Giddy up Buttercup! Winston Peters rides again.

It can happen here!

Good Morning Munchkins, your starter for 10 is to read this recent article by Jonathan Milne, about NZ horse racing getting tax breaks and government support to open up its gambling operations in NZ, and then come back to this blog post.

Done that, good, now let us proceed by reminding you of that scene in the Godfather where the Mafia goes to a famous Hollywood producer and asks that a mafia connected actor be given a big part in his upcoming movie. The producer says no and then wakes up the next morning with the head of his favorite racehorse next to him in bed.

From there now let us careen to last year’s SFO prosecution of several figures in NZ’s horse racing industry under Operation Chestnut which revealed nearly 7 million dollars in pokie fraud and helped expose a web of money flowing from pubs to gaming societies and then to, wait for it, horse racing!

Finally let’s zoom across to this recent article by Radio NZ which notes that while the number of pokie machines and venues is declining the profits from gaming is going up.

The common factor in all of this? Winston Peters*!

It’s not for no reason that he is known as the “god father of horse racing” in NZ or that there are sections of the New Zealand’s Gambling Act which are ruefully referred to as “Winston Clauses” because they were effectively inserted by him, at the behest of the racing industry, and are the basis of the current monopoly powers that Racing New Zealand has.

But wait doesn’t Racing NZ give the money it raises from horse racing to charity? Why yes, yes it does, if you count mostly giving to established sports rather than the communities where the machines are located "charity" and where the bulk of that cash goes back to Racing New Zealand to pay for its own.

And just to add insult to injury, because this is Winston Peters we are talking about here, all of this is taking place during Gambling Harm Awareness Week here in Aotearoa, because of course it is!

So let’s recap. Massive tax breaks for a parasitic and mostly redundant niche industry in NZ so that its pseudo aristocratic and corrupt elite can maintain their lifestyles built around exploiting poor communities.

This is the dark side of Winston’s populism; this is the dark space that Ian Wishart wrote about in Lawyers, Guns and Money, his expose of the racing industry in New Zealand, and its alive and well in New Zealand First today.

Winston Peters sits in the middle of this grotty crossroad of power and vested interests and if the plans to allow these unjustified tax breaks and greedy power grabbing goes ahead expect no good to come from it.

I know, from someone who was close to the Chestnut Investigation, that the parties who were prosecuted were mostly scapegoats so that the others in the industry could avoid detection due to bungling by the DIA in the investigation and industry capture of DIAs senior management (who were then unwilling to upset the peace with their new friends in the racing industry).

My friend in DIA also advises that if YOU take the time to look at the grant lists for major gaming societies to see where much of the money from pokies actually goes it’s not really going back to the “community” as the Gambling Act requires, but mostly into the pockets of NZ’s sporting industrial complex (think rugby, cricket and hockey mostly but including horse racing - and the UPDATE UPDATE at the bottom of the page) via way of various fronts and schemes.

And the mood of the public in NZ to gambling in general is negative, the views aired in the media rarely speak any good or have any good stories to tell because for every pre-school which gets a measly $500 for toys or their leaky roof which desperately needs fixing there is some larger more connected entity which gets $500,000 just so they can help keep off season players and management in jobs by paying the work as “development coaches”.

Such a sentiment like this ties easily into a comment I got last year from someone well up in NZ's charity sector around where the funding from things like gaming machines actually goes, when they told me with a straight face, and no irony, that “if local and mid-level rugby in NZ was to have its funding tap turned off to the ongoing stream of money from gambling machines in pubs over half of those clubs would fold in six months”.

And all of this of this, absolutely and utterly not surprisingly, links back into Winston Peters with such regularity and such ease that it’s easy to see why Labour blocked NZ First from getting it hands on the Fishing Industry portfolio given how much money they have pumped into NZ First.

Its not to say that other political parties do not have dodgy links to various industries in NZ but NZ First is so brazen about it that it weakens the whole argument of who, or what, is actually in charge of things in NZ when NZ First can run such pork barrel politics in full public view with nary a grumble from the public or the people supposedly in charge, you know, like the PM and cabinet.

Personally I am opposed to gambling but I accept that the intent of the NZ gambling Act is to minimize the harm that gambling creates and then ensure that any profits from it go back to the communities which spend their money on it (in a similar model to how Lotto grants work) but that,s not happening here and its not just some sleazy operators but govt ministers like Winston seeing that his good buddies from horse racing get their $$$ while others suffer.

Keep that in mind next time you see Winnie fronting one of his "populist" causes.

UPDATE - Oh and in breaking news Police have raided a range of harness racing entities (ie also horse racing) in the Canterbury area for race fixing and drugs. Just in case you needed another reason to not want these people to benefit from Winstons "generosity".

UPDATE UPDATE - It must be my lucky day as the news just keeps on disgorging the goodies. Now its Tennis NZ sweating as half its funding comes from ... wait for it ... wait for it ... the TAB! Of course run by racing NZ. Maybe I should buy a Lotto ticket tonight.

*-Ok, except for the scene in the Godfather.