A classic tactic of columnists looking to stir up shit where none was previously visible – the journalistic equivalent of forcing a banger round the u-bend – is to take two things that are not really equivalents and make a direct comparison between them. Here’s Glenn “LA Law” Jackson in the Sydney Morning Herald giving a textbook demonstration:
“So a price has been placed on defrauding a code. It is $4,000. To place it into context, if someone had run onto Dairy Farmers Stadium on August 21, 2010 – the night Ryan Tandy’s Canterbury played North Queensland – he or she might have been fined the same amount.
“The maximum penalty for streaking at Dairy Farmers Stadium is $4,000. That fine can be doubled if you interfere with the on-field play. But for interfering with the integrity of rugby league by attempting to manipulate the first scoring play of that Saturday night fixture, Tandy has been hit with a $4,000 fine. Or a $571 successful outlay on that option.”
Let’s swiftly deal with the rather odd last sentence, which seems to imply that Tandy could have covered his fine in advance by placing a bet as part of his own gambling scam. A course of action which, one would have to assume, he did in fact choose to take: Tandy is clearly not the first name on the list for Rhodes Scholarships but it’s difficult to imagine that even he would try to pull of a betting scam without placing a bet.
I’m not sure if LA Law has figured out that fines tend to be higher if the guilty party actually benefits from their fraud – perhaps he thinks Bernie Madoff, for instance, would have effectively got away with it if he’d just stolen enough money to cover the fine. In this case, the requirement of Tandy’s fine to repay his ill-gotten gains is presumably negated to quite a large extent by the fact that the whole ludicrous scheme didn’t pay off in the first place.
Anyway, back to the main point: the idea that the $4,000 fine is “the price [placed] on defrauding a code”. Which, of course, is utter nonsense: the fine (and a 12 month good behaviour bond!) is the price that has been placed on being convicted of providing false information to the NSW Crime Commission and attempting to dishonestly obtain financial advantage by deception. So far as I’m aware, neither New South Wales nor the Australian Commonwealth has a law against defrauding a sporting code. If they do it seems rather odd that Tandy wasn’t charged with breaking it – he’d have been bang to rights.
Legally, what were the actual charges against Tandy equivalent to? Getting caught trying to pull of an insurance scam and lying about it, perhaps? It’s startlingly obvious to anyone who actually spends two seconds thinking about it that it’s the job of the court to enforce the law and of the NRL to uphold the integrity of the game. Ergo one minor league fraud equals a $4,000 fine (and a 12 month good behaviour bond!) and one spot fixing scam equals a life ban from the NRL. Seems to me that everyone’s done their job here.
Fortunately for LA Law, there’s one man who’s always prepared not to spend two seconds thinking about things: Mark “Slower” Geyer. Here’s Slower’s view: “Every spectator went there thinking they’re going to get a fair game, and they didn’t. You can do a lot in the game but you can’t rob the fans. What’s the price for that? It’s all about making people aware of what they’ve done. Does a $4,000 fine do that?”
Personally I’d argue that it is, in fact, perfectly possible to rob the fans in rugby league: the South Sydney Rabbitohs continue to charge for membership, for instance. But that’s beside the point, which is of course why Slower and LA Law are – accidentally or on purpose – suggesting that it’s up to a court of law to do the NRL’s disciplinary job for it. I can only assume these two would be in favour of tasering refs for making bad decisions, or even the death penalty for players who lie down faking head injuries to milk penalties. It’s the only language they understand.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Amateur hour: Channel 9 and its commentators’ pokie embarrassment
Regardless of what you think about mandatory pre-commitment for gaming machines, there can be little doubt that the response to the proposals is, once again, giving the NRL and people connected with the game the opportunity to make themselves look like clowns. Channel 9 and its commentary team, Ray Warren and Phil “Frog Man” Gould, are among the first out of the comically overcrowded car with wobbly wheels.
As far as the actual proposal goes, personally I find it depressing to think that the NRL is genuinely dependent for its financial future on the conscience-salving handouts given by pokie palaces. If the game really can’t survive without the proceeds of a tax on the stupid (and by this I don’t mean ticket revenue at Souths games) then, well, maybe it doesn’t deserve to exist anyway.
Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I like to think that a well-run game that got its head out of its arse and tried to plan for the long term rather than twisting itself in knots for the next ten bucks would manage fine without the grubby reality of pokie money.
And let’s be honest: much as Frog Man and his corporate backers are keen to portray the pokies as a bit of fun down at the club the reality is that most of the revenue is coming from the misguided and the desperate, blindly feeding money they can’t afford to lose into the coffers of institutions that don’t care how much it hurts them when they inevitably do. If you’ve ever set foot in, say, the Dragons club in Kogarah or Bulldogs in Belmore you’ll be fully aware that these places are not – despite what their websites depict – primarily social clubs. The overwhelming majority of their floor space is taken up with gambling machines; they are, in effect, casinos.
I don’t have a problem with casinos at a fundamental level. But then I’m not a gambling addict, I hardly ever go to them and when I do I’m pretty well aware that I’m throwing – a limited quantity of – money away. Others are not so fortunate, and – whether or not you think mandatory pre-commitment will achieve its goals – it is unfair to present an attempt to assist problem gamblers to deal with their addiction as a conspiracy against a purely social activity.
That, of course, is exactly what Channel 9, Warren and Frog Man have been using live NRL broadcasts to do. Oddly enough, while he’s perfectly capable of being a bumptious arse I actually have least issue with Frog Man on this. He is a senior executive at a rugby league club that relies on pokies for a significant portion of its income, and while his interests should be openly declared (perhaps a caption saying “Phil Gould’s employer, Penrith Panthers rugby league club, derives over $10 million a year from its associated leagues club where the overwhelming majority of main room floor space is used for gambling machines”) it’s hardly surprising that he is pushing them on air.
Warren’s position, much as I hate to admit it, is considerably worse. This is a man who acknowledged in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald barely a year ago that he has suffered from a gambling problem. “When I think about the money I spent, it crosses my mind that I could now be living on the shores of Sydney Harbour,” he said. “I was never able to gather money around me. It’s not like I live in a fibro house, but I certainly don't live in opulence.”
Most importantly, Warren wanted to warn others about the perils of gambling. “I’d bet on the Saturday, but also on the Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday….Then I realised there’s no future in it. If I could get that message across, I certainly would. It took me a long time to realise.”
Very laudable. Or at least it would be if Warren hadn’t felt the need to join in with Frog Man in attacking, on air, the mandatory pre-commitment proposals. Granted, it’s possible that Warren is completely in favour of rules attempting to help problem gamblers deal with their addiction and he simply doesn’t think this particular proposal will be effective. That seems pretty unlikely – and certainly none of that nuance came across in Warren or Frog Man’s comments – but it is, perhaps, possible.
Unfortunately, Warren has now apparently decided to take the war criminal defence and go with the line ‘I was just following orders’. “It was a directive from up top that it be read by at least somebody, so I read it,” Warren has said. Which is wonderful: a man who acknowledges his own gambling problem and claims to want to “get that message across” about how gambling has “no future in it” is happy to attack anti-gambling regulations to millions of viewers just because he’s told to.
Of course, the worst offender in this is clearly Channel 9. At first, the station tried to worm its way out of the impending shitstorm by throwing Warren and Frog Man under a bus. It issued a statement saying: “The comments relating to the federal government proposed poker machine tax were purely the opinions of the commentators”.
Which is interesting, given the supposedly unscripted comments were accompanied by an on-screen caption with the name of an anti-pokie law website. Dare I suggest that shows rather more technological facility than I expect from Warren and Frog Man? (though I do recall Frog Man brandishing an iPhone on The Sunday Roast once, so perhaps he did whip up a graphic to back his comments while playing Angry Birds with his massive sausage fingers).
I wonder what Warren feels, having dutifully toed the company line (which, to be fair, he says he agrees with), to find that his bosses are happy to wash their hands of the whole affair and leave him and Frog Man dangling in the wind? My prediction is that Warren will soon ‘clarify’ his remarks about the original comments being “a directive from the top” to get his bosses off the hook; after all, he’s already admitted that he can’t afford to walk away.
As far as the actual proposal goes, personally I find it depressing to think that the NRL is genuinely dependent for its financial future on the conscience-salving handouts given by pokie palaces. If the game really can’t survive without the proceeds of a tax on the stupid (and by this I don’t mean ticket revenue at Souths games) then, well, maybe it doesn’t deserve to exist anyway.
