Hooked by Quentin Beresford

Author:Quentin Beresford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2025-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Charles Livingstone agrees. The gambling industry, he says, has a bunch of politicians whom it targets with donations and on whom it can then rely to put their case. ‘What we’re looking at is an industry that is not so much influencing government but is embedded in government,’ he commented.17

With political donations escalating by more than 500 per cent over the two decades to 2023, the assault on democratic principles was becoming a deep concern for those interested in integrity in government. Anthony Whealy, a former New South Wales Supreme Court judge and the chair of the Centre for Public Integrity, lamented that the corridors of Parliament House were being transformed into ‘a virtual den of thieves. True access is only available to big money.’18

We’ve seen how political donations have been used in a number of cases to stymie the democratic process. Another egregious example centred on the granting in New South Wales of a licence in 2014 to James Packer’s Crown Casino Resorts by the Liberal government led by Barry O’Farrell.

Allegations of influence-buying dogged the approval process. The Packer family have been generous donors, especially to the Liberal Party, over many years. Through Crown, James had donated approximately $2 million in Victoria and Western Australia, the states in which his company held a casino licence. However, James’s mother, Roslyn, has been even more generous. Out of her own resources she had donated $1.34 million to the Liberal Party over a 22-year period. Of this, $1.18 million was given after 2012, when discussions commenced about a proposed gargantuan casino project at Barangaroo, on Sydney’s Darling Harbour. A week after Roslyn Packer made a $10 000 donation to the Liberal Party, O’Farrell decided to approve the project without putting it through a competitive tendering process.19

All Roslyn Packer’s donations were legal. In itself, this shows the weakness in Australia’s electoral laws: they allow the perception of influence buying.

A recent analysis of gambling donations shows that perception may indeed be reality. The Commonwealth Parliamentary Library analysed gambling donations over the past decade and found that these had surged by 600 per cent. Just eight gambling companies had together donated $2.7 million over the decade.20 It’s hard not to conclude that donations have reached a point where the major political parties are working behind the scenes for gambling interests.

In fact, this is the view of many experts. According to Anthony Whealy, generous donations are the backbone of a ‘tremendous lobbying exercise’ that has allowed the gambling industry to amass enormous power: ‘They know that they’ll get a return call when they make a phone call,’ he has noted. ‘They know they’ll get an audience when they want one.’21

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