Instead of Mandatory Pre-Commitment which is attracting such resistance, why not go with one dollar machines? From what I have read, and it certainly sounds like it makes sense, this approach would cost less to implement, attract less resistance from the clubs and pubs lobby and still reduce the harmful effects of compulsive and addictive gambling.
Also, this approach just might gain consensus backing in the Federal Parliament, something not to be sneezed at as it would then likely be implemented by whoever sits on the Treasury benches.

The author’s argument rests on an ethical double standard. Everyone else is assumed to be incapable of deciding what they themselves can do, but the author is assumed to know, not only for himself, but for everyone else as well.

The author’s conception of what ethics means is pretty shaky too. It doesn’t mean everyone else should be forced to obey your arbitrary opinion on pain of imprisonment.

It is not legitimate to reify gambling as some kind of force, like space aliens or a “contagion”, that come among us and work their evil. Gambling is the result of people’s choices. To medicalise it as an “addiction” adds nothing to that.

To say the argument is not prohibitionist is absurd and disingenuous. Of course it’s prohibitionist! You want to use the force of law to stop people doing it by hedging them around with restrictions, often by threatening *others* with penalties, with what is none of your business. And if you succeed in this, you want to carry it into other areas. When people predictably respond by finding something else to gamble on, the author cries “Control the internet!”

Your argument depends on the “social impact”. But hang on. You’re not society. You don’t own society. You don’t speak for society. And you don’t know what society values any more or better than society does!

But if you are right, why stop at gambling? Why not a general program of forcible improvement of everyone to stop them doing … anything you don’t like, really!

To say gambling is the “reason” for fraud is moral and intellectual nonsense while ever the vast majority gamble without it “causing” fraud, or family breakdown, or suicide, or any of the other negative decisions that you wrongly lay to gambling.

Quite apart from the fact that the author’s argument is ethically and rationally indefensible, it won’t work.

It’s not about gambling, is it, it’s about a desire for power. And the means of indulging that addictive, socially destructive vice should be put out of the hands of unethical, violent, busy-bodies and know-it-alls.

Personally I'd like to regulate and have 24/7 surveillance on anyone who thinks social engineering by taxation and regulation is a good idea. (not)

Get out of our lives, people will be responsible for their own actions one way or another.

This attraction to regulate and tax everything then gives rise to a sense of entitlement to "injury" compensation and protection, by people who would otherwise have to live with their actions.

Our society will always have people who need a bit of help and we cover that already, all this does is encourage people not to be responsible and accountable for their own actions. It's always someone else's fault .. someone else has to mop up, someone else should "do something!"

Another avenue of course for the "victim" industry, which as we see elsewhere is gaining momentum in our do-gooder finger wagging society.

More government, more tax, more regulation .. what do we get, more people on welfare less people in actual work that creates and more in industry that compensates and relies on taxes.

Gambling is an activity of choice, if people go too far, they suffer, and some might suffer with them .. so what, it happens - they are a tiny minority.

I'm surprised you don't want cars banned because people have accidents that ruin lives .. or am I speaking too soon?

Can we afford all the good idea fairies that we encounter?

Noel Preston,

“In fact I wrote this in an essay during my final year at Secondary School in 1959”

Sir, you were lucky.

Normally, it is when our minds are uncontaminated by schools and churches that we can see reality clearly, and look at it fearlessly

Noel,
you seem to have been a bit of a wowser and I'd love to know if there was a Christian influence. But great to see you cured yourself of the mixed metaphors, a habit so dreadfully easy to fall into, as Orwell warns.
There comes a point.
I think gamblers should be allowed to gamble to their hearts' content and suffer the consequences. With one provisor; gambling profits should be taxed at 50% initially and progressively increased, and the money should be used to support the passive victims of gambling in food and rent and cloathing vouchers once they leave the offending family member. No one should be protected from the consequences of their actions in unexceptional circumstances.

I'm a gambler, my whole life has been a gamble. I don't live in a world that has security and safety as it's god.

I risk take. I calculate risks and success.

Poker machines should be banned. There is no reasonable risk of success.

To enforce mandatory pre-committment enforces loss. It assumes, as do those who subscribe to it, automatic loss of the ammount pre-committed. That's not risk taking nor gambling ... that's sheer stupidity. You might as well legislate throwing money into a bucket.

It is self harm. Legisating self-harm is madness

Here we go, all the 'liberals' out in force.

'Get out of our lives' they cry.

Good oh, then Hume and ilk here will promoting the ending of all laws and prohibitions I suppose?

Let's have no drug laws at all, no age considerations for boozing or smoking.

No blessed safety belts that hold me back from injuries if I decide to crash my car.

Let's do away with silly licences for electricians and pilots.

Let each and every citizen do whatever they like and no one should interfere?

Do grow up you lot.

But I do resent the 'concern' from churches, like the Catholics over gambling, knowing how much they adore horse racing and Bingo.

And why the concern over 'bandits' when Keno plays silently over the beer taps drawing squillions from the ever drunker boozer?

Or the stock and share markets we all so adore, that are giving us the Euro collapse right now.

Should we stop that gambling too?

There comes a time when the empty rhetoric of pain-in-the-arse -liberals, as featured here in the comments, becomes just too silly.

If WA can survive without these bleeding machines, so should all other states.

Reduce their prizes, and few will bother to play them.

Who would ever have thought that Joh could have been right about anything?