no more aussie donks on 888....fml

With Tony Abbott and his Liberal pals in power, this is just one of many things we are going to need to worry about in the coming years. I still can't believe Australia has that many stupid people that voted him in as Prime Minister.

As far as poker in Australia goes, kiss it goodbye by years end IMO. Abbott and Xenophon will nuke it. Guess our options are either Crown Casino or Star City and paying 10% rake + a $10 per hour time charge. For those outside of Oz who don't know who Tony Abbott is, the article below sums him up in a nutshell.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politi...908-2tdra.html

Goodbye poker.

Our best chance for now is to stay under the radar and if it comes to it lobby key LNP free market figures like the attorney general.

How can you believe this? Just where is the logic behind it?

Online poker has been made illegal. The new government has a published policy of seeking to enforce that law. The old government talked about liberalising the law but they lost the election.

You seem to think that this is not a live process with a clear direction of travel already, it is as if you have not noticed that it is already a public policy issue.

Your advice amounts to letting only the opponents of online gambling have their say and have their influence reacted to. Now those opponents are a whole bunch of people that range from the anti gambling brigade, to those genuinely concerned about problem gambling to well funded commercial interests in B&M gambling who want to exclude competition and a bunch of politicians who want to protect state revenues from the tax of legal gambling by excluding online gambling.

The anti camp is large, diverse and well funded but your response is to let them get on with it and call on anyone pro internet poker to stay silent. It's like letting the school bully keep taking your lunch money and threatening you in the hope that he gets bored and bothers someone else. As a tactic it is absolutely awful and as a strategy it amounts to outright cowardice with a dash of laziness, doomed to failure.

If you let the only voice be anti online gambling then you are going to get shafted.

any thoughts on australian sports party/motoring enthusiasts party

I would assume they don't have a clear position on online poker as both seem to be single issue parties

The Lib Dem from NSW will obviously be against banning online poker as they are a libertarian party

The Greens are mixed on the issue, Di Natale wants to ban online poker, Adam Stone (the unsuccessful QLD Greens Senate candidate) said he was opposed to banning online poker and most of the others don't seem to have a stance one way or the other.

Xenophon obviously wants to ban it, as do Family First. Labor will probably oppose a ban, Abbott favours it but it isn't a priority for him at all and if we can get key LNP figures onside he won't act alone. Obviously the LNP will follow whatever Abbott and the senior powerbrokers tell them to do.

In the house, Wilkie supports regulated online poker but not the status quo. Not sure what Bandt or the other two Is (McGowan and Katter) think.

Palmer will probably be pro-gambling since he wanted to build a casino in Coolum a while back where I used to live. That means the two PUP senators are likely to be on our side on this one.

As I said a while ago if the general consensus is that we need to move on lobbying, I have a close personal friend in the LNP who is a poker player and has two state and one federal MPs who owe their seats to him directly or indirectly so he is taken seriously in the QLD LNP, he told me the best strategy is to try and get George Brandis in our corner since as Attorney General he's the main ally we want, he's high up in the ministry and ideologically he is sympathetic to our cause because he is a 'government should stay out of peoples lives liberal' (in my friend's words).

If we want to start lobbying my friend knows the right people and it won't be particularly expensive if the poker community chips in. I don't know whether lobbying now is the right move and don't want to move alone in this but if the consensus is we want to lobby, we should take steps to set it up and i'm willing to make the connections between my friend and the stars/888 reps and whoever the poker community nominates as its ambassadors (people like jackie glazier and joe hachem make sense among others)

Anyway, i'm willing to devote as much time to the fight as necessary but I don't want to start anything unless we have a consensus on how to proceed since we don't know whether anything will be acted on and the status quo is obviously desirable

One of the biggest issues is what exactly we want in the event legislation is proposed

The major ones in order of importance

1) Online poker legal in Australia
2) Global player pool allowed
3) Existing sites to be allowed to continue operating
4) Player protections are in place to prevent us from being cheater etc. but don't restrict our ability to play games/sites of our choosing
5) Taxes to be operator side rather than player side (this should be fine unless ATO legislation is changed)

Some things we have to argue our case

1) Poker is a game of skill
2) Refusing to regulate will drive anything underground which hurts Australian citizens who play poker and denies them protections (eg. Lock in US market)
3) Tax revenue/licensing fees for poker site operators will bring the government revenue it would not otherwise have and doesn't currently have
4) Very difficult to police existing ban on online poker and it's a waste of government resources
5) Very little problem gambling is attributed to poker compared to other forms of gambling
6) Hypocrisy - why should live poker be legal, but online poker be illegal?

