(Image: Adobe)

After a bruising summer campaign of pressure to get on board the pokies reform train, NSW Labor Leader Chris Minns came up with a minimalist package of changes yesterday which will do little to reduce the record $7 billion a year lost on the 90,000-plus EGMs across the state.

While the “VIP lounge” signs will disappear from outside pubs, individual pokies clubs can no longer donate to the Labor Party and only $500 in cash can be loaded into a NSW poker machine each time, think about what hasn’t changed.

First, NSW will retain high-intensity $10 maximum bet machines. In Victorian pubs and clubs it is $5.

As Paul Murray inconveniently pointed out on Sky News last night, NSW is the only state where you can simultaneously smoke and gamble on the pokies. No change is planned there, either.

And rather than matching Dominic Perrottet’s firm commitment to eliminate cash from NSW machines, Minns is proposing only a 12-month trial involving 500 machines across the state, with pub and club trial participants fully compensated for any losses suffered.

As gambling reform advocate Tim Costello wrote for Crikey and told Seven News and the SMH: “This policy shows it was written in a back room of ClubsNSW. This proposal is absolutely guaranteeing ClubsNSW support. They know this is exactly how you defeat a mandatory card. This is effectively still kicking it into the long grass.”

Perhaps the best indicator of the low-impact Minns package is shown by the reaction of investors in pokies giant Aristocrat Leisure. If the Minns announcement at 2pm yesterday was a serious hit on the pokies, the stock would have been down. Instead it finished 8 cents higher at $33.28.

Aristocrat has about 50% of the Australian poker machine market and its head of government and stakeholder relations is Anthony Ball, who spent almost a decade as CEO of ClubsNSW, including overseeing the brutal campaign run against the Gillard-Wilkie gambling reform proposal in 2010-11.

Aristocrat shares were floated at $2.90 a share in June 1996, valuing the company back then at just $303 million. Today it is worth $21.8 billion, making it one of the 20 most valuable companies on the ASX.

The company is about to get drawn into the public debate about cashless cards, partly because I’ve just nominated for its board at the February 24 AGM on a platform that Aristocrat enthusiastically embraces cashless pokies and dissociates itself from the donations and political influencing operations of Clubs NSW and the Australian Hotels Association.

The notice of meeting is due to be lodged with the ASX on January 25, after which we’ll know if the board has decided to censor the platform or offer any meaningful defence of its anti-money laundering credentials or its relationship with the clubs and pubs.

Aristocrat has a history of avoiding scrutiny. It has taken down the webcast archives of all past AGMs and refuses to even privately provide shareholders with a transcript of last year’s fully virtual AGM, during which these 16 written questions were asked. Who knows — if the jungle drum is right it may even borrow from Gerry Harvey’s playbook and revert to a physical AGM at its headquarters this year, with no webcast for the 50,000 shareholders to watch.

Interestingly, Aristocrat is one of the largest suppliers of poker machines to the seven venues owned by the ALP in Canberra and Sydney, a situation which is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media but was covered in Crikey‘s gambling wrap last week.

From a policy point of view, the worst-case scenario for Aristocrat would be a John Howard-style guns buyback of poker machines across the country, rendering the supply of new machines obsolete. However, such a policy would only be triggered by some form of royal commission or dramatic independent inquiry, like what happened to Crown and Star Entertainment.

However, if the gambling industry continues with its long-standing bullying behaviour, what is to stop the next NSW government from commissioning an inquiry into the political influencing regime of pokies manufacturers and their collaborators in the pubs and clubs?

It is all very well for Ball to be Aristocrat’s super-aggressive head of government and stakeholder relations but what would he say if giving evidence in front of Crown and Star giant-killer Adam Bell SC?

If a royal commissioner came out with sweeping recommendations and a tobacco-style approach was adopted, you could even see a future of pokies buy-backs, class actions, tax increases, apologies in Parliament for state-sponsored abuse, compensation funds for those whose lives have been destroyed by addiction, cash bans, $1 maximum bets, Tasmanian-style daily and annual loss limits, and dramatically reduced venue operating hours. This would see Australia’s 5000 pokies venues reduced to perhaps 500, based on a destination tourism casino model.

Before you get too excited, this is a long way from what Minns put up yesterday.

Rather than clinging to cash-based play which help criminals launder money, perhaps Aristocrat needs to get in front of the curve and start advocating for fully carded play, just like what the casinos are facing. At the moment, we’ve got ClubsNSW calling this “reckless” and trying to orchestrate mass emails to MPs effectively defending unlimited cash money laundering on NSW machines.

Even Murray admitted on Sky News last night that ClubsNSW has done “an appalling job” explaining what they do and had been “lazy” in thinking everyone would vote for it based on getting a $6 schnitzel subsidised by pokies gamblers.