Dear Action Station – why banning pokies is counter productive

The good people at Action Station have started a petition banning pokies.

I think this would be a clusterfuck of counter productive outcomes that would make things far worse than this well intentioned but hopelessly deluded call to ban pokies.

Surely ‘reforming’ pokies would be far more successful than banning all pokies – in fact banning all pokies would drive gamblers into the arms of organised crime.

Empowering organised crime is a social policy failure – we need to violently crack down on pokie numbers & force them to only give back to the communities they are taken from.

Heavy handed Government regulation and recycling the revenue back into the communities it is taken from in the form of anti-gambling rehabilitation and poverty programs is FAR more effective than banning & driving gamblers underground into the arms of Mafia loan sharks and unregulated Triades.

The spike of violence in Dairy’s right now is due to stupid social policy pushing the price of tobacco so high and banning it in prisons they have created a perfect black market and the crime to feed it.

Banning shit rather than brutal regulation is a pathway to more negative outcomes.