Australian Football League side Geelong President Colin Carter said that the AFL industry has been “complicit” in the harm caused by poker machines, according to Baker & Warner of the HERALD SUN.
Carter said the game had been “slow to come to terms with the fact that we have got a big problem.”
The former AFL commissioner said the Cats -- which turned over more than A$10M from two gaming venues last year -- had the view that in the “long term that we would probably prefer to be out of the industry” but an exit was not now financially viable.
Short of getting rid of its pokies, Carter committed Geelong to becoming a best-practice gaming operator, indicating he was open to harm-minimization reforms such as running only “con-free” poker machines.
Carter said,
“If someone came to us and offered us a great price, a good price for the machines and what our investment is, we would probably take it. But it is a profitable business that we can’t afford to get out of at the moment because the whole footy industry economics rest on that, and I’m not about to put our football club at risk.”
Nine Victorian clubs took almost A$90M from gamblers’ pockets in the last financial year -- about 20% of their total revenue (HERALD SUN, 3/30).
