by frog
Published in THE ISSUES by frog on Mon, April 16th, 2012
Tags: general debate
General debate, April 16, 2012
Published: April 16, 2012
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A question…
What has the GP got lined up for May Day?
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The National Government’s self-serving priorities and total abandonment of any pretence to be a centre-right party puts up barriers to an extension of their MoU with the Greens:
http://localbodies-bsprout.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/national-rejects-broadening-mou-with.html
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Want one at maritime New Zealand. Do not have any contact at all with the marine industry. Real estate agent or taxi driver is a good qualification.
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Priceless satire from Danyl @ the Dimpost; Bill English gets a going over
Snippet:
“First order of business is to carpet the hallway. Now some silly people think that the best way to do this is to measure the area of the hall and buy an equivalent amount of carpet. That’s just nonsense. You don’t see businesses in the private sector going around figuring out what they need and then purchasing it.”
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Louise Upston asks her Nat colleague Sam Lotu-Iiga on Twitter when submissions close on welfare Bill. http://wp.me/phxnb-1et
They already have – after only 11 working days
Could only happen in the National Party
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Racist New Zealand
Programs like Renters promote discrimination by focusing on ethnic minorities; they also disproportionately put the blame on tenants, when there are many terrible landlords in New Zealand who never get named and shamed…
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Sheesh toad… that’s unbelievable! Eleven working days to get a submission together. Talk about undemocratic.
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In defence of Jafas
My self flagellation for today was in reading a rather large post (1040 words) by deluded rightwing stalwart Karl du Fresne, who waffled on with some of the worst parochial rubbish I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading…
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Lotto worse than pokies?
The main difference between Lotto and SkyCity’s pokie machines is the return they provide to communities. While SkyCity only gives 2.5% to a charitable trust, NZ Lotteries distributes 20% of the profits from Lotto to communities throughout New Zealand…
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Come on Jackal, you can’t dismiss what Sky City say, and then give credence to the PGF. The PGF are concerned only with a very tiny minority of new Zealand’s population, and use their position to disadvantage a much larger proportion of citizens.
The PGF represents a subset of “problem gamblers” who can’t afford to gamble, yet continue to do so, to the detriment of themselves and their family.
These people actually aren’t attractive to casinos; the casinos prefer people who would be problem gamblers if they didn’t have the resources to fund their habbit. Casinos like people who drop hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of dollars a week. Problem gamblers simply aren’t in that category. Even in these financially depressed times, people come into casinos every night and drop $10K.
But let me continue to rant about the PGF. And its to do with the far more usual pokie outlets, those run by the gaming machine trusts, which you note return 37% of their income to communities. (I think thats acutally the legal minimum, and some return a bit more)
The PGF has sucessfully lobied for many councils to have a “sinking lid” policy to prevent the addition of any new or replacement pokie machines, with a goal of reducing the pokie machines in an area to zero.
Given the good community works that are financed by pokie income, that is having a deletious effect on many communities. This is not good, and if the PGF suceeds in its goals, it will damage the community groups that are limited in their range of funding activities. Unlike many other countries, there is very limited community group support from our government, as they rely on the pokie machine (and a number of other community spirited funders) to take the strain.
So I am keen that the Sky City proposal goes through, even though it isn’t a big community funder, simply because I don’t want PGF to be able to hold Sky City up as a poster child to help them further decimate community group funding. The zealots at PGF represent the single greatest threat to the survival of community groups.
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With the Glen Innes protest we are seeing a return to the dark ages of New Zealand Policing!
http://localbodies-bsprout.blogspot.co.nz/2012/04/police-image-tarnished-again.html
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Community pokies are a tax on the poor to fund middle class community groups – no wonder some appreciate them so much. There is even a transfer of money out of poor areas to community groups in more upmarket environs.
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If only the poor weren’t being forced to put money in the pokies
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dbuckley
Got any evidence of that bub?
Police brutality in Glenn Innes
The Police have used excessive force to disband a peaceful protest, obviously singling out and arresting John Minto because of his activism and seriously injuring an elderly lady who had to go to hospital…
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If only the rich were prepared to fund community groups and end the reliance on gambling profits or fund schools so there were no activity fees.
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Bugger. Missed a word. And spelled another incorrectly. Should be “That is having a deleterious effect on many community groups”
Source – personal experience. There is less money available to community groups through pokie machine trusts than there used to be, so its harder to get funding for projects.
Although the conclusion is mine, the statistics that form the basis of my conclusion are the DIAs. Pokie numbers peaked at the end of 2002. Pokie machine income peaked in 2004. Inflation since 2004 has been something like 22% and even allowing for inflation, pokie incomes are not back to the peak levels.
Gotta thank you at this point, Jackal. Until you posed the question, I wasn’t actually aware of quite how dire the situation is. I knew funding was down, but not by how much.
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dbuckley
The tradeoff between having less pokie machines, which means less problem gambling and all the associated social issues it causes is worthwhile. It’s likely that the money saved by communities that reduce their pokie machines is far more than any supposed lost funding.
Kiwiblog vs Maui Street
Rightwing blogger David Farrar has complained about an excellent post by Morgan Godfery at Maui Street. He thinks Godfery is being unfair to the cops who brutally disbanded a peaceful protest in Glenn Innes on Tuesday…
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The community groups are usually too small/local to fund-raise effectively and thus the dependence on external funding.
