Former ClubsNSW CEO Josh Landis made a now infamous comment (that he has apologised for) suggesting NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet does not understand gambling reform legislation, and is acting on his ‘conservative Catholic gut’. His apology is below:

‘The comments were made during a phone call with a journalist late yesterday afternoon, who asked why I believe the Premier is so insistent on introducing a mandatory cashless system and other gaming reforms. I want to make it clear that in answering the question I misspoke and should not have referred to the Premier’s faith. This was not a premeditated comment or an intentional attack on the Premier personally, rather it was a poor attempt to explain that there is a lack of evidence for the policy and the Premier is a moral person who intrinsically wants to help those who are causing themselves harm. I would like to take this opportunity to unreservedly apologise publicly for any offence caused.’

Landis is not the first to tie Catholicism into a discussion about the morality of social issues. There is a wider conversation going on in the social fabric of Australia.

The rhetorical pincer tying Catholicism to the modifier ‘conservative’ is nuanced. Commonly, the chain of logic is thus: conservatives want to control society; Catholicism is the dogmatic, dated, and socially unwelcome institution that binds them to doing so. For those with a progressive outlook, it chains two ‘bad’ Australian brands together and holds them responsible for curtailing of the working man’s freedoms. Gambling is one such instance where some are attempting to shroud the moral debate in a cloud of unholy mysticism. In so doing, they stand on the shoulders of others who’ve made a peculiar bloodsport out of the denigration of Catholic identity in modern Australia.

The Catholic instinct for social reform can hardly be called conservative. The Church’s social justice history intersects congruently with both Labor and Liberal history. Menzies stood behind Catholics on education, and Catholics stood behind Whitlam on the broadscale social-democratisation of the Australian government.

Insofar as Perrottet’s planned gambling reforms are ‘conservative’, they reflect the fact that 21st Century leftist machine politics have become utterly disconnected from the problems of everyday people. Ergo, socially-concerned, politically-minded Catholics have found a tenuous resting place in the other side’s ‘broad church’.

Perrottet does remarkably well to take less fire than he might be expected to as a conspicuously Catholic leader. He does this by being inconspicuous in the public manifestation of his personal faith. In some way, this must disappoint the Catholics who would prefer him fight a little harder in the obvious war being waged against their religion in the public square.

Then again, the Catholic Church has been politically resilient because of its wisdom – in Australia at least – in approaching matters of politics not through the lens of Catholicism, but through the lens of simple common sense. Its members in high office don’t bring dogmatism to bear in crafting secular policy – despite the shrieks claiming the contrary which emanate, predictably, from its enemies.

This brings us to the gambling reforms. They are not Catholic, nor are they conservative. They are common sense. Andrew Wilkie is correct to call out the Labor party as not fit to govern, for its failure to get on board. Pokie gambling is an abject misery within Australian society, and its proponents are hopelessly compromised by an addiction of their own: state and local political influence.

It is my view that ClubsNSW is not fit to partake impartially in this debate, because its constituent members – some notable exceptions excluded – do not present the problem of pokie gambling in full. They are quick to laud the benefits of a cash-loaded Clubs sector. Bathed in sunlight are the public goods that flow from gambling money: sports for kids, civil society for adults, cheap eats for families. But shrouded in darkness is the beast which feeds this public relations campaign: broken careers, ruined dreams, and shattered families – mothers and children left starving in cold houses.

For five years I worked intimately with a large Club in outer Western Sydney. I was at the spear-tip of that community redistribution of pokie revenue that ClubsNSW often lauds as its raison d’être. I loved it. But I also couldn’t ignore that for every child provided a free football or music lesson in the morning, and every smiling veteran downing a cheap schooner in the afternoon, there was a concomitant personal catastrophe unfolding in the dead of the night.

When Labor hero Bob Carr made his ‘deal with the devil’ and unleashed the great evil of pokie gambling on New South Wales in 1997, he condemned the state to three decades of societal decay. Sydney’s Catholics voted overwhelmingly for Labor in those days, and Sydney’s Catholics watched in horror as Carr’s demented deal took hold overwhelmingly in Labor electorates, decimating Labor families.

So, perhaps Dominic Perrottet’s Catholicism understands what Bob Carr’s agnosticism couldn’t: that addiction to gambling has corrupted the soul of New South Wales.

If it takes a ‘Catholic gut’ to end this scourge, then we shall all be Catholics.  

Ben Crocker is a Research Fellow at Common Sense Society, in Washington DC.