Anti-pokies crusader Andrew Wilkie was staying schtum this morning after accusing his opponents of running a smear campaign against him and threatening his life.
“We’re saying nothing more. We’re just referring people to the press release,” Wilkie’s media adviser, Philippa Duncan, told Crikey this morning.
But how smart is that? To just throw the bomb, then stand well clear. And how good is it for Wilkie’s credibility?
The independent MP’s accusations were made in a media release posted on Wilkie’s website yesterday, in which he claimed:
“In the past two days, I’ve received a death threat, been threatened with the existence of compromising photos and am having my past as a cadet at Duntroon nearly 30 years ago trawled over.
“That some in the industry would stoop to a smear campaign against me is unsurprising…
“(It) shows that this industry, which profits enormously from human misery, will stop at absolutely nothing to prevent these historic poker machine reforms.”
But is there any evidence that the clubs who profit from pokies are behind any such campaign of intimidation? Well, no, or none that Wilkie is prepared to share. His staff will not give details of how the death threat was made — by phone, by letter, to his staff, to his office, to his home — or what it actually said. Nor will they reveal what evidence they have of people digging into his past and threatening him with “compromising photos”.
Presumably, Wilkie would not be stupid enough to point the finger so directly without something to back it up. But if he has evidence he needs to publish it pronto. In the meantime, his opponents get a free kick.
“To suggest the clubs industry is involved in a smear campaign against Mr Wilkie is utter garbage,” Jeremy Bath of Clubs Australia told The Age last night. Clubs Australia boss Anthony Ball chimed in on the ABC this morning: “I’m absolutely shocked if Andrew Wilkie is suggesting that me or my organisation has issued death threats — it’s absurd. We will not stoop to smear tactics, we will not issue death threats, that’s offensive to me and my organisation.”
But as Wilkie and his fellow anti-pokie campaigner, Nick Xenophon MP, point out, the clubs are already running a thoroughly dishonest scare campaign on YouTube about people needing a “licence to punt” should their pokie proposals become law.
So what might Wilkie’s enemies go searching for? In the following extract from his 2004 book, Axis of Deceit, Wilkie gives a hint of what a smear campaign might thrive on — some of which is rather topical given recent scandals in the Australian Defence Force:
“I readily acknowledge that I was a larrikin in my youth, particularly at Duntroon, where I set some sort of record by incurring 250 punishments, 175 of them on consecutive days. You name it and I probably got into trouble for it back then — including roughing up the anti-uranium protesters’ site outside Parliament House, souveniring flags for the cadets bar, giving junior cadets a hard time, smothering an instructor in shaving cream, and getting caught with a woman in the barracks. Eventually, though, I was deemed officer material and graduated as an infantry officer.”
Sounds like there might be potential for embarrassment at least, but as Wilkie points out, he did graduate and he was security cleared many times. And he withstood great pressure in 2003 when he was a whistleblower during the Iraq war.
Nick Xenophon told Crikey this morning that he wasn’t surprised the fight had turned vicious.
“It’s indicative that it’s going to be a long and nasty campaign, because billions of dollars are at stake,” he said. “I’m absolutely prepared to accept Clubs Australia know nothing about any of this but obviously he can’t be responsible for everyone in his industry.”
Xenophon was asked this morning whether there might be any compromising photographs of him in circulation. Wagging his finger at ABC Melbourne Mornings host Jon Faine he joked: “It was just one goat.”
Andrew Wilkie doesn’t need to say any more. Who made the death threat is probably only known to the person who made them but it is unlikely to have been a person supporting the push to limit the power of the pokie barons. A power to the $20 million power.
What is of greater concern however is the lengths taken by powerful bodies to intimidate and to silence those who stand in opposition.
Andrew Wilkie is to be congratulated for taking a principled stand and being prepared to stand up to the intimidation and bullying that will come his way. He shouldn’t have to make any more material public as it should now be in the hands of the police.
I see that Nick Xenophon, for whom I have always had a great deal of respect, is, like me, an afficionado of the Greatest Joke Ever Told.
‘The people in our village, do they call me, “Xenophon the House Builder?” NO! They so cruel….’
There is big money at stake. The plethora of misleading advertising against the pokie reforms are evidence enough of the fear of falling profits. Why not let States vote on if they want pokies in their clubs and pubs? Adelaide didn’t want them but they got them anyway. The reforms are all about targeting problem gamblers there are no plans to make gambling illegal. Why are the clubs so anti-problem gambling? Could it be problem gamblers make clubs the most money. One woman’s mother spent over $100,000 before her family realised what was happening and that is only just one case. Of course the clubs are fighting the reforms. If they gave a toss about problem-gamblers they would be sitting down and working out how to sort the occasional flutterers from the problem punters and preventing tragic family breakdown and crisis due to gambling.
If you mess with the pokies, the world will end. Really. Just like when smoking was banned indoors, or when Responsible Service of Alcohol laws were introduced. The world ended each and every time, remember?
And if you don’t think Publicans and Clubbies would stoop to this sort of tactic, these are the same people who opposed Random Breath Testing. Because the world would end, of course.
http://www.rbt.com.au/rbt-articles/1992/10/17/how-rbt-changed-our-lives/
The pokie palace (aka Loserville) is a mid 20th century phenomenon that ought to have died already. Of course it’s the regular losers that are keeping the joints alive.