Tag: policies
election night is here
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!
election 2010 – the silence is deafening
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.
gambling reform – my policies
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.
election 2010 – gambling reform
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.
