The city of Nelson has been working hard to secure a New Zealand Football Club license, giving the city the right to launch two new teams. Mayor Aldo Miccio, who is confident that his city will receive a license, has stated that the clubs will not take money from poker machine profits as funding.
“There will be no funding from pokies,” he says. “There are a number of places where you can apply for grants that aren’t pokies”.
Now seems to be the ideal time to adopt such a stance. Since poker machines could soon be forced to impose limits, sporting clubs and other public programs will suffer from a lack of funding. So, rather than fighting the reforms, Nelson has taken a different approach, simply by looking for funding elsewhere.
Nelson’s potential new football teams are just some of only a few organizations that have refused pokies funding. We hope that this will start a new trend in the gambling market, however. Although pokies grants can be quite generous, it is a good idea to supplement funding with money from other sources – just in case pokies funding is ever cut.
