The Quick Read

(Or go straight to The Long Read, Chairman’s Lounge Edition, six paragraphs below.)

The Misdirection
They wheel out the same victim every time and dress her up as the villain: some pensioner in a brown cardigan, her whole world gutted by the thought of a week without her modest two-dollar flutter over a tepid shandy of lager and lemon at the local RSL. Freedom under siege, they cry. It’s pure theatre; shabby theatre at that; and about as honest as a three-card monte dealer working the Flinders Street underpass. That pensioner isn’t the problem the gambling industry is protecting. She’s the victim they’re hiding behind. They wave her cardigan like a matador’s cape while behind the curtain, they’re running an industrial-scale operation designed to extract every last dollar with machines engineered to hook people with the precision of a Pavlovian lab.

Inside the Extraction Zone
Walk into any RSL in a working-class suburb at 11am on a Tuesday. The rooms are dim, deliberately so. The carpet is red, always red, patterned in swirls designed to hide the stains: spilled drinks, ground-in ash, the darker patches where punters have relieved themselves rather than abandon a machine they’re convinced is about to pay out. At Crown Casino, the cleaning staff can tell you stories about the urinous reek near certain machines, the puddles they mop up from gamblers so deep in their trance they won’t leave their posts even for basic human dignity. The soundtrack is mechanical chimes and digital waterfalls in electric green and gold and that particular shade of purple that exists nowhere in nature. And the faces. Christ, the faces. Grey-skinned, hollow-eyed, feeding twenty-dollar notes into machines with the mechanical desperation of junkies at a needle exchange.

The Linguistic Corruption
But here’s where it gets truly insidious: gambling hasn’t just colonised our venues and our wallets. It’s colonised our language, reprogrammed the wet computer of our collective brain. Listen to how we talk about politics now. We don’t hold power to account; we speculate on leadership odds. We don’t analyse policy; we handicap races. Every day, precious column inches get burned discussing who’s odds-on for promotion, which backbencher is the long-shot bet for a ministry. It’s horse-race coverage literalised into our democratic discourse, turning governance into a form to study rather than a system to scrutinise. And in social welfare? Our discourse has been corrupted by the language of winners and losers, a zero-sum worldview that poisons any appetite for collective reform. Gambling’s metaphors have become our political reality.

World Champions at Losing
Every year, Australians lose more money per capita to gambling than any other people on Earth. We’re world champions at losing, gold medallists in getting fleeced. The recent Four Corners investigation exposed online bookmakers keeping millions in stolen money, and the Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission; our de facto national regulator; which meets once a month, employs zero full-time staff, and has been so thoroughly captured that Steve Cannane filmed their chairman doing a runner to his clapped-out red Mercedes, which stalled twice before he managed his escape.

Canberra’s Complicity
Meanwhile, the Albanese government has spent 2024 and 2025 folding, hedging, and shelving the Murphy Report’s recommendations. When Senator David Pocock raised concerns that the Australian Parliament Sports Club was taking gambling industry sponsorship, they kicked him out. The message couldn’t be clearer: “We’re the bookies’ bag men now.”

Walking Away from the Table
Other countries have walked away from this table. Norway, Finland, parts of Canada; they’ve banned the advertising, removed the machines, and survived. We could do the same. The house only wins if we let them keep dealing. It’s time to call time, cash out, and walk away. The table’s fixed, the odds are cooked; but our future doesn’t have to be.

The House Always Wins: How Australia’s Gambling Addiction Became a National Paralysis

The Long Read or CHAIRMAN’S LOUNGE EDITION

The Misdirection: Who’s Really the Victim?
They wheel out the same victim every time and dress her up as the villain: some pensioner in a brown cardigan, her whole world gutted by the thought of a week without her modest ten-dollar flutter over a tepid shandy of lager and lemon at the local RSL. Freedom under siege, they cry. Nanna’s rights trampled by wowsers and killjoys.

