The Federal election of 2010 was one of the strangest and most evenly-balanced elections in Australian history. The counting of votes dragged on, and it became apparent that neither the ALP nor the Coalition would be able to govern in their own right. Deals would need to be struck.

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It may have taken 17 days, on top of one of the shortest and strangest election campaigns I can remember… but we finally have a government and a prime minister. A minority government, sure, but the wait is finally over. And with Independents Oakeshott and Windsor joining Wilkie and the Greens in throwing their weight behind Labor, our political landscape will never be the same.

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Take a look through the pokie-related news stories of the past few days, and one name pops up nine times out of ten. Andrew Wilkie, Independent soon-to-be Federal MP for Dennison. Wilkie has been receiving broad national coverage for his stance on a number of issues, primarily pokies reform, and his insistence that any major party wishing to deal with him will have to go a long way towards accomodating his list of priorities.

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What a day to break my silence on this blog! It’s been just over a week since I’ve added anything to cyenne.com, although not through choice… my ADSL connection has been cactus since Tesltra decided to perform some maintenance at my local exchange. How a 2-hour maintenance operation can turn into a 9-day outage is beyond me; still, depending on tonight’s results, there’s always the NBN!

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Last night saw an interesting moment in the current Federal election campaign. Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, live on stage at the Rooty Hill RSL in Sydney’s west… but not at the same time. An audience of 200 undecided voters to ask them the hard questions… although they seemed quite partial to Abbott, and saved the hardest questions for Gillard. I guess that’s inevitable, given he’s the local boy.

But for me, the event provided a telling snapshot of the political world’s attitude towards poker machines and problem gambling. Rooty Hill RSL is massive, with a bowling alley and a laser skirmish centre to complement the 800 pokies in residence. Yes, 800 machines… as a Victorian, with our venue cap of 105 machines, that figure is almost unfathomable.

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I’ve held off on commenting too much about this over the past week or so, but here we are. Two weeks out from the Federal Election of 2010, and to date neither of the major parties have said a word about problem gambling. Nothing. As far as they’re concerned it’s a non-issue.

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As I discussed here, it seems that our politicians have no policies when it comes to gambling reform. No policies to tackle problem gambling. No inclination to change the gambling landscape in this country… and let’s face it, when you look at countries with the highest number of poker machines, and look at the relative populations, sadly Australia comes out on top of the heap. More about that another time.

So if our pollies have no intention of reforming our gambling industry, I guess I’ll have to donate some policies of my own. Ms Gillard? Mr Abbott? Feel free to make use of any of the following.

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So it’s been a few months since the Productivity Commission’s second report into gambling was released by the government (the first was in 1999). In a nutshell, there are at least 100,000 problem gamblers in this country, possibly up to half a million, with many hundreds of thousands more Australians impacted by problem gambling behaviours and actions every year. Almost half of the money spent on gambling comes from problem gamblers, and this is almost $5 billion a year. The report recommended a large number of actions to be taken to reform the industry and prevent, or minimise, the harm that gambling can cause.

Since then, a lot has happened. Kevin Rudd was shown the door and Julia Gillard has taken over the top job. An election has been called, for August 21. Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott are climbing over each other to promote their policies which will either Move Australia Forward or Stand Up For Australia, depending on who you listen to.

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