‘Dead set against them’: The Labor heavyweights turning on their party over crucial reform

ALP heavyweights Unions NSW boss Mark Morey, one-time publican and former local government minister Harry Woods and Young Labor president Caitlin Marlor have launched a new assault on gambling and poker machines to force the party to deliver sweeping reforms.

The trio is part of a new ginger group called Labor for Gambling Reform, which is modelled on successful pressure groups such as the Labor Environmental Action Network and Rainbow Labor.

The establishment of the group will be a potential flashpoint within Labor between members who are demanding immediate action on gambling and pokies and the more cautious parliamentary voices who fear industry pushback.

The group is preparing to take the fight to next year’s NSW and national ALP conferences, challenging the Minns and Albanese governments over “inaction on gambling reform” despite a 2023 review, chaired by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy, recommending immediate advertising bans.

Among the group’s demands of the NSW Labor government are a moratorium on granting new poker machine licences in pubs and clubs and a phased five-year reduction of machines in NSW, to bring the state, at a minimum, in line with Queensland (about 25,000 fewer poker machines).

The group also wants the government to redirect the $1 billion tax subsidy for poker machines in clubs to be used to compensate for the removal of licences. “Compensation should be minimal given the historical profits made from those machines,” the group says.

The federal government should ban all online gambling inducements and inducement advertising, a recommendation from Murphy’s You win some, you lose more parliamentary report.

There should also be a legislated ban on all gambling advertising on all media, including broadcast and online, phased in over three years.

Woods, a former federal and state MP who was a publican and bookmaker before entering politics, was a licensee in hotels in regional NSW and Sydney before pokies were allowed in pubs.

He said allowing pubs to become gambling dens in the mid-1990s was a mistake.

“I’m dead set against them,” Woods said.

He also said that “it would be very hard not to get a consensus that poker machines are bad”, and that the state government should be looking at ways to dramatically reduce the number of machines in NSW.

“Increasing taxation on poker machines in the first instance wouldn’t cost anything to government revenue, but it would have the effect of diminishing the value of machines for the owners,” Woods said. “A bipartisan position on gambling would make changes much easier.”

Marlor, the recently elected president of the youth movement, said young people expected governments to act on gambling.

“I think it is very clear that young people are being exploited by the gambling industry,” Marlor said.

She said that recent research painted a disturbing picture: 85 per cent of 12- to 17-year-olds had seen a gambling ad on television in the past month.

“Then there are the video games that have gambling features and all this is gatewaying young people into gambling as adults,” Marlor said.

“It is time to take action and build pressure within the party and every time we are delaying, we are exposing more young people to gambling.

“Other successful Labor groups have pushed the party historically, and we are going to do the same through grassroots campaigning, demanding action, taking the fight to the conferences, engaging local branches.”

Morey, the most senior union official in NSW, said families across the state were being “systematically robbed by an industry that deliberately targets our most vulnerable communities”.

“When Fairfield has one poker machine for every 55 residents while wealthy areas have virtually none, we’re looking at class warfare disguised as entertainment,” Morey said. “That’s before you even consider the rapacious behaviour of online sports betting.

“The union movement has always stood against exploitation of workers – gambling corporations extracting $10 billion annually from at-risk families is exploitation on an industrial scale.

“Labor governments talk about reducing inequality while allowing an industry to operate that transfers wealth from working-class communities straight into corporate coffers. That contradiction has to end.”

Data from the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority shows $2.3 billion was lost on the state’s almost 88,000 machines from April to June. The figure was 8.8 per cent higher than the same period last year.

In 2023, then-Liberal premier Dominic Perrottet committed to gambling reforms, including introducing mandatory cashless gaming in all venues by the end of 2028.

Perrottet was responding to recommendations made in 2023 by the NSW Crime Commission’s report into the extent of money laundering in NSW, particularly through gaming machines.

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