In Australia gambling and poker machines have so deeply parasitised themselves into local sports clubs, that they can now _no longer operate without the poker machines_. They’ve co-opted sport so thoroughly, that gambling is now basically an ingrained part of organised sports from local level up.
Horse racing. All over the world there are tracks where horses run, and people bet on the horses, but that isn't why they exist. The track's gambling license, something first granted back when the track was built, is now used to facilitate an attached "casino". The horses are cover for the casino and the casino is just cover for the real money makers of the enterprise: an arcade of slot machines. Corruption for sure, but the "sport" of horse racing probably wouldn't have survived absent that corruption.
I don’t know how HN views horse riding, but “no more horse racing” probably would have resulted in a lot less dead and injured horses, so maybe horse-racing should have died out.
Fewer dead horses on the track, but if the sport went away then there would be horses all over the country out of work, which generally doesn't end well for horses, and likely an overall reduction in the number of horses kept as pets.
What? No they aren't. It's a cancer affecting the balance books of some specific clubs, but of the local aussie rules footy clubs my friends have played at, none have owned venues with pokie machines. There was one club in my brother's under 17s league that was attached to a pokies pub and everyone used to complain about them because their ones got paid too well.
If we ripped out pokies machines then some clubs would be screwed, but I would be seriously surprised if it was more than a handful per league. It would arguably be beneficial for the average team.
There are no pokies outside the Casino in Western Australia (Perth). And thus no pokies at sports clubs or bars etc. It’s glorious.
I admit to not being entirely sure what "Sports Clubs" are over east though or why they need propping up by gambling. In any case, it works fine here.
You CAN get a permit for a few bits of "gambling" that is mostly only for "sports clubs" but it's very VERY restricted, and mostly like actual games with people like Poker, Two Up, etc. It's not really a problem in nearly the same way, and no machines:
https://sportscommunity.com.au/club-member/wa-gambling/
A few years ago I had a chat with a mate over in QLD, and mentioned our ludicrous prices in WA. The standard line at the time here was "Beer has to be expensive in WA, because we're not allowed to subsidise the cost with pokies".
His reply was there are bars in QLD with pokies, and bars without, and none of them charged anything like what we were paying for a pint in WA (nor did the bars with pokies charge significantly less than those without).
Real question: Is the price of a pint high because of operating costs or taxes? Also, can each state set their own alcohol tax rules, and does WA have very strict rules?
Alcohol taxes / excise are controlled at the federal level in Australia. In WA I think the high cost is 1/3 ridiculously high rents, 1/3 high minimum wage and other costs, and 1/3 operators screwing the public because they can.
Higher median wage in WA than other states + higher operating costs to venues (WA liqour licenses used to be the most expensive unsure if this is still the case).
Wouldn't a higher median wage be more profitable for the operators though? They were all paying minimum wage the last time I was involved (which was many years ago), but they'd have been benefiting from the influx of FIFO money since the start of the mining boom?
The sports clubs that depend on pokies also cease to exist - they become pokies venues that also have a sporting arm. They begin to drain the community instead of contributing back to them.
They’re able to use pokies profits to subsidise cheaper food and alcohol to bring in customers, and in turn get them to pump a money into the pokies, while starving other venues of those customers who can’t compete on price.
A (local) sports club doesn't need to "make ... money". It can get contribution from its members, and subsidy from the local government. Otherwise, your argument would sanction every behavior, even turning schools into strip clubs.
Um, what good are schools if you can't make a profit from them? /s
That's why UK Conservatives turned most of English education into for-profit businesses.
People here are always harping on about how the only reason for coordinating people (companies) is to make profit for the owners/bosses.
What pains me is that people are saying "the local club couldn't survive without {an external party taking a proportion of the gross income}". The maths means that without that external entity there would be more money.
Of course without addiction ruining lives people wouldn't give so much of their money away to these particular sports clubs. But, that just means the sports club is running off the destruction of people's lives in the local community. I mean, that's perfect capitalism, but absolutely inhumane.
