I’m looking forward to growing old, because then the Balmain Tigers Club will pay someone to look after my cat. According to the Tigers’ latest annual report, an organisation called Pets of Older Persons is one of the main beneficiaries of its largesse.

Donations to POOPs, as it is known, are at the heart of the present conundrum of clubland. Are they a vital hub of their community, or giant pokie palaces that are using their local connections as a fig leaf? All not-for-profits, including registered clubs, enjoy special tax treatment, which is currently under review by the Productivity Commission. Yesterday’s news that the commission is casting a disapproving eye over the club sector’s $500 million in tax breaks drew the usual response.

ClubsAustralia CEO David Costello said that clubs employ almost 100,000 people directly across the country and donate hundreds of millions of dollars annually to charities and sporting groups.

But exactly how much money do they donate? The last published accounts for my local — the Tigers — shows that it is SFA. And if you take into account the damage done by problem gambling in the community, then I would say that NSW taxpayers are well into the red.

In the year to August 31, 2008, the Tigers made a $10.2 million profit on its pokies and donated $389,569 to local groups — that’s 3.8%. I donate a much larger percentage of my income to charity, and I’m not even very generous. In that year, for every dollar that a Tigers member spent on food and drink, they put $2.72 through the bandits. How do Tigers board members, including local identities Dawn Fraser and Paul Sironen, sleep at night knowing that?

In fact, almost half of that charitable contribution was mandatory. In NSW, clubs with gaming machine revenue of more than $1 million are required to allocate 1.5% of that revenue to community groups and charities under the Community Development and Support Expenditure (CDSE) scheme.

The Productivity Commission is trying to determine how to regulate a sector that is in fact an historical anomaly. Most clubs were set up after World War II to provide cheap drinks and meals for their working-class members, with a particular focus on the returned soldiers. Somewhere along the way many of them have morphed into multimillion dollar businesses — triggered mainly by a lifting of the poker machine ban in 1956.

Most clubs earn more than half their income from the pokies, which feed an unending stream of revenue to the state government. In 2009-10, the NSW state government will receive about $1.08 billion in pokie taxes; this represents about one-tenth of taxation revenue and about 2% of overall revenue.

And more cash flows in the form of electoral donations. According to the website Democracy4Sale, ClubsNSW donated almost $60,000 to NSW Labor and nearly $30,000 to the NSW Libs in the year 2008-09.

Being one of the biggest donors in the state has given the clubs excellent contacts. Late last year former ClubsNSW CEO Mark Fitzgibbon said publicly that he had “no doubt” donating helped ClubsNSW influence political outcomes. “I know it’s a cliche, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” he said.

The Tigers, of course, suffer from being in an area that has lost interest in rugby league, despite the fact that the first game was played on Birchgrove Oval 101 years ago. And if the polls are right, it’s also losing interest in state Labor.

The club, which is losing $100,000 a month, has decided to reinvent itself via a $200 million property development backed by the company of club director Benny Elias. The development application, which includes a 13-storey residential tower, shops, a new club, plaza, 146 residential spaces and a six-level 594-space car park, is currently on public view and has, predictably, created a storm of controversy.

The problem for the NSW state government is that the seat of Balmain could easily fall to the Greens next election, with Education Minister Verity Firth losing to the current mayor of Leichhardt Council, Jamie Parker. And the Greens don’t take donations from developers, or clubs, or anyone other than those giant furry koalas (or is that the Wilderness Society?).

But I’m supporting the Tigers and their charity program, because I may just need the services of POOPs when I’m old. I always have the same breed of cat — it makes life easier — but they have huge appetites, so Fat Cat VIX will very likely just eat my corpse. My current one is very large, quite thick, has no neck and likes to eat raw meat. Balmain Tigers, I have your next mascot.