It’s pure theatre; shabby theatre at that; and about as honest as a three-card monte dealer working the Flinders Street underpass. Because here’s the misdirection: that pensioner isn’t the problem the gambling industry is protecting. She’s the victim they’re hiding behind.

They wave her cardigan like a matador’s cape while behind the curtain, they’re running an industrial-scale operation designed to identify the clinically addicted, the desperately vulnerable, the financially precarious, then extract every last dollar with machines engineered; colour-tested, sound-calibrated, psychologically optimised; to hook them with the precision of a Pavlovian lab.

A civilised society would call this what it is: predatory capitalism feeding on human misery. Instead, our governments have become the bookies’ bag men, carrying the take and counting their cut.

Inside the Machine: A Tour of the Extraction Zone
Walk into any RSL in a working-class suburb at 11am on a Tuesday and tell me about harmless flutters. The rooms are dim, deliberately so; easier to lose track of time when there’s no natural light, no clocks visible through the haze, just the hypnotic pulse of screens cycling through their algorithmic con in electric green and gold and that purple that exists nowhere in nature.

The carpet is red, always red, patterned in swirls and geometries designed to hide the stains: spilled drinks, ground-in ash, the darker patches where punters have relieved themselves rather than abandon a machine they’re convinced is about to pay out. (At Crown Casino, the cleaning staff can tell you stories about the urinous reek near certain machines, the puddles they mop up from gamblers so deep in their trance they won’t leave their posts even for basic human dignity.)

The soundtrack is mechanical chimes and digital waterfalls, punctuated by the occasional robotic fanfare when someone wins back a fraction of what they’ve already lost. And the faces. Christ, the faces. Grey-skinned, hollow-eyed, feeding twenty-dollar notes into machines with the mechanical desperation of junkies at a needle exchange, fingers stained yellow-brown from chain-smoking through six-hour sessions.

This isn’t entertainment. This is extraction. These machines are designed to keep you playing until you’ve got nothing left; not your rent money, not your dignity, not even your bladder control.

The Deepest Corruption: How Gambling Reprogrammed Our Brains
But here’s where it gets truly insidious: gambling hasn’t just colonised our venues and our wallets. It’s colonised our language, reprogrammed the wet computer of our collective brain. Listen to how we talk about politics now. We don’t hold power to account; we speculate on leadership odds. We don’t analyse policy; we handicap races.

Every day, precious column inches and broadcast hours get burned discussing who’s odds-on for promotion, who’s shortening for a challenge, which backbencher is the long-shot bet for a ministry. It’s horse-race coverage colonising our democratic discourse, turning governance into a form to study rather than a system to scrutinise; a community established for the public good.

The media runs the same play every time: ignore the substance, focus on the contest, treat politics like a spectator sport where you’re betting on horses rather than choosing who gets to shape your life. And we’ve internalised this so completely that we barely notice anymore.

The gambling industry hasn’t just sold us pokies and sports betting; they’ve sold us a framework for understanding power itself as something to punt on rather than participate in.

And in social welfare? The damage is even deeper. Our discourse has been corrupted by the language of winners and losers, a zero-sum worldview that poisons any appetite for collective reform.

We talk about “backing winners” in industry policy. We frame welfare recipients as “losers” who couldn’t compete. We’ve adopted the casino’s logic; that for every winner there must be a loser, that redistribution is “robbing” the successful to pay the unsuccessful; and used it to dismantle the very idea of mutual obligation and social insurance.

Gambling’s metaphors have become our political reality, its moral framework our civic common sense. The house hasn’t just changed our behaviour. It’s changed how we think, what we value, what we imagine is possible.

World Champions at Losing
Australia’s gambling industry isn’t leisure anymore; it’s a parasite that’s worked its way into the bloodstream of the body politic and started reprogramming our neural pathways. Politicians in navy suits and sensible ties describe it as “entertainment,” but entertainment doesn’t usually leave families bankrupted, RSLs hollowed out into soulless slot machine warehouses, or Parliament House itself taking donations from the nation’s bookmakers like they’re running a protection racket.