I think you confuse the real world for Ayn-Randistan. Local sports clubs don't need to make someone $5M/yr. They just need to provide sporting facilities, such as fields and tracks, to local sporters. They can be run by volunteers.
Likewise, running a business for a profit doesn't mean exploiting people to their ruin. If you can't make money ethically, you should do something else.
> If you're running your business to extract value from people rather than to create community with them, you're a bad person.
I run a restaurant with the same idea - we pay our staff way more than anyone else is outside the Michelin places for example.
Still, you might be a bad person if you're running an exploitative business, but very likely the system will reward that kind of person more than you or I. In fact I find it difficult to compete with those sorts of people because they get away with it and make more money so can do more marketing, expand more aggressively etc. The classic annoyance I face is other restaurants in the area giving away free french fries for a 5 star review on Google maps.
Now there are customers who spot the fraudulent review restaurants and come to ours instead, and the discerning customer is our market segment anyway (we do many other things that normies would miss but discerning customers notice and reward with their loyalty) but a restaurant lives and dies on the whims of hordes of normie customers that are delighted to get free fries and don't mind creating a Google account for the first time in their lives to get'm.
We import our flour because taiwanese flour can't achieve authentic biscuit taste, at least in our hundreds of tests. But most wouldn't really notice that especially without a direct comparison - but for people that care a lot about biscuits, they can tell.
Our restaurant is almost certainly the cleanest in the neighborhood, which in Taiwan only a discerning customer would notice or care about. Other restaurants aren't filthy but they don't achieve the level of sterility we do.
We remember the names of most people who come in and call them by it when they return.
Hm what else. The fact that we let you choose between American "cheese" (what basically all taiwanese people think cheese is) and actual cheddar cheese if you order a bacon egg and cheese. We make our BEC on a pan with bacon grease and swap to the vegetarian pan sans bacon for vegetarians (non vegetarian restaurants in Taiwan wouldn't bother mostly). Etc.
because the gambling machines mainly fund the people who own these machines, not the club. the club could hold a single bingo evening and raise more money than a month of gambling machines would bring.
If the club holds the license the club owns the machines. Clubs are not for profits and need to return 100% of profits to the club & facility.
In practice this takes the form of Club Board members giving themselves generous contracts to renovate/clean/manage aspects of the club (via services companies that they or a family member own).
There are sports leagues clubs in NSW that rival small Las Vegas casinos in facilities and amenity.
and i agree - why shouldn't these drugs be legalized? Regulate their sale, just like alcohol. Stop the drug cartels from making profit, and they will disappear.
After all, client's neurotransmitters are the same.
recommend googling 'opioid epidemic' in which people got addicted to perfectly legal painkillers they were prescribed. yeah cartels didn't profit (at first, anyway). neither did society.
It was already tried in the US. The agreed upon results were that humans want alcohol and the downstream effects made society worse e.g. increase in alcohol consumption, empowering organized crime and corrupting the police.
I know. That’s why I’m not arguing that we actually try again. Plus I do enjoy drinking beer and other alcohol. But not all drugs are equal.
Many people can responsibly enjoy alcohol. Some can’t. But there are some drugs that are so effective it would be difficult for any human to responsibly use for any extended period of time. It becomes less about philosophy and more about physiology.
>I don't see the issue with gambling revenue funding a club.
Gambling revenue hurts society more than it profits the club. The answer is that if we absolutely need these clubs, we should more explicitly subsidize them with govt money. It'd be stupid, but less stupid than what we're already doing right now.
Should we take from the most vulnerable in society in order to prop up these clubs? Its not rich people dumping all their money into the pokies, its retirees and people who are broke from gambling addictions getting into debt
There exists a deeper question here regarding “why do these clubs require so much money that they need to bleed it out of the community in the form of poker machines?” I’d posit a good number of them probably don’t need that much cash, and most of it is just profit.
It’s heinous.