By Terence Mills
Several years ago a friend who gambles regularly mentioned to me that pokies were manipulated by the larger clubs and casinos to boost the House take and diminish the odds for a punter to win. He particularly mentioned how the win-options were compromised for weekends and when there were large conventions staying at the casino hotel at times when there were many more novices playing the machines. He had heard this from in-house sources
This information was merely of passing interest to me as I’m not a gambler, not for any question of morality but mainly because when it comes to casinos, horses and even the stock market, I just don’t consider that I have enough confidence or knowledge to bet successfully.
Now we have some courageous whistle blowers in the form of former Crown employees who have provided some very revealing information to Andrew Wilkie independent federal member for Denison in Tasmania.
According to ABC Online the allegations aired by Wilkie and specific to Crown include:
- Staff being told to remove betting options from pokies
- Crown regularly resetting machines’ memory to reduce returns to players
- Staff being instructed to use different player ID cards when processing transactions over $10,000, to avoid reporting to AUSTRAC, the national anti-money laundering agency
- Punters were constantly fed alcohol while at their machines and evidently those reluctant to leave their machines, who soiled themselves while betting, had Crown providing a change of clothes so they could continue gambling
- Crown also ordered staff to “shave down” buttons on gaming machines to allow illegal continuous play on the machines, the former workers said.
State regulations ban the practice of allowing a machine to spin without the need to press a button for each spin. The whistle blowers allege they were instructed to use tools to shave down buttons on new machines to create space for punters to wedge something next to the buttons, so they could be held in place to keep the machines playing continuously. Regular punters would be aware of this practice even to the extent that Crown allegedly gave gamblers plastic wedges similar to guitar picks, featuring Crown’s logo, which were jammed next to the buttons to hold them down.
Money laundering has for a long time been an accusation levelled at casinos and the recent arrest of Crown employees in China, which was largely about inducing big gamblers or whales to patronise Crown establishments in Australia, also suggested that currency controls in China were being breached by providing a conduit for money laundering. With regulations in China limiting Chinese nationals to a foreign exchange offshore quota of $US50,000 a year there is probably a big temptation for those wishing to get money out of China, for offshore investment, to buy casino chips in China for redemption in countries like Australia. The Chinese authorities are very tough on this but not so much in Australia.
It’s almost as if coalition governments try to facilitate money laundering. In Queensland, the short-lived Newman government changed the rules to allow winnings of up to $5,000 to be paid in cash. Previously, jackpots could only be paid out by cheque or electronic funds transfer to a bank account. The former Baird Government in NSW, like the Newman government justified this and other changes in the name of reducing red tape.
None of this is new but what is new is that whistle blowers have now come forward and the need for an enquiry is becoming critical despite some obvious resistance from both state and federal authorities who are subject to the massive lobbying influence exerted by the gambling industry and are conscious of the the level of political donations coming from the gambling lobby to both major parties.
Then there is the influence exerted by people like Woolworths’ whose annual pokies revenue in Victoria grew to $669 million in the 2015-16 financial year representing over a quarter of its national gambling revenue.
That Andrew Wilkie has taken up this cause is a credit to him and a strong argument in favour of more Independents in our parliaments. Realistically, nobody expects the gambling and pokie industry to be outlawed but punters and the community should be able to rely on a level of government regulation that will even up the playing field and eliminate money laundering. It can’t be that hard, surely?
