The Reverend Tim Costello is the chief advocate for the Alliance for Gambling Reform, and has been outspoken on the need for NSW to introduce a cashless gaming card. I chatted with him on Friday morning.
Fitz: I do want to get to your view as Australia’s leading anti-gambling force, on one of the central issues of our upcoming NSW election, but first...
TC: First, I call myself a gambling reform “advocate”. I’m not a prohibitionist. I’ve never been anti-gambling. My grandfather was an SP bookie. I am a gambling reform advocate...
Tim Costello, gambling reform advocate: “I’m not a prohibitionist. I’ve never been anti-gambling.”
Fitz: But first we need to acknowledge that your brother Peter – love that man! – is chair of the company who are the landlords of this paper.
TC: As you have reminded me, many times!
Fitz: Not always with unfettered joy. So, I’ve got to ask: given how well known you two brothers are in different fields, and often on opposite sides of politics, just where and when did Peter go so badly wrong?
TC: (Laughs.) One of my university friends remembers “when Peter Costello was more left wing and Tim Costello was right wing”. Peter, at that time, was flirting with Labor in student politics. I only really became political when I became mayor of St Kilda in 1991, and ran on a platform of putting ratepayer dollars into social housing. So I started going, “Yep, you can use government to alleviate poverty to act more fairly to protect the vulnerable”, and maybe that’s when those perceptions of different politics began.
Fitz: The then Victorian premier Jeff Kennett, at the height of his powers in the mid-90s, often called you “un-Victorian” and that “leftist cleric” for your eagerness for gambling reform, but still you persisted. What drives you in the field?
TC: I was working as a Baptist minister at St Kilda and as a lawyer. I set up a legal aid practice in the church. Pokies had just been introduced in Victoria and I didn’t have any objections. A middle-aged woman who didn’t smoke or drink, who owned her own house, was happily married, came in as a legal client because she’d got addicted to pokies in 1993 and stolen $60,000 from her employer – and got four years jail. And I asked myself the question: how does the one who’s never been in trouble, a law-abiding citizen end up in prison for four years? Discovering that the machines are built for addiction got me going.
Tim Costello is not anti-gambling, but wants Dracula out of the bloodbank
The Reverend Tim Costello is the chief advocate for the Alliance for Gambling Reform, and has been outspoken on the need for NSW to introduce a cashless gaming card. I chatted with him on Friday morning.
Fitz: I do want to get to your view as Australia’s leading anti-gambling force, on one of the central issues of our upcoming NSW election, but first...
TC: First, I call myself a gambling reform “advocate”. I’m not a prohibitionist. I’ve never been anti-gambling. My grandfather was an SP bookie. I am a gambling reform advocate...
Tim Costello, gambling reform advocate: “I’m not a........
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