Sol Trujillo is telling the world through the BBC that Australia is a racist nation and the PM’s dismissive “adios” comment is certainly the closest he has come to a Pauline Hanson moment.
Another uniquely Australian political feature is also on show this week with the ACT branch of the ALP announcing plans to sell the 440-strong poker machines business it operates through the Canberra Labor Club.
The ALP and its affiliated unions are arguably the democratic world’s richest political movement with almost $1 billion of assets. Part of this wealth has come from running gambling dens in the nation’s capital since 1979 to help raise funds for political purposes. No wonder the ALP-ACTU machine was able to outspend the Coalition by about to five to one at the last Federal election.
As opposition leader, Kevin Rudd claimed that he hates poker machines but it has taken 18 months to finally see some movement at the station.
After all, it is pretty hard for Labor governments to have moral authority in dealing with hundreds of thousands of Australian pokie addicts when it is preying on these very people through its own four venues.
In another classic example of how pokies are ingrained into the Australian system, the major media outlets have ignored the ALP’s dramatic decision.
The Canberra Times broke the story yesterday and the only other comprehensive coverage was this package on ABC online.
The only criticism of the announcement has come from the LHMU union which wasn’t consulted about the sale.
“I would have thought that any company — but particularly a Labor club that’s owned by the Labor Party — would have consulted with its workforce and their representative union prior to making a public announcement,” said Lyndal Ryan from the LHMU.
Rather than worrying about the workers who help fleece the problem gamblers, is there anyone standing up for the victims who will now be at the mercy of a private operator?
Exactly who will pay the ALP more than $20 million to become the biggest pokies operator in Canberra? This money will certainly come in handy if we do have a snap double dissolution election.
Labor’s announcement is a major win for anti-pokies campaigners such as Tim Costello, Senator Nick Xenophon and multi-millionaire Paul Bendat, who runs the www.pokieact.org website.
Bendat is attempting to shame Woolworths into selling its vast 11,000-strong pokies empire — a tough ask when Australia’s dominant political party was in the same business.
With Labor now effectively declaring the pokies business was damaging its brand, Woolworths has come to a major fork in the road.
After all, there aren’t many pokies operators with a spare $20 million to invest and Woolworths is the logical buyer of the Canberra Labor Club chain given it is already the biggest player in most Australian cities.
Roger Corbett, the hypocritical devout Christian who drove the Woolies push into pokies, will be praying his successor Michael Luscombe doesn’t draw even more attention to his destructive empire by giving a big cheque to the ALP.
The mainstream media should be all over this issue, especially the Fairfax press given that Corbett is a director. As we’ve noted before, Woolies is such a big advertiser that it tends to get treated with kids gloves when the commercial media cover problem gambling stories.
However, the tide might slowly be turning. The local Rockhampton paper named Woolies in this story bagging the retail giant’s attempt to extend its opening hours from midnight to 5am, so that lonely pokies addicts can really get into the zone. This is a standard Woolies tactic across the country and one they would no doubt repeat if handed control of the Canberra Labor Club.
Stephen – apart from your bizarre opening paragraph (Pauline Hanson moment?!) this entire “story” is complete guesswork with a large dig at Woolworths. Is this the best you can do? Do you have no contacts within the ALP or otherwise who might have given you some direction (rather than guessing)?
Wow, being in the left really is like “the emperors new clothes”.
One lousy comment for what is arguably the most sinister money-raising machine of any political party on the planet.
If it was the libs, you lefties would be having kittens…
As I understand from Spanish speaking colleagues, adios is a formal goodbye with no expectation of meeting again. Quite chilly compared to caio which suggests until next time, or in Aussie would be “see you later”.
I tend to agree with Trujillo that Australians have an appalling lack of awareness of the 250,000,000 South and central Americans. For instance when we talk about “America” the real answer is: “Which one?”. El Norte – the northern continent or the southern one.
But fact is Trujillo was a bad fit as are most USA businessmen here in Australia. They would junk medicare and incentivise the rental of pencils in primary school. It’s a sick country with a mad gun hyper aggressive gun culture and glorification of competition over public interest.
And that’s not racist, that’s personal.
Isn’t it rather touching that Sol shows the inner hurt that comes of consciousness of failure (and if losing so much shareholder value and being vastly overpaid for it was not enough appointing Amigo Burgess to speak to Australians capped it all). We are racist, and backward and have to change. Poor Sol never even got within a bull’s bellow of understanding Australians and Australia. Mate, only 1 per cent of us even have a prejudice about Hispanics (who they? rumba, samba, Acapulco, tango, Pele, Maradona, a bit of polo…. que sera sera, Porfirio Rubirosa and Placido Domingo – or wasn’t that a fellow called Keating?). This isn’t the US where you are top of the class of the 13 per cent of the population who are popularly stereotyped as violent, illegal, drug couriers but definitely up scale compared to the 13 per cent who are black descendants of slaves. The Three Amigos is just friendly lazy cliché mongering like calling a group of Welshman Taffies as lame humour. But Sol, we feel your pain about Telstra; indeed we share it in quite unfair proportion. But, to take your pathetic complaint at face value let’s suggest you visit the feral Western suburbs (Melbourne will do) for the first time and find out what happens to you. You aren’t dark like most of those unfortunate sub-continental students who get beaten up by real racists so you’ll probably just get mugged enough for your wallet and mobile phone to be taken because you are an unfit looking well-dressed older guy.