NSW labor unites across factional lines on poker machine overhaul

New South Wales Premier Chris Minns is set to take a tougher stance on poker machines to the next election after being pushed to adopt the approach by the party’s left.

A poker machine reform push from Labor’s left faction gained unanimous backing at the NSW party conference on Sunday, reports The Guardian, after right-aligned Unions NSW Secretary Mark Morey negotiated its terms and Minns became personally involved in the days before the vote. 

The outcome adds a set of gambling reform commitments to the party’s policy platform ahead of next March’s state election and points to a rare instance of cross-factional cooperation within NSW Labor.

Left proposal, right negotiator

The motion originated with Darcy Byrne, the Labor left mayor of Sydney’s inner west, whose initial proposal called for the removal of half of all 90,000 poker machines currently operating in NSW.

Rather than progressing through left-aligned channels alone, the proposal was negotiated with Morey, a member of the party’s right faction who has since secured a spot on Labor’s upper house ticket for the coming election. In his address to delegates supporting the motion, Morey thanked the premier “who got involved a week or so ago.”

Labor sources said the Minns government had participated indirectly in talks leading up to Sunday’s vote and had tracked rising grassroots support for the motion. That involvement, arriving in the final stretch before the conference, suggests the premier’s office judged the momentum behind the proposal too significant to leave to a floor vote alone.

What the factions agreed to

The version of the motion that passed includes a moratorium on licenses for new poker machines, plus a requirement that clubs generating more than $20 million in machine profits pay additional tax.

It also commits the party to a 10-year plan to reduce the state’s gaming machine count, with 50% of machines relocated between venues to be permanently withdrawn from operation rather than reinstalled elsewhere.

A further provision calls for mandatory facial recognition technology in every gaming room, supporting a statewide self-exclusion register; according to sources familiar with the matter, policies of this kind are already in development within government.

Byrne told The Guardian Australia that “momentum for real reform of poker machine harm is becoming unstoppable.”

Addressing delegates directly, he said: “For too long, NSW politics has treated the pokies as a problem that everyone acknowledges, but which nobody is willing to solve … for too long the private interests of the poker machine lobby have trumped the public interest of preventing addiction and harm.”

A test case for party unity

Minns is not required to legislate the motion, though its passage arrives while Labor works to present a unified front before the March election.

The cross-factional handling of the poker machine issue stood in contrast to a separate floor dispute the same day, when the left moved to force debate on repealing two protest laws, an effort the right-controlled conference ultimately voted down.

That dispute began when conference organizers scheduled discussion of 56 branch motions on protest laws second-to-last on Sunday’s agenda, a placement critics said was designed to limit the chance of it being debated at all.