Pokies Industry is Tekken Ur Jurbs
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Ever since the vagaries of politics put Andrew Wilkie into a position where he could insist on gambling reforms, Clubs Australia and their oleaginous spokesman Andrew Ball have being trying out various bullshit campaigns to convince us that the reforms are a Bad Scary Thing. Every campaign they’ve run crashes up against a wall of facts and logic because the only truth to their fear of the reforms is that they are trying desperately to protect their own profits.
Clubs Australia’s latest scare campaign is that gambling reforms will cost jobs. It’s yet another emotive claim, designed to whip up fear and anger, which has no actual basis in fact.
Reducing gambling to a solely recreational pastime might reduce the number of jobs in the gambling industry, but it does not mean that the total jobs and money in the economy will shrink – quite the opposite.
Australians lost about 11 billion dollars on poker machines in the last year; the productivity commission estimates that about 40% of that comes from problem gamblers - $4.4 billion dollars per year.
If you took all the problem gamblers out of the industry overnight what would happen to that $4.4 billion? It doesn’t just vanish in a puff of smoke. It all comes from personal earnings, so if we don’t put it into pokies we're going to spend it on other things instead, like shoes, holidays, eating out, vodka shots, movies, plasma screen TVs, chocolate bars, piercings and football memberships.
The employment multiplier effect from gambling is about three jobs per $1 million: that is, every million dollars earned by pokies creates 3 jobs.
The employment multiplier effects from restaurants and catering businesses is about 20 jobs per $1 million, the retail sector is about 6.5 per $1 million.
So, if the reforms work to completely eradicate problem gambling you would actually create about 45,000 jobs. Sadly though, human nature being what it is, the reforms probably won’t completely get rid of problem gambling. Still, even if it only reduces it by half, that’s still more than 20,000 new jobs.
Hopefully not for Andrew Ball though. If the gambling industry is cut back there's going to be a glut in the market for lying, oleaginous little shits, he might have to expand his skill set.
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