Possibly a national community group trust needs to be established to either receive sponsorship or to collectively fund-raise – taking advantage of the tax deductability of donations.
One option would be to add a charge to rates (as per GST) to support local community groups – and councils appoint a trust to disperse the money, so locals support groups they have access to participating in. This is/was always one way (community group funding trust) to use money from any sold council assets.
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Don’t buy that. The numbers just don’t stack up.
The scale of community activites supporting by pokies is huge. I would guess that every year 70% of Kiwis do or go to something that has pokie machine support. There are thousands of community groups that get funding from pokie machine trusts, and in some cases only the members of that group benefit from the funding, but many times the group has a community purpose that touches hundreds or thousands of people.
Some are really important like rescue services, or schools. Some are just “community” like the saturday soccer clubs.
But for all of these groups, reduction of pokie machine income is not a good thing.
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dbuckley
Your pontificating aside, care to link to these numbers you say just don’t add up?
Greg White – Asshole of the Week
The government dictates the terms of settlement and therefore bears some responsibility for how and who manages it. And that’s where this story gets interesting…
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DIA publication PROBLEM GAMBLING IN NEW ZEALAND – A BRIEF SUMMARY
Canterbury (my area) has (1996 census) about 13% of New Zealand’s population, so by proportion, we have 7,800 of the upper estimate of the DIAs numerical analysis. They think its an underestimate, so lets double it and say 15K.
And just for clarity, the DIA note that
That includes the problem gamblers.
More than 15K people in Canterbury benefit from pokie funding just in the arts and entertainment category (that’s my area so I know about that), and probably as many again in sport, and as many again in schools.
So vastly larger chunks of the Canterbury population benefit from pokie machine funding than are involved in problem gambling. And the benefits are community benefits, they benefit huge numbers of people connected by an interest.
The DIA report does not identify any community harm done by problem gamblers. It identifies family harm as being a widespread issue.
The very worst case estimate in the paper is that 500K people could be impacted by the actions of problem gamblers, about 12% of the population. My (albeit unsubstantiated) guess from above is that 70% of the population per year are in some way involved in an activity supported by pokie machine trusts.
In terms of deleterious effect on community groups, one just needs to look through the list of applications declined on any Trust’s site to see that there is far more demand for financial support than is available, and being in a situation where the support available is dropping year on year not just in inflation adjusted dollars but real dollars is clearly making matters worse.
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dbuckley
Or there are just more applications being made that don’t warrant funding? You still have not provided information that backs up your assertion.
The equation is: Less pokie revenue going to communities – benefit from less pokie machines/problem gambling = negative or positive outcomes to society.
Naturally poisonous water?
There is nothing natural about our waterways becoming poisonous!
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It really comes down to what you consider as a problem. If my partner was dropping anything a week into pokie machines, as a consequence of being addicted, that we could otherwise invest in useful things, I’d consider that a problem even if we could afford it. I know more than a few people who aren’t necessarily in debt, but would be much better off than they are if they hadn’t blown a lot of their income in an industry that thrives on convincing more people to do precisely the same thing.
It’s the addiction aspect that bothers me most, not the affordability, because if people are gambling because they’re addicted then it’s taking money from them that they could use more productively for themselves if they were thinking more rationally—and they’ll always have more of their own money in the first place than they’ll get back through community projects. What proportion of people who use pokie machines can easily stop if they want to do so?
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To answer the question of whether pokies benefit society, follow the money. It comes from the gamblers, many of which can’t really afford to lose the money, so it detrimentally affects them and their partners and children. Some gamblers get addicted, and start spending money which isn’t theirs, which can detrimentally affect businesses, even to the point of causing businesses to fail. Does the benefit outweigh this damage?
Much of the money goes back to the gamblers. For small payouts, most is then “reinvested” and thus lost again. For large payouts, the winners tend to spend it on stuff they don’t really need (performance cars, big TVs, etc), reducing the overall benefit. Some winners waste so much that they end up just as badly off or even worse off than if they hadn’t won at all. (This includes such actions as quitting work because they don’t need the money and then being unable to resume work again.)
Some of the money goes to the casinos, etc. Part goes to wages, but part is straight profit or spend on advertising – no social good there.
A relatively small amount goes to government or charities, but I don’t see that this can possibly make up for the damage caused to the gamblers and those around them.
Trevor.
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I’d say the evidence unambiguously supports that societal impact of pokie machine outcomes are positive. Just look at the numbers. To reiterate qualitatively: problem gambling affects problem gamblers and the people connected to them. Pokies benefit the entire community. There is a massive difference in scale.
If there were a spare half billion of taxpayer funding that could replace the pokie machine income, then the position changes dramatically, as then all you would have is the downside, and no upside.
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“Just look at the numbers.” I would, except I don’t have any, and you haven’t provided any.
Yes, pokies benefit the entire community. However the benefit to individuals is probably only a few hundred dollars a year or less. The damage caused by pokies is concentrated, but can amount to thousands of dollars per individual, and in extreme case can trigger even higher amounts of damage. What price do you put on an education that has been impaired by the students going hungry, or not receiving the assistance they deserve from their parents? What does it cost to process through the courts those that have been caught up in gambling, from driving while intoxicated to leaving children unattended in cars, etc?
To me, it is not at all unambiguous that the impact is positive.
Trevor.
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Just saw this, the adam smith quote is a doozy.
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/04/there_is_no_invisible_hand.html?
There is NO invisible hand. Never was.
Just another wingnut fantasy. who knew?
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