Things that are against us

1) Poker is an easy target to appease anti-gambling zealots since we're not as organised as clubs defending pokies etc
2) Won't someone think of the children/ID fraud/etc crowd
3) Many politicians don't understand the issues at hand and just see gambling=bad, we don't have an organised lobbying group to meet with politicians and explain the issues etc.

Anyway, i'm just throwing stuff out there. I feel like we need Pokerstars to give us their position on the issue since they have more power/money than the rest of the Australian poker industry combined and they should be with us on this fight since they have the most at stake financially in actual dollars

Their detailed policy is here
http://ldp.org.au/policies/1220-gambling

as you say they support legal Internet gambling and are quite condemning of the current monopoly suppliers and taxes.

Care needs to be taken with this sort of line. There is little research that really shows what forms of gambling might or might not be most associated with problem gambling and less on which type if any might cause it. The picture is muddied by competing lobby and interest groups which chuck mud at their potential competitors.

FWIW my view is that the research showing that problem gamblers bet in lots of ways and that correlates with problem gambling rather than any one type of gambling is most compelling but in the research you can find some data that can be cherry picked to claim the exact opposite of your belief that poker is relatively benign.

For instance in the UK the form of gambling with the highest proportion of problem gambling is poker played in a pub or club followed some way down by on site dog race betting. I am pretty sure that this is a blip as the sample size is small and it is highly engaged gamblers who bet in lots of ways that seek out poker in a pub/club (and dog tracks btw) but others could argue on the data we have that poker is the most problem gambling dominated method of betting in the UK, it would be rubbish but the case is at least as strong for that as it is for Internet gambling in general being worse. Indeed the widespread acceptance that Pokies or FOBTs are agents of the problem gambling devil is actually very weak, it is informed by research which appears to be designed to make them look bad, the methodologies used are terrible (not using random samples and then not comparing to a similar sample being universal).

Anyway, I don't want to derail, you just need to be careful with a poker is better than other gambling line. For instance if you looked at hours spent on it, compulsive behaviour like thinking about it when not doing it, playing longer sessions than planned, having your gambling affect your relationships with others, whether you have ever borrowed to fund it and many other criteria often used to assess if the player is a problem gambler then your average grinder is pretty much bound to trigger the alarm bells for "disordered gambler" if not full DSM-IV or PGSI problem gambler...even if they are a winning player earning a good living.

just a quick question about tax since there seems to be a few people in the know: do you need to declare your winnings somewhere in e-tax? i would assume so, as otherwise they might take a look at your bank account and not have any clue where the money comes from. if so, what section do you declare it in?

Hi all, it's been a while since I have posted on 2plus2 (although I have been lurking from time to time ) but I just wanted to point out that in regards to tax questions there are some old but still very relevant threads in the legislation forum, perhaps someone more literate than I could post a link.

Some time ago I commenced another thread to discuss the possibility of setting up a professional association to lobby for poker. Some of you may remember that. The difficulty was always going to be coming up with a set of objectives we all agreed with. Although we made some progress in the discussion it was going to need a very passionate advocate with some time on their hands to drive it further . In addition I had a number of pro's contact me informally to give their view that poker was still best operating under the radar for the time being. I think this was probably going to be the best approach given that any lobbying was always going to simply alert our enemies to the paradoxical situation that the online offerings we receive were technically illegal under the IGA. I also believe that this was likely representative of the views of the majority of major pro's.

That said, I can see a time we may need to formally unify when our hobby or livelihood is removed. In other words, we are no longer under the radar. I think Swoop has some excellent ideas there with his contacts. Also , given the rather amazing senate results from micro parties during the election, a direct political approach may be very effective.
I think this is a discussion which we will need to keep active going forward.

Best regards to all,

Bruce

This thread?

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/57...eedoms-286059/

what is happening to the world. why cant we just all play online poker and just be left the **** alone by people who are no higher human beings than us.

Clearly we need an Australian Poker Players Party to get elected to the senate. Should be pretty easy if the sports party and motor guys can get in

On that my feeling is that the motor enthusiasts party will be pro gambling whereas the sports party sound like they may be fairly socially conservative. Their focus is on families, especially kids, going outside and getting fit by playing sports according to their website. From what I've seen family groups usually don't love internet gambling.

