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Shaun Micallef’s Going For Broke ★★★★
If you’ve watched a footy game on TV, flicked through a newspaper, listened to a radio or glimpsed the games and social channels that contemporary adolescents are glued to, you’ll know how pervasive and inescapable gambling has become in Australia today. The statistics around the $32 billion industry are alarming. Just for starters, Australians are the biggest gamblers — and losers — in the world per capita; 20 per cent of gamblers account for 80 per cent of losses; and in 2017, Australia had 0.3 per cent of the world’s population, but 2.5 per cent of its gaming machines.
While the fallout from gambling can be easily measured at a grassroots level, the machinations of the industry are complicated. Myths about “having a punt” are threaded into the national psyche. The proceeds of gambling fund elite sport — the Sydney Opera House even — all the way down to local clubs, social hubs and community events. Governments rely on gambling taxes to pay for essential services and are increasingly beholden to lobbyists, an egregious conflict of interest if ever there was one.
The three-part series Shaun Micallef’s Going For Broke does a good job of unravelling many of these complex equations. It identifies with chilling clarity the most pernicious practices in the gambling industry’s playbook and dissects the dark arts that make gambling appealing and addictive. As one participant says, gambling is “psychological warfare”.
It does so by putting a human face on the issues it explores, be that attendees at a seniors’ bingo night and fashionistas glamming up for the Spring Carnival. We meet Dylan DiPierdomenico (son of AFL legend “Dipper”) on the day he is released from a nine-month prison sentence for gambling-related offences and a mother who has somehow managed to turn her life around from addiction. The humility and frankness of both is truly moving. The head of the much-criticised industry group Responsible Wagering Australia has a turn at explaining the inherent contradictions of his organisation, while researcher and academic Dr Charles Livingstone eloquently dismantles the very idea of “responsible” gambling.
Micallef says at the outset he has never gambled, played a pokie or willingly sat down to watch a football game. So unlike the actor, writer and comedian’s previous factual shows Stairway to Heaven (about faith) and On the Sauce (alcohol and binge-drinking), he has no skin in the gambling game. Yet, there is no mistaking his genuine interest in how gambling is entrenched in Australian society and history. His curiosity and empathy for the people he meets is palpable. He asks questions and listens without betraying his views, resists funnyman quips (though he does a good John Howard imitation) and the “concerned journalist” furrowed brow, and leaves interviewees to tell their stories. Some of which are shattering.
Going For Broke shares a considerable amount of behind-the-camera DNA with the terrific SBS documentary The People Vs Robodebt, both of which are from production company CJZ. As in Robodebt, Going For Broke advocates for those who, pun intended, are being played by a system that is stacked against them.
The late Labor MP Peta Murphy called for a comprehensive ban on all gambling advertising on all media, broadcast and online. Just last month, the federal government finally announced long-awaited reforms that fall well short of a ban, merely limiting the number of gambling ads that can be broadcast between 6am and 8.30pm, ending advertising on jerseys, jumpers and in stadiums and banning online advertising to under 18s.
Micallef signs off the final episode, which was finished well before the reforms were announced, on a tear-worthy note. He didn’t even have to take a punt on how this story would end.
Shaun Micallef’s Going For Broke premieres at 8pm on Tuesday, May 19, on the ABC and streams on ABC iview.
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