Russell Crowe gets gladiatorial over gambling machines

Published on Thursday 3 January 2008 22:28

HE MAY seem an unlikely candidate to lead a moral crusade. But Russell Crowe has become the rallying point for a bid to halt the damage caused by compulsive gambling on Australia's hordes of poker slot-machines.

The Oscar-winning actor, previously best-known off-screen for his hellraising, is the focus of a new drive to wean Australians off the "pokies" which take billions of pounds from them each year.

Crowe has persuaded the board of the South Sydney Rabbitohs rugby-league club, which he co-owns, to remove the slot machines from its premises.

This is despite the fact that the scores of "one-armed bandits" were raking in about 430,000 a year for the club.

Now his actions have sparked a bout of soul-searching among this nation of gamblers. Australia has more than 200,000 poker machines, 21 per cent of the world total, and together they take up to 4.3bn from gamblers each year.

Charities complain that the machines are particularly concentrated in poorer areas, and take disproportionate amounts of money from people on welfare payments and those with gambling problems. There are an estimated 300,000 problem gamblers in Australia.

New Labour prime minister Kevin Rudd has suggested the federal government wants to address the issue, saying: "I hate poker machines and I know something of their impact on families."

Clover Moore, lord mayor of Sydney, a city whose pokies turn over about 1billion a year, joined Rudd's condemnation, saying: "Australia's sad boast is that it has more than one-fifth of all the poker machines in the world. I am delighted by the prime minister's comments and hope that, finally, we will wean ourselves off our shameful reliance on the income from these machines of misery."

This financial reliance is the subject of a new study, out yesterday, which said Australian state governments had become "addicted" to the huge tax revenue provided by pokies, and that the industry escaped tough regulation because of this relationship.

Its authors, Charles Livingstone and Richard Woolley, from Monash and Western Sydney universities, said in the International Gambling Studies Journal: "These revenues arguably rely on unsafe consumption practices, generating considerable harm."

They called for official recognition that poker machines fuel problem gambling. "It would be a major advance if governments simply admitted that they're in it for the money, because money can be replaced," they said.

"What can't be replaced is the self-respect, mental health and peace of mind of those who continue to be harmed."

Millionaire businessman Peter Holmes Court, co-owner with Crowe of the Rabbitohs, said: "Russell threw down the gauntlet and said, 'Can we do this?' We put a proposal for a family-friendly club, an inclusive club."

In a letter to club members, the two men said that excessive use of pokies would hurt the Rabbitohs' core-support area of Redfern, a largely blue-collar part of inner-city Sydney.

"We just believe that low-income areas like Redfern need fewer poker machines rather than more," they said.

"We believe a club can be successful if it caters for our members and the broad community … and the distracting din of pokies doesn't stop the conversation or drown out live music."

Crowe, who won the best-actor Oscar in 2001 for his role in Gladiator, has also set up a "club with no pokies" page on internet network site Facebook.