Maybe I’m too optimistic, but I like to think that a well-run game that got its head out of its arse and tried to plan for the long term rather than twisting itself in knots for the next ten bucks would manage fine without the grubby reality of pokie money.
And let’s be honest: much as Frog Man and his corporate backers are keen to portray the pokies as a bit of fun down at the club the reality is that most of the revenue is coming from the misguided and the desperate, blindly feeding money they can’t afford to lose into the coffers of institutions that don’t care how much it hurts them when they inevitably do. If you’ve ever set foot in, say, the Dragons club in Kogarah or Bulldogs in Belmore you’ll be fully aware that these places are not – despite what their websites depict – primarily social clubs. The overwhelming majority of their floor space is taken up with gambling machines; they are, in effect, casinos.
I don’t have a problem with casinos at a fundamental level. But then I’m not a gambling addict, I hardly ever go to them and when I do I’m pretty well aware that I’m throwing – a limited quantity of – money away. Others are not so fortunate, and – whether or not you think mandatory pre-commitment will achieve its goals – it is unfair to present an attempt to assist problem gamblers to deal with their addiction as a conspiracy against a purely social activity.
That, of course, is exactly what Channel 9, Warren and Frog Man have been using live NRL broadcasts to do. Oddly enough, while he’s perfectly capable of being a bumptious arse I actually have least issue with Frog Man on this. He is a senior executive at a rugby league club that relies on pokies for a significant portion of its income, and while his interests should be openly declared (perhaps a caption saying “Phil Gould’s employer, Penrith Panthers rugby league club, derives over $10 million a year from its associated leagues club where the overwhelming majority of main room floor space is used for gambling machines”) it’s hardly surprising that he is pushing them on air.
Warren’s position, much as I hate to admit it, is considerably worse. This is a man who acknowledged in an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald barely a year ago that he has suffered from a gambling problem. “When I think about the money I spent, it crosses my mind that I could now be living on the shores of Sydney Harbour,” he said. “I was never able to gather money around me. It’s not like I live in a fibro house, but I certainly don't live in opulence.”
Most importantly, Warren wanted to warn others about the perils of gambling. “I’d bet on the Saturday, but also on the Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday….Then I realised there’s no future in it. If I could get that message across, I certainly would. It took me a long time to realise.”
Very laudable. Or at least it would be if Warren hadn’t felt the need to join in with Frog Man in attacking, on air, the mandatory pre-commitment proposals. Granted, it’s possible that Warren is completely in favour of rules attempting to help problem gamblers deal with their addiction and he simply doesn’t think this particular proposal will be effective. That seems pretty unlikely – and certainly none of that nuance came across in Warren or Frog Man’s comments – but it is, perhaps, possible.
Unfortunately, Warren has now apparently decided to take the war criminal defence and go with the line ‘I was just following orders’. “It was a directive from up top that it be read by at least somebody, so I read it,” Warren has said. Which is wonderful: a man who acknowledges his own gambling problem and claims to want to “get that message across” about how gambling has “no future in it” is happy to attack anti-gambling regulations to millions of viewers just because he’s told to.
Of course, the worst offender in this is clearly Channel 9. At first, the station tried to worm its way out of the impending shitstorm by throwing Warren and Frog Man under a bus. It issued a statement saying: “The comments relating to the federal government proposed poker machine tax were purely the opinions of the commentators”.
Which is interesting, given the supposedly unscripted comments were accompanied by an on-screen caption with the name of an anti-pokie law website. Dare I suggest that shows rather more technological facility than I expect from Warren and Frog Man? (though I do recall Frog Man brandishing an iPhone on The Sunday Roast once, so perhaps he did whip up a graphic to back his comments while playing Angry Birds with his massive sausage fingers).
I wonder what Warren feels, having dutifully toed the company line (which, to be fair, he says he agrees with), to find that his bosses are happy to wash their hands of the whole affair and leave him and Frog Man dangling in the wind? My prediction is that Warren will soon ‘clarify’ his remarks about the original comments being “a directive from the top” to get his bosses off the hook; after all, he’s already admitted that he can’t afford to walk away.
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