The gambling lobby has literally bought a seat at every table in Canberra and the house always wins. What we’re witnessing is the slow-motion death of civic will, a country that’s doubled down on its own conscience and pushed all its chips to the centre of the table in exchange for political donations and licensing fees.

Every year, Australians lose more money per capita to gambling than any other people on Earth. Read that again. We’re world champions at losing, gold medallists in getting fleeced, the undisputed heavyweight title-holders of throwing our money away. Billions drain annually from household budgets; rent money, grocery money, kids’ school excursion money; straight into the vaults of corporations who then funnel it into political donations and advertising partnerships.

The ads are all muted earth tones and mateship, beer-commercial aesthetics in slate grey and forest green selling financial ruin as a lifestyle choice. “Bet responsibly,” they say in sans-serif font over images of mates laughing in warm amber lighting, with all the sincerity of a tobacco company promoting “sensible smoking.”

Behind those glossy campaigns, the real picture painted in harsher colours: homes repossessed on bad bets, marriages destroyed by hidden losses, parents eating instant noodles for dinner; that particular shade of orange that shouldn’t exist in food; while lying about where the money went. It’s a death in life, the social contract torn up and used as a betting slip.

Four Corners Exposes the Rigged Game
The recent Four Corners investigation “Losing Streak”; and that title does exactly what it says on the tin; exposed what everyone who’s paying attention already knew: the whole game is rigged from go to whoa.

Steve Cannane showed us online bookmakers keeping millions in wagers placed with stolen money. Financial advisers gambling away their clients’ life savings while betting companies kept the proceeds and shrugged.

And overseeing this carnival of corruption? The Northern Territory Racing and Wagering Commission, the de facto national regulator, which sounds impressive until you learn they meet once a month in Darwin’s tropical heat, employ precisely zero full-time staff, and have been so thoroughly captured by the industry they’re supposed to police that Cannane filmed their chairman doing a runner to his clapped-out red Mercedes, which stalled twice; the engine coughing, the chairman’s face flushing crimson; before he managed his great escape.

You couldn’t write this as farce; no one would believe it.

Labor’s Endless Retreat
Meanwhile, back in Canberra where the carpets are blue and the walls are beige and everything has the antiseptic non-colour of a space designed to hide the dirt, the Albanese government has spent the entirety of 2024 and 2025 performing an elaborate pantomime called “We’re Definitely Going to Do Something About Gambling Advertising, We Promise, Just Not Today.”

They folded in November 2024. They hedged their bets in January 2025. They’ve now pushed all the chips from the Murphy Report into the muck pile until after the election, when presumably they can fold again.

Labor’s had so many meetings with media moguls and sports executives; all behind closed doors, all wrapped in non-disclosure agreements thicker than a casino’s security manual; that you’d think they were negotiating a hostage release rather than considering whether maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t let gambling companies advertise to children during Saturday morning footy.

The Pocock Principle: Speak Truth, Get The Boot
And when Senator David Pocock; former Wallabies captain, current keeper of Australia’s last functioning political spine; raised concerns in October that the Australian Parliament Sports Club was taking sponsorship money from Responsible Wagering Australia (that’s the gambling lobby’s peak body, in case the Orwellian name didn’t tip you off), what happened?

Did Parliament thank him for highlighting this jaw-dropping conflict of interest? Did they investigate why the Prime Minister is president of a sports club that’s literally registered as a lobbying organisation and funded by the gambling industry?

No. They kicked Pocock out. Told him he wasn’t welcome. The message couldn’t be clearer if they’d hung a neon sign over Parliament House in hot pink and electric yellow: “We’re the bookies’ bag men now, and if you don’t like it, there’s the door.” Now they’ve deregistered the club. Nothing like disconnecting the warning light on the dashboard when the nation’s federal engine is cooking.

