The clubs that benefit hugely from poker machine revenue are addicted to the gambling addicts who account for a disproportionately large amount of it.
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The machines are rivers of gold for their operators. According to the ACT's Gambling and Racing Commission they grossed $143,536,235 in the 2021-22 financial year.
But there is a third and a fourth player in this "game". The largest beneficiary, apart from the clubs themselves, is the ACT government.
Almost $30 million of that gross revenue - 19 per cent - went to the government. The fourth player with a vested interest in the pokie cash is the ACT Labor party.
It benefits from significant political donations made by clubs owned and operated by unions closely affiliated with the ALP.
Is this interlocking web of relationships, which is fraught with the potential for conflicts of interests, one reason Canberra lags behind the rest of the country in addressing poker machine addiction?
The Barr-Rattenbury government's record would appear to speak for itself. While, on the one hand, it has made much of its taxpayer-funded scheme to reduce the number of pokies in the territory, it has not been matched with a gaming machine revenue drop.
The clubs have had a win-win at the taxpayer's expense. After being paid handsomely for each machine licence they relinquished, they are making more money from fewer machines than before. They must be laughing all the way to the bank.
To put that into perspective, given analysis by The Canberra Times found the machines cost Canberrans $1.7 billion in the decade to 2019, it would appear the ACT government received a budget boost of about $323 million over that time.
While that's great news for the bottom line, it comes at a very heavy human cost. The government's own research has found 5.4 per cent of adult Canberrans - more than 15,000 people - experienced some level of harm from their gambling.
But the story doesn't end there. What about the kids who miss out on urgent necessities? What about the partners who are bashed as a result of arguments over money? And what about those who have to go on alone after a loved one has taken their own life as a result of this addiction?
It is not enough for the ACT Gaming Minister Shane Rattenbury to acknowledge "reducing machine numbers over many years is not a sufficient strategy" and that he wants to introduce a scheme where each gambler's poker machine losses are capped.
If that's the case then why is it taking so long?
Back in March he said the ACT government was "testing the market" for a "central monitoring system" to reduce gambling harm. The four-week-long "market sounding", which was due to be completed by late April, was in line with the government's 2022 discussion paper on poker machine bet and credit limits.
The CMS would connect every poker machine in the ACT. Gamblers would need a universal player card. This would enable bet and credit limits for individuals.
But was the market sounding necessary? And how committed is the government to following through? The ACT is the only jurisdiction in the country that has not gone down this path already. Casinos in Tasmania and Melbourne are already introducing cashless-only gaming and mandatory precommitment betting limits.
Is this yet another case of the ACT government reinventing the wheel? Also, why was it that when the government started making serious noises about reform four years ago it stopped releasing gross gambling machine revenue for individual clubs?
There is more the ACT can be doing to reduce the harm of problem gambling.
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