Did you know you can cook bread with steam?
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You wonder sometimes why we bother at all to turn up to polling stations on election day, as it seems the politicians in this country respond more to corporate influence than the power of the ballot.
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The operators of this system Two Way media, along with their venture partners Tabcorp, insist there are plenty of safeguards in place to prevent this new system from being abused by those who have a problem with gambling. Fair enough, but it seems the online gambling vendors are the only ones prepared to give those assurances. After numerous contacts being put into the office for the NSW Minister for Gaming and Racing, Graham West, the silence coming out of Macquarie Street is nothing short of deafening.
And speaking of deafening, it was also interesting to see that channelnews was the only media outlet prepared to run this story. Now I am unsure what the exact reason is, but some media organisations do have a vested interested in the gambling industry (like Channel 9 for example) whilst other, smaller players possibly did not deem it newsworthy enough to give it some space.
A couple of years ago, a Productivity Commission report noted that the booming gambling industry costs society up to $2.9billion annually in associated social problems, outstripping the cost of illicit drugs ($890 million) and alcohol ($2.4billion) as a social problem. And in a country that houses 20 per cent of the world’s poker machines, five times more than the United States, one would think the launch of another and even easier way to throw money down the drain would be a high-priority issue.
Perhaps last year’s Betfair media blow-up has made all concerned in the online gambling industry a bit shy when it comes to making comments, however as pointed out earlier, the vendors themselves are keen and happy to talk about their online gambling ventures ad nauseum. Its only those that are charged with regulating and monitoring the system that seem to have contracted an extreme case of media- shyness.
The situation is further muddied by the fact that federally there is a law called The Interactive Gambling Act (IGA) which makes it an offence to provide an interactive gambling service to a customer physically present in Australia and carries a maximum penalty of $220,000 per day for individuals and $1.1 million per day for bodies corporate. However, there is a small but significant loophole here – the Act does not cover sports betting.
So sports betting services such as Betfair, Centrebet, Sportsbet and the Sky Racing Active service are all in the clear here- legally anyway.
UK-based Betfair signed a landmark agreement with Racing Victoria in July 2006 which saw Betfair begin covering Victorian racing, and last year, in Tasmania which licenses peer-to-peer betting exchanges, Betfair was allowed to set up shop there.
Moreover, New South Wales, South Australia and Western Australia do not have legislation that specifically applies to Internet gambling- and maybe this is why the NSW Gaming and Racing Minister is loathed to comment on yesterdays Pay TV gambling launch- since in effect, he really has no control over its existence anyway.
