Page 1037 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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DR KINLOCH (11.02): Mr Speaker, let me make some preliminary points. I do not speak to this matter out of some kind of blameless life locked in the chapels of ivory towers. I have long been, and therefore, as those who understand the nature of addiction can tell you, I am now, and continue to be, a compulsive gambler. I will pass over the details. Some of you know of them.
As I think about the Commonwealth public servant who, last year at Lasseter's Casino in Alice Springs, went through a million dollars worth of public cheques, public money, intended for Aboriginal developments - he is now in gaol, I add - my reaction is one of reflective sorrow: There but for the grace of God go I. The same applies to Rex Jackson and the Adelaide test cricketer, both of them now in gaol, and to the Northern Territory public official of whom we heard in the casino inquiry, whose wife cannot allow him access to money - a man in public office who cannot be trusted.
So I have been lucky. I give thanks to my wife, to some good friends and wise counsellors, to Gamblers Anonymous, to such people as Dr Mark Dickerson who appeared before the select committee, to the loving influence of the Society of Friends and to my colleagues of the Committee for a Casino- Free Canberra that I am here, able to speak about the dangers that can beset us, especially of the levels of gambling that could beset us, represented by gambling casinos.
Let me give you a more famous and tragic example. Oscar Wilde - incredible man, wonderful genius - wrote from Reading Gaol one of his most magnificent works, The Ballad of Reading Gaol:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword.
But his greatest work of all is De Profundis - words from the Latin Mass - "out of the depths". He had been disgraced by the societal values of his time, but also by his own values. As he contemplated his terrible and damaging relationship to Bosie, to Lord Alfred Douglas, he had to recognise that there had been nothing noble in it. Bosie had been selfish, idle, wasteful, unfaithful, stupid - a trifler, a man of superficial values and tastes. Wilde reflected on this in De Profundis. This is addressed to Bosie:
...your will of course directed everything. At the time when I should have been in London taking wise counsel and calmly considering the hideous trap in which I had allowed myself to be caught...you insisted on my taking you to Monte Carlo, of all revolting
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