Once a homeless alcoholic, Colin Bridle now fights the proliferation of booze and pokie machines

Thursday, 2 May 2019

Once a homeless alcoholic - and with a history of issues with gambling - Colin Bridle now fights the proliferation of booze and pokie machines in his local community. He's one of a small band of 'Unlikely Avengers' engaged in a shared struggle. Steve Kilgallon reports.

Seven-year-old Colin Bridle wet the bed, and lay in the damp sheets, listening to his parents arguing again. He heard his dad storm out, drunkenly slamming the door so hard that the glass panes broke. Only then did he get up, to find five fist-sized holes in the gib, and three more the shape of his mother's head.

Colin had problems with his legs that had caused a series of operations. It also meant that when his father became violent, he was the only one of the kids who couldn't escape easily. Instead, he would crawl underneath the house and burrow out of the old man's range, fending him off with his crutches. Many years later, they would make peace before his father passed.

Later in life, Colin would inevitably have his own problems with alcohol and gambling, and was, for a time, homeless. 'You get to a stage where you've been on the street for a while and it's cold, and you're sick and tired of sleeping under the same bush,' he says. 'So you knuckle down, and get on with the job of living.'

As part of his reformation, he studied a diploma in social work, writing a paper on the social issues faced by his home town, Tokoroa. It prompted the Salvation Army to give him a job, setting up a community house where he ran food and clothing banks and offered budgeting advice and addictions counselling. The experiences of his clients, added to his own life story, left him with firm views on gambling.

'I know people who've committed suicide [because of gambling]. I can tell a story of a woman who, with her two-year-old son drove her vehicle at a lamppost to try and end her life and hit the brake a split-second before impact. When you see these things and help people in a town where deprivation is high, what do you do? You try and make a stand.'

Bridle's stand was broadly against what he considers are the evils of pokie machines, and specifically against plans to merge three small clubs with pokies into one 'super-club'. 'When you go to fight a cause, you fight a cause you've had experience in,' he says.

In 2015, a plan was struck to merge three small clubs in financial trouble into one: the Olde Establishment (nine machines) and Pockets Pool Lounge (two venues of 18 and 16 machines) in Tokoroa, and the Putaruru Memorial Club (nine), in a town 22 kilometres away.

It would mean closing one Pockets venue, no pokies left at the Putaruru venue, but the creation of a 30 machine super