The Hollowing Out: What Happened to Our RSLs
The rot runs deeper than Parliament; it’s metastasized through the entire civic architecture. Your local RSL, the one with the fading photos of diggers in sepia brown and the honour roll in tarnished brass, has been transformed into something between a casino floor and a methadone clinic.

These venues were built as sanctuaries, spaces for returned soldiers and pensioners to gather over a counter meal and a beer, yellow fluorescent lights and Formica tables and the kind of daggy community warmth that held suburbs together.

Now? Walk in and the first thing you see is rows of pokies glowing in the artificial twilight, each machine humming its algorithmic siren song in colours that would make a Pride parade look understated. Neon purple. Acidic green. That particular shade of gold that only exists in gambling dens and highway service station toilets.

The machines are always placed near the entrance; psychological design, that, prime real estate for catching punters before they can change their minds; and they’re always surrounded by people who look like they’ve been there since dawn, feeding in notes with the mechanical persistence of factory workers on a production line they can’t leave.

The irony would be funny if it weren’t so bleak: venues built to honour service now run on servicing addiction. Community programs that once kept these places relevant; youth sports, pensioner lunches, emergency relief funds; have dried up like creek beds in drought, while the pokies hum louder, each spin extracting another small piece of dignity, each flashing screen another sucker bet nobody can win.

Some towns haemorrhage tens of millions annually to these machines. Tens of millions. In communities where the median wage barely cracks fifty grand, where a broken-down car or a kid needing dental work can push a family to the edge, the pokies are extracting wealth with industrial efficiency and calling it community service.

The Casinos: Crime as Overhead
The casino giants; Star Entertainment, Crown Resorts; have turned criminal investigation into overhead, another line item on the balance sheet somewhere between marketing and maintenance.

Repeated findings of money laundering, corruption, proven connections to organised crime, regulatory breaches so systematic they read like a how-to manual for corporate malfeasance; none of it costs them their licenses.

They get extensions instead. Tax breaks. Sympathetic hearings where Labor and Liberal governments trip over themselves to ensure these corporations deemed “unsuitable to hold a casino license” (actual regulatory finding, not my interpretation) somehow get to keep operating their palaces of marble and chrome and those deep burgundy carpets that hide all manner of sins.

AUSTRAC finally prosecuted the Mounties club chain for systematically breaching anti-money-laundering laws, confirming what everyone who wasn’t wilfully blind already knew: pokies venues are cleaning dirty money while the red carpet gets rolled out.

Crown’s treatment in Victoria and Western Australia mirrors Star’s in NSW, where the Minns government has delayed; twice now; implementing lower cash limits on daily gambling, pushing back from $5,000 to $1,000 like even that pathetically modest restriction might bring on the apocalypse.

The industry doesn’t merely survive regulation; it authors it, sets the odds, deals from the bottom of the deck, and pockets the rake while governments count their percentage.

Total Cultural Capture: From Kids to Cup Day
And the cultural capture? That’s total. Complete. Gambling isn’t advertising anymore; it’s infrastructure, woven through sport and media and political discourse like mycelium through dead wood. Sports broadcasts have become interactive tutorials in financial ruin, live odds scrolling across the bottom of the screen in electric blue and white, updating with each play like a fever dream crossed with a stock ticker.

Kids speak casually about “multi-leg bets” and “accumulator odds” the way previous generations discussed batting averages. They’re learning to calculate long-shot parlays before they understand compound interest, getting groomed as marks before they’re old enough to realise the house always wins.

Research shows 600,000 teenagers under eighteen are already gambling. Six hundred thousand. That’s not a crisis; it’s a cultural catastrophe, and it’s precisely what the industry intended. Almost one in three twelve-to-seventeen-year-olds gamble. By eighteen to nineteen, it’s nearly half, burning through $213 million annually on bets they haven’t got the prefrontal cortex development to properly assess.

