Town tilts the odds off pokies

Photo / Hawkes Bay Today.

VICTORIA - Romsey, an hour's drive north of Melbourne, is, on the surface, an unexceptional place. Like most small towns in Australia, it has a pub, an RSL, a sports oval and a bowling club. What it does not have - and this is why it has achieved a certain degree of fame - is electronic poker machines.

Over the past decade or two, "pokies" have become ubiquitous in Australia's pubs and clubs, except in Western Australia, where they remain confined to casinos. In the cities, suburbs and rural areas, their march appeared unstoppable - until Romsey rebelled.

The fight began quietly enough. A Melbourne businessman, Jim Hogan, bought the Romsey Hotel, the town's only pub, and announced plans to renovate it and install a gaming room. Locals lobbied their council, which organised a plebiscite and found nearly 80 per cent of residents opposed.

The council, Macdeon Ranges Shire, rejected Hogan's application for a gaming licence. He appealed, the council appealed, and the five-year battle went all the way to the Victorian Supreme Court. It ruled in Romsey's favour, a decision endorsed by the state's Civil and Administrative Tribunal last November.

Now, emboldened by Romsey's stance, other communities - in Victoria and elsewhere - are following suit: an indication that an anti-pokies grassroots movement may be taking shape.

In Woodend, just west of Romsey, bumper stickers declare that the town is "proud to be pokie-free". In Jan Juc, a seaside hamlet near Torquay, on the Victorian coast, the council is fighting a gaming application. The Macedon Ranges mayor, John Letchford, was much in demand at a local government conference, where colleagues from Queensland, South Australia and New South Wales sought his advice.

In Romsey, a semi-rural town with a population of 4500, the legal battle ignited strong feelings. Some who resisted the pokies had beer bottles or rotten eggs smashed on their doorsteps; others received nasty phone calls. After the final court judgment was handed down, drinkers hurled abuse at Letchford from the hotel veranda.

The aftermath, too, has been mixed. Anti-pokies campaigners are still jubilant, but townsfolk who wanted the machines - believing they would benefit local businesses and create jobs - feel resentful.

Hogan, meanwhile, has abandoned the pub's A$5 million ($6.3 million) renovation and put it on the market. He claims a petrol retailer is interested - meaning that Romsey could end up with no pub at all.

For women such as Sue Kirkegard, who led the anti-pokies fight, the machines represented a threat to community well-being. "Pokies have been around long enough that everyone knew something terrible that had happened to someone they knew," she says.

"One friend, her mother-in-law used to help at the bingo. There were always two old dears there, then suddenly one disappeared. When she asked, 'where's Mary?' it turned out that Mary had lost her house on the pokies. I also know a bloke who got called out to his mate's house one night, because his mate was about to murder his wife. She'd blown the mortgage."

With Romsey populated mainly by young families with relatively high levels of debt, Kirkegard and others felt the community was at risk.

And a Productivity Commission report on the issue, tabled in June, reinforced their fears. It found that problem gambling costs Australia at least A$4.7 billion a year, and that gambling addicts account for about 40 per cent of total spending on poker machines.

The report, which recommended a $1 per bet limit, was released on the morning of Julia Gillard's leadership coup. Not surprisingly, little has been heard of it since. But imposing tighter restrictions on an industry that contributes about 10 per cent of state government revenue was always going to be tough.

In Romsey, sports clubs which are sponsored by Hogan - and hoped for extra financial support once the machines were in place - are bitterly disappointed. "We have cricket, football, netball, golf, bowls and tennis, and poker machines would have contributed to each and every one of them," says John Lynch, a former football club president.

Hogan, who has another pub - renovated, with pokies - in the neighbouring town of Wallan, has begun laying on courtesy buses to transport people there from Romsey. "I think the whole thing has been blown out of all proportion," he says. "Gambling is a legal recreational activity, and if there was a gaming room in the Romsey Hotel, no one would be forced to go there.

"It's preposterous that 20 or 30 people can hold up a multi-million-dollar development." What about the rights of my patrons?""

The courts disagreed, finding that the negative social impact on Romsey of the machines would outweigh any economic benefits.

Widely reported, the case is still being talked about thousands of kilometres away.

The actress Anne Phelan, who starred in Prisoners and Neighbours, was on tour in regional Western Australia earlier this year. She recalls: "People would come up to me in these remote places and say, 'aren't you from that town in Victoria that's beat the pokies?"'

Many residents, though, are unhappy about the prospect of losing their 142-year-old pub, and there are those, like greengrocer Joe Schembri, who accuse Hogan of trying to punish them, "just because we don't want pokies rammed down our throats".

Veteran campaigners such as Nick Xenophon, who was elected to the South Australian and then Federal Senate on an anti-pokies platform, applauds Romsey's stand. "This case shows that communities, if they have a choice, don't want poker machines," he says.

THE FACTS:

* A$4.7 billion Cost of gambling to Australia a year

* 40 per cent of total spending on poker machines by gambling addicts

* 11 per cent of state governments' revenue comes from the gambling