Sign up for Guardian Australia’s free morning and afternoon email newsletters for your daily news roundup Last year David Harris, the Labor MP for Wyong on the central coast, thanked a local leagues club for giving $4,400 to a group providing school supplies to disadvantaged children.Īnd yet, critics say some clubs give large sums of money to projects with direct links to the organisation, with little oversight or transparency over how the grants are awarded. In October, Holsworthy Liberal MP Melanie Gibbons congratulated Moorebank RSL for a $25,175 donation to a charity supporting parents whose children are in the neonatal intensive care unit at Liverpool hospital in Sydney’s south-west. Each year, in the state’s parliament, MPs line up to pay tribute to its charity efforts. All up more than $1bn has been handed out. “They’re just raking in the money and they don’t know what to do with it,” Livingstone said.ClubsNSW says each year about $100m in donations are made via the scheme “ to a variety of worthy causes”. In 2013-14, pubs and clubs made a combined $5.9 billion in revenue, which surged to $6.5 billion in 2018-19 due to technological advances and the advent of casino-style games – known as multi-terminal gaming machines – in clubs. “They’re just raking in the money and they don’t know what to do with it.” Charles Livingstone, head of gambling research at Monash Universityīut Charles Livingstone, head of gambling research at Monash University, said the amounts donated to the community were miniscule compared with gaming revenue. Registered clubs are not-for-profit entities that can claim a tax rebate if they spend 1.85 per cent of their poker machine profits on specific projects that benefit their local communities.

Tudehope said it was not his decision to make. Greens MP Cate Faehrmann and independent MP Justin Field grilled Finance Minister Damien Tudehope in the NSW upper house last week on whether the government planned to sign a new memorandum of understanding with ClubsNSW that commits not to introduce new regulations around poker machines, as it has before each election since 2010.

Nsw poker machine tax