbench is unmistakable: don’t disrupt the sponsor’s serenity. Don’t politicise the game. Don’t question the rules. But the rules are politics. When gambling firms can bankroll a parliamentary club, when fossil fuel giants sponsor defence think tanks, when Big Tech writes the privacy code, the line between governance and grift dissolves into public relations.

“Game On,” as the saying goes. The house always wins.

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The Final Whistle

So here we are: a democracy rebranded as a casino, a Parliament run like a sports bar, and a reformer sent to the sin bin for believing transparency isn’t treason. The irony is that Pocock, a man who literally tackled for a living, has been sent off for rough conduct against hypocrisy.

But maybe this was inevitable. Australia’s moral compass now points towards the betting slip. Our Parliament isn’t only corrupted by gambling money; it’s addicted to its logic. Everything has odds, everything has a price, and everything can be spun as a win. In this new civic theology, conscience is a foul, truth is offside, and the only rule that matters is the house edge.

The whistle’s blown. Welcome to the national game. Game on.

Just don’t ask who’s paying the ref.

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“You can still wear a Wallabies jersey; just not your conscience.”