Overwhelmingly Victorian clubs spend the vast amount of money claimed under the scheme on themselves. One Melbourne council alleges that sponsorship deals with local sporting clubs sometimes come with conditions that the venue’s logo is promoted. Some of the gifts given to the community include discounted room hire or meals at their own venues, which encourages people to visit the clubs that host poker machines. So too is paying wages, superannuation, cleaning costs, training courses, rent, security services, staff uniforms, insurance fees, pest control, undisclosed entertainment and utility bills. This means keeping the lights on at a club with pokies is a “community benefit”, counting towards a tax cut. In Victoria clubs can claim their own operating costs. That includes money spent on new kitchens, fridges, television and Keno subscriptions, lifts, bar stools, lawn mowers and even golf carts and upgrades to the golf course. But as one Victorian councillor put it, it was based on “ an egregious loophole”.Ĭlubs can count the millions of dollars they spend on themselves or their affiliates as part the money returned to the community. From my point of view, it was totally misleading.” The origin of ‘a broken system’ĭecades ago, state governments decided to give clubs a tax cut if they returned a set amount of gambling profits into the communities they were extracted from.

And yet, it’s able to present itself as a community benefit. It’s got people on welfare and food bank parcels. “Pokies, to put it bluntly, have got people committing suicide. “When I learned what was going on, I felt really, really angry,” Mitchell says. It is part of a scheme that the anti-gambling campaigner Tim Costello says is Australia’s most shameless rort. Mitchell realised the clubs taking her money are, overwhelmingly, spending gambling profits on themselves while claiming the expense as “a community benefit” to help secure a tax cut. She and “the girls” would meet at the club and “all pretend to each other that we were supporting the community”. But when she recalls the countless hours she spent at the pokies, she remembers being told her money was going back into the community.

Australian pokies wins