This weekend’s conference is a critical moment for New South Wales Labor. It’s a chance for elected officials and members to finally choose to act on the scourge of poker machine harm.

For too long, NSW politics has treated the pokies as a problem that everyone acknowledges but nobody is prepared to solve.

For too long, our parliamentarians have looked the other way while the suffering caused by gaming machines has been allowed to fester and spread.

For too long, the private interests of the poker machine lobby have trumped the public interest of preventing addiction and harm.

But at this conference, for our party, this is a crisis that can no longer ignored.

In part, that’s because the problem is getting worse. The scale of losses and harm have grown truly obscene. The facts are worth recording because they are so stark.

The almost 90,000 poker machines in NSW communities represents the largest number per capita of any jurisdiction........

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