From Guardian
The shaming of Australian gamblers is relentless. Alcohol causes more deaths, and yet no one is demanding that we picket shiraz.
I saw my first pantomime aged seven, in the hall of a Returned Services League (RSL) Youth Club, sometime in the 1980s. It had a dashing hero and heroine, a man in a ballgown, flying handfuls of lollies and that leap-out-of-your-seat raucousness that exhilarates children. There were hundreds of us. The supervising adults maintained respectful distance and when the curtain finally came down on the dastardly villains, everyone was given a showbag full of treats. It was brilliant.
You rarely get such binary experiences of good and evil as an adult. Unless, of course, we’re talking about gambling in Australia. Colourful characters appear with the predictability of the dame’s grand entrance: the sword-wielding, righteously outraged Nick Xenophon and Andrew Wilkie on one side, and the slithering Waterhouse family, Clubs Australia and Channel Nine sports commentators on the other.
Spectators like you, me, most of the media and seemingly every member of government ooh and ahh when cued. “Problem gambling!”, ooh! “Somebody think of the chilluns!”, ahh! “Nanna spent my future home extension in a pokie!”, eee, ooo, awww!
Provoked by panto-villain-of-the-month Tom Waterhouse, we have in recent weeks been hollering like a room of school-holiday children on a glucose spike. Thanks to the increasing of his advertising budget for free-to-air television ads (up 340% from last year), young Waterhouse has been slightly more ubiquitous on Australian free to-air sports broadcasting than the face of Jesus in Renaissance painting.
