(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)
(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

The Catholic Church is Australia’s largest and richest church. Whether it is schools, hospitals, aged care facilities, churches or poker machine venues, the Vatican ultimately oversees an Australian property portfolio conservatively valued at more than $30 billion.

As the employer of more than 220,000 Australians across 3000 agencies, there would not be another institution — with the exception of Coles, Wesfarmers and Woolworths — that owns and runs facilities in which more Australians congregate on a daily basis.

Recently in western Sydney, the Catholic Church hosted the national conference of the Club Managers Association of Australia (CMAA) at one of its church-owned but gambling-funded facilities, the Liverpool Catholic Club.

The CMAA is an unusual organisation because it is formally affiliated with the Australian Council Of Trade Unions (ACTU), even though its members are the CEOs and HR bosses of large poker machine clubs that negotiate enterprise agreements with thousands of hospitality workers.

The Liverpool Catholic Club is also the venue where former NSW premier Dominic Perrettot chose to formally launch his recent unsuccessful reelection campaign. It was a strange choice, given Perrottet was running so hard against the interests of ClubsNSW with his proposal to impose fully cashless poker machines by 2028.

I recently visited the enormous club during a road trip to Sydney and was surprised to see a large picture of Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher at the front desk.

The club’s 2022 annual report follows the standard operating procedures for ClubsNSW members in systematically downplaying the size and scale of its pokies operation. For instance, the 57,506 members are told they contributed poker machine taxes of $15.5 million, but there was no reference to the likely multiple tens of millions in pokies losses at what is effectively a church-owned casino in one of Sydney’s poorer regions.

The club booked $89 million in total revenue for 2022 and a $15.5 million profit, on which it pays no corporate tax.

Independent journalist Michael West investigated the Dooleys Lidcombe Catholic Club in 2018 and discovered that pokies delivered 83% of its revenues in 2018, or some $74.5 million. It would be a similar number at the Liverpool Catholic Club, although it does have a substantial sporting empire, including an ice-skating facility adjacent to its large Sydney gaming floor, and a private golf club in Albury. There is also a large Mercure Hotel on its main western Sydney site, where the Club CEOs from across Australia all stayed during their big national conference last week.

As Crikey recently reported, local government councillors from across Australia endorsed a strongly worded gambling motion earlier this month that, among other things, called for churches and charities operating pokies venues to lose their tax-preferred status.

Just like the Labor Party with its multiple pokies venues in Canberra and Sydney, few people realise that the Catholic Church has built up an asset pool estimated at well over half a billion dollars from its pokies operations in NSW and the ACT, where it runs the Southern Cross Club.

The ACT remains the only jurisdiction in Australia that allows pokies outside of casinos but restricts them to not-for-profit clubs, excluding pubs, which is why the Catholic Church and the ALP are left as the two biggest pokies operators in the national capital. The CFMMEU, the richest and most powerful union inside the ALP’s ACT branch, also owns and operates a large pokies venue in Dickson called The Tradies.

There are approximately 5000 pokies venues in Australia and it is rare for one to give up the lucrative revenue streams they generate. Indeed, I’ve only been able to come up with this list of 40 former pokies venues across the country.

Full credit to the Catholic Church for pulling all its pokies out of its Southern Cross Yacht Club on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin back in 2015 under a buyback scheme run by the ACT Labor government, which saw it surrender 100 of its 680 licenced machines. But should it really have been up to ACT taxpayers to pay the Catholic Church to surrender pokies licences? Why doesn’t the church walk away from a toxic damaging industry?

You can argue that some of the pokies assets built up by Catholic-branded or founded clubs are now largely controlled by their members, but the church doesn’t try to hide the connection at places like the Liverpool Catholic Club.

Its longest-serving director is Phillip Coleman, who earlier this year was lauded in The Catholic Weekly for picking up an Australia Day gong for services to the Catholic Church and the pokies club movement. The church-owned newspaper declared that Coleman had built “a highly successful Catholic club with mates literally from the ground up” and that he “helped to raise the funds and purchase the land at Prestons for the Liverpool Catholic Club and has been a director there since 1982”.

Who else can claim to have been a director of a giant, not-for-profit, church-backed pokies empire for 41 years, which now has net assets of $168 million after likely taking more than $1 billion from gamblers?

While women still can’t be Catholic priests, they’ve broken through in the church’s pokies division, although the only female director of the Liverpool Catholic Club is physio and netball coach Van Nguyen.

NSW Premier Chris Minns is a practising Catholic who is seemingly going slow on gambling reform, failing to even deliver his modest cashless pokies trial promise in a timely manner. Last week he summarised the ICAC troubles of Gladys Berejiklian as a failure to declare and manage conflicts of interest and warned Labor colleagues not to fall into the same trap.

It would be interesting to know if Minns regards the large pokies operations of both his party and his church as an inhibitor to reform in NSW — the world’s most pokies-soaked jurisdiction, where gamblers are forecast to lose almost $8 billion across 92,000 machines this calendar year.

Meanwhile, as the Uniting Church continues to campaign hard for pokies reform through its Wesley Mission in Sydney, gambling reform advocates are still waiting for the Catholic Church to take a position. Full divestment of all pokies assets and removal of the Catholic name from the various church-owned suburban casinos would be a good start.