One-armed bandits do more real harm than bikie gangs

Bikie clubs (roughly speaking, social clubs that have a slot on the org chart for a sergeant-at-arms) are the political equivalent of pro wrestling ‘heels’ – the Iron Sheik, the Undertaker, larger-than-life theatrically gifted evildoers whose function is to be booed while making the hero look good.

Nobody has a good word to say about them, and they’d feel insulted if anyone did.

I’ll say this for bikie gangs, though: their clubhouses don’t have poker machines. That’s one form of harm where they come out well ahead of your average RSL. And there are a lot more RSLs than there are bikie clubs.

We know that poker machines do harm – lots and lots of it. I’d give examples, except that it’d be fairly pointless because nobody actually attempts to deny it. We’ve just decided, collectively, to shrug our shoulders and look the other way.

Against this, clubs with pokies are heavily taxed and contribute buckets of money to the government’s bottom line.

In addition, they’re supposed to balance out some of the harm they do to the local community by returning a chunk of the takings (in Victoria, for example, 8.33 percent) in the form of donations to ‘community benefit’.

And when I say ‘local’, that’s a straightforward geographic expression: one study found that ‘people who live closer to pokies venues are more likely to gamble and are more likely to experience serious financial and mental health consequences’, which is not, as far as I know, true of bikie clubhouses.

Before your domestic violence charity approaches the club down the road seeking a contribution to its women’s refuge, though, you should be warned that the vast majority of clubs have the firm view that charity begins at home.

A report from the Alliance for Gambling Reform (AGR) found that 77% of clubs, after considering all possible recipients, had realised that the most worthy object of this money was in fact themselves.

Last year Victorian clubs spent $241.7 million on ‘staff wages, staff meals, beer gas, venue decorations, security, pay TV subscriptions, accounting, legal fees, council rates, pest control, trophies and prizes for members’ (and if you want to check, you can go to the website of the Victorian Casino and Gambling Control Commission and search for ‘community benefit fund’ to look up what your favourite venue has reported).

We are community groups, the clubs say: we serve the community, and we deserve a break.

In an era where people are less and less likely to join anything at all that can’t be handled on a smartphone there is something in this. It’s also true that clubs use these savings to subsidise drinks and meals and attract more patrons for their gaming rooms, providing more unfortunates for the meatgrinder.

The Victorian government has responded to the AGR report by saying it’s shocked – shocked! – to find that gambling is going on here, while of course pocketing its winnings.

Money doesn’t stink, as the Roman emperor Vespasian once remarked (he was taxing urine – hey, there’s an idea!). Isn’t it better to tax heavily the things that we want to discourage – gambling, drinking and smoking – than the things we want to encourage, like payrolls (or urination)?

The flaw in this argument is that getting 10% of the state budget from gambling taxes does rather discourage governments from actually discouraging these vices. Gambling has grown around the institutions of Australian society – its sports, its associations, its entertainments – to the point where it’s hard to cut back the growth without killing the patient.

That’s the defence the Albanese government offers for its refusal to ban online sports betting advertising: free-to-air television has become dependent on it, and sports depend on TV rights.

It’s the same argument that the tobacco companies ran with for so long last century – without tobacco sponsorship, sports would go broke and wither away. We were, as a society, able to fight back against that by simply taxing cigarettes directly and passing the money directly to footballers and cricketers through targeted public sector sponsorships. Why don’t we do that now?

Times change – bikie clubs, for example, are now subject to generally applicable smoking bans, and their members (though not, again, the actual clubs as business entities) seem to be putting their effort into bootleg tobacco over the traditional harder drugs.

We face new challenges, and old problems, and we want governments that try to fix them rather than just booing the villain. Bikie clubs are the poster, not the problem.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.