verging_on_random

Go pub Keno!

September 20, 2007 on 8:46 pm | In Uncategorized |

In one of its few attempts to grapple with important matters since regaining office - it might be the only one, I can’t think of any others off the top of my head - the Iemma Government has decided that it might let pubs run Keno, which is kind of a professional version of bingo.

Well good luck to them I say. I’m all for it, and the bleeding heart do-gooders like Tim Costello and Peter Holmes a Court should just butt out. If they want to do something nice for suffering humanity let them go rescue fallen women or beat up drug dealers or something. Just leave the gamblers alone.

I love gamblers. The misguided souls who volunteer to donate money to the government are my favourite people on earth. Every time I see them in their serried ranks at a club, or feverishly scratching another scratchie outside the newsagent, I’m comforted that I’m paying less tax than I otherwise would just because these nice folk are falling over themselves to contribute to Consolidated Revenue. Bless them all, says I.

Besides, gambling is a wonderful sociological device. It cuts through the crap and holds up a remorselessly revealing mirror to the Real Middle Australia. Many is the time I’ve looked at the old bitches lining up to have their Lotto cards run through the machine, thin-lipped and beady-eyed, greedily licking their lips and dreaming of winning a million dollars that will take them away from their drab boring lives and turn them into fairy princesses with a lovely home unit in Broadbeach and the biggest home theatre system you ever saw and a holiday in Phuket. Or the shaky old blokes desperate to engage anyone in conversation while they wait to see if they’ve finally cracked the big one where they can drink as much piss as they want all day long and finally achieve their dream of owning a Holden Statesman. Yes there they stand most mornings of the week, the aromas of envy and avarice and selfishness faintly nasty in the morning breeze, clutching their $50 notes which they are about to donate to the treasury while they exchange vicious humourless condemnations of dole bludgers and single mothers and public servants and all the other contemptible creatures who make life so hard for these fine upstanding Australians that they can barely find the odd $50 a week for a harmless flutter on Lotto.

Leave them alone, I repeat. Being subsidised by them is some small consolation for living with the knowledge that we are all part of the same human race.

I do however have one minor suggestion. Since newsagents became tax collectors for the state government it can take an inordinate amount of time to do something as simple as buy a newspaper. The Lotto addicts seem incapable of organising themselves even though they go through their irrational rituals twice a week, so invariably everyone has to stand and wait while some stupid bastard wants to check the figures once again, or query their change, or whatever else they can find to prolong the erotic business of trying to get a shitload of money which they have done nothing to earn.

My suggestion therefore is that the government ban Lotto but allow newsagents to have poker machines outside, on the footpath. Those forgotten heroes of our country as Amanda Vanstone famously called them, the self-funded retirees, could go and play the pokies to their heart’s content and the rest of us might be able to buy a newspaper again without having to take a cut lunch for the trip.

But please please please, let them go on giving to the taxman. Society is in their debt.