So does banning stars etc means that their associations live will also be prohibited ? ie. ANZPT APPT blah blah, that will be pretty brutal imo Any chance they will just forget about it ?

Don't all the Poker websites already get blurred out from T-shirts/signage when shown on TV in Australia? Every sponsored pro seems to have their sponsorship logo blurred. Was wondering if it was due to this whole "Homg gambling!" thing.

Which is stupid, since you don't walk into a bar and see some massive blur over the pokie machines making you less tempted to play them.

No, that was a short phase that happened after Black Friday, and everyone had to blur out the FTP/UB logos. I believe even in repeats of old PAD and HSP episodes, they now blur the logos. It's a worldwide thing.

Even during the Aussie Millions and APT?
If black Friday didn't affect Australia, why does Australia have blurred labels in their own tournaments?

If my memory serves me correctly, of course. I barely get to see Poker on TV anyway.

+∞

Certain gambling advertising is banned under the IGA, it has nothing to do with Black Friday.

http://www.dbcde.gov.au/broadband/on...bling_act_2001

Unless you are what the ATO defines as a poker pro which is basically undefinable the answer is no afaik but you do have to declare interest on your bank accounts/investments etc that includes money won from poker

The tax code clearly states gambling winnings are exempt from taxes except if you're a professional gambler and unless you employ people to bet for you then you're probably okay, especially if you have any income other than poker

Obviously everything I say is to the best of my understanding, not a tax lawyer etc.

There's also a chance we should get in contact with the Lib Dem senator and try to make it an issue he cares about as most libertarians do, since he'll have a lot of sway in the senate as part of the greens/inds/minors group that controls the balance of power

I think the first step is to figure out what we want and what if anything we're willing to compromise on, then we work out who we need to get on-side who is attainable (Labor senators is an obvious starting point in that they want to obstruct the LNP's agenda, we want the Lib Dem onside, ideally the Sports and Motoring guys if they get the seats, then we can work on the Greens, then Brandis as the small gov't attorney general Brandis is a prime target to get onside within the LNP, plus there's a chance Turnbull might see reason too)

Yep doesn't help that One dropped overage of the EPT from its lineup to help educate the masses (in particular politicians) about the amount of skill in the game.

Yeah you could do that. But from what I have seen of him he looks as if he could be a complete nutter (and yes I am talking about the Lib Democrats senator and not the Motoring Enthusiasts Senator) and you wouldn't know how he would manage the issue and indeed whether you could trust him to make sure he gets your message across effectively in negotiations with the government without doing it in such a way as to propel the issue into the forefront of the coalition's mind to get on with the job of enforcing the Act.

This is not quite right, I'm afraid.

The Tax Act does not mention gambling - and it certainly doesn't say gambling winnings aren't taxable. It simply provides that income is taxable, and doesn't define income. The cases have held that earnings derived from the operation of a business is income - and thus the question is simply whether someone's gambling constitutes a business.

The ATO treats poker quite differently from other forms of gambling (and is more likely to treat poker winnings as taxable income). The best insight into the way the ATO looks at it is probably the reasoning process in a private binding ruling issued to a poker player. Have a look at:

http://www.ato.gov.au/rba/content/?f...1372160223.htm

The critical part of the conclusion is probably as follows:

"You have a certain degree of sophistication using computer software, your winnings are significant in relation to your financial status and on a chance to skill matrix, successful poker playing may be seen to be dependent more on skill than on chance, which you and other noted players have demonstrated by consistently winning over many years.

However, the indicator contributing the most weight is the impression you primarily play poker for profit rather than pleasure. You have a dependent family and significant financial obligations regarding investments and borrowings. Your leaving your income earning activities as your profits increased gives the impression poker playing is an income substitute or your primary income earning activity, rather than being a hobby or a pastime.

Instead of your playing for money being an irregular activity, including playing the occasional tournament, the impression gained his your poker playing is on a regular or daily basis, in a similar manner to an employee or businessperson who attend their employment or business on a daily basis.

It follows, for the relevant income years, you were/are carrying on a business of poker playing and your income from poker playing is assessable and your expenses incurred in poker playing are deductible."

On the basis of that, it seems to me that if you play poker as a means of earning the money you need to live, then you are a professional and the tax office will treat your net winnings as taxable.

Any difficulties you perceive in a poker player being audited?