The marketing doesn’t even pretend subtlety anymore; it’s all laddish banter in muted greys and navy blues, every second ad break another betting company promising mateship and good times through an app designed by algorithms that would make a Skinner box look humane.

Melbourne Cup Day; “the race that stops the nation,” they call it, like it’s something to be proud of; is the annual high holy day of this civic religion. And what a religion: the liturgy is gambling jargon, the sacrament is a bourbon and Coke in a plastic cup, the fellowship is a bunch of people in cheap fascinators losing their shirt on a two-minute horse race while pretending they’re at Ascot.

The aesthetics are all pale pink champagne and mint green sundresses, Instagram-filtered to within an inch of reality, but scratch the surface and it’s the same grim arithmetic as the pokies: most lose, a tiny fraction win, the house takes its cut, and we’re supposed to call this culture. Supposed to think it’s charming.

The race itself; thoroughbreds with coats of chestnut and bay running on legs so fragile they sometimes snap mid-race, all so we can flutter a tenner on which horse name sounds funniest; is less carnival than moral autopsy. One day of performative glamour masking 364 days of industrial-scale addiction, cruelty, and quiet financial ruin. The real race never stops; it’s the one grinding away at family budgets and mental health, 24/7, the long odds compounding until there’s nothing left.

The Social Fabric Tears
Gambling doesn’t just destroy individuals; though it does that with ruthless efficiency. It shatters trust itself: between spouses who’ve hidden their losses, between governments and citizens in a game rigged from the start, between leaders and the principles they swore to uphold when the lobby’s money talks louder than their consciences.

It transforms neighbourhoods into extraction zones, every pub and club now a branch office of the national casino. Venues that once anchored communities in something resembling fellowship have become profit farms for poker machine manufacturers, each one taking its cut while communities hollow out around them.

Even sport; community sport, kids’ sport, the stuff that supposedly builds character and brings us together; isn’t immune. The gambling lobby sponsors teams, stadiums, charities, universities, cancer research, for Christ’s sake.

They’ve bought naming rights to the civic square, painted their logos across our shared spaces in corporate colours we’ve learned not to see. The whole society is carrying the bookies’ bag now, and we barely notice anymore because the purple and gold screens have become part of the furniture: we’ve internalised their logic so completely we think in their terms without realising we’re doing it.

The Sophisticated Corruption
Australia’s political class likes to reassure itself that we were “once free of corruption,” that we’re somehow better than the Banana Republics and captured states elsewhere. Mate, have a look around. The gambling lobby’s hold isn’t corruption in the sense of brown paper bags changing hands in parliamentary car parks; it’s far more sophisticated than that.

This is regulatory capture so complete it’s captured our imagination, reprogrammed our political discourse, convinced us that letting predatory corporations systematically destroy vulnerable citizens is “freedom” and “choice,” that regulation equals socialism, that protecting people from algorithmic exploitation is somehow un-Australian.

Labor; allegedly the party of the battler, the unions, the working class; now presides over the battler’s methodical destruction, collecting licensing fees from pokies clustered in the poorest postcodes, the ones where every loss hurts hardest and longest.

Reform proposals arrive dead on arrival, already compromised into uselessness, then get shelved, trialed into oblivion, or mothballed until after the next election when they can be quietly buried while the media speculates on leadership odds rather than policy substance.

Tasmania: The Template for Surrender
Tasmania’s 2018 election was the template. Labor campaigned on removing pokies from pubs and clubs; a genuinely bold policy, the kind that might actually matter.

The gambling industry responded with a blitzkrieg: advertising everywhere in screaming red and urgent black, claims of job losses, economic apocalypse, freedom under threat. They poured over $400,000 into the Liberal Party’s campaign coffers, a sum that in Tasmanian politics buys you everything short of the keys to Parliament House.

Labor lost. Within a year, they’d abandoned the policy entirely, folded before they’d even sat back down at the table. The message to every other Labor party in the country was clear: cross the gambling lobby and they’ll bury you. Federal Labor got the message. They’ve been folding ever since.

A Crime of Indifference
Here’s what makes this unforgivable: governments aren’t powerless here. They’re perfectly capable of acting. They just refuse to. They know the odds. They’ve seen the research, read the reports, heard the testimonies from people whose lives have been destroyed by machines deliberately engineered to destroy lives.

Gambling policy in Australia isn’t a failure of governance; it’s a crime of indifference, a fixed match played out under fluorescent lights while everyone pretends they can’t see the cards marked.

Gambling isn’t infrastructure in the metaphorical sense anymore. It’s literally built into budget assumptions, the foundation our governments rest their fiscal projections on. In Tasmania, pokies generate 3 percent of state revenue; a figure that sounds almost reasonable until you realize it means the government requires citizens to ruin themselves in sufficient numbers to fund basic services. It’s a protection racket dressed up as entertainment regulation.

Gambling stands alongside fossil fuels as one of the two great corruptions of Australian politics: one choking our economic lungs while the other suffocates whatever’s left of our civic soul, reprogramming our brains to see politics as spectacle and welfare as a zero-sum game, both rigging the system against any future worth inhabiting.

Walking Away: The Countries That Did It

But here’s the thing about gambling: the house only wins if you keep playing.

Other countries have walked away from this table. They’ve banned the advertising, removed the machines from vulnerable communities, told the corporate bookies to take their algorithmic predation and shove it. Norway, Finland, parts of Canada; they’ve done it and survived, their governments somehow finding revenue without systematically destroying their most vulnerable citizens. We could do the same.

Nothing’s stopping us except our own governments’ complicity and cowardice. Our federal, state, and local administrations need to stand up; actually stand up, not perform some meaningless consultation process designed to manufacture consent for inaction; and tell Big Betting the party’s over.

The crisis is urgent. The risk assessment is decades overdue. This has nothing to do with denying pensioners their modest flutter over a shandy and everything to do with acknowledging that civilised societies don’t build their budgets on the corpses of broken families or conduct their politics in the language of bookmakers.

The Penny Can Still Drop
The penny can still drop. It’s never too late for that moment of clarity, that instant when the scales fall and you see the con for what it’s always been. We can recognize this national wager as a sucker’s bet no democracy should take. We can reclaim our political discourse from the horse-race coverage and zero-sum thinking that gambling has infected it with. We can remember that governance isn’t a spectator sport to punt on, that welfare isn’t about backing winners, that society isn’t a casino where some must lose so others can win.

Governments that depend on gambling revenue managed before the pokies arrived; somehow, miraculously, states funded schools and hospitals before 1956; and they’ll manage after.

Communities that think they need the machines will discover, as others have, that money spent on actual entertainment; restaurants, cinemas, live music, anything that doesn’t algorithmically harvest human vulnerability; creates more jobs, generates more genuine economic activity, and builds something resembling community rather than systematically demolishing it.

Australia doesn’t have to be the world’s biggest loser. We could walk away from this table while there’s still something left to save, while we still remember that government’s job is protecting citizens, not selling them to predatory industries for a percentage of the take. We could choose; actually choose, not in the gambling industry’s perverted sense of the word but in the meaningful democratic sense; to fold this bad hand and stop pretending the game isn’t rigged.

Time to Cash Out
The house always wins. But only if we let them keep dealing.

It’s time to call time, cash out, and walk away. The table’s fixed, the odds are cooked, the whole thing’s a con; not just at the pokies and the casino, but in how we think and talk and imagine what’s possible. But our future doesn’t have to be. We just need governments with the spine to push back from the table, reclaim our political language from the bookmakers’ jargon, and tell the lobby we’re done carrying their bag.

That’s not idealism. That’s mathematics. And unlike the pokies, the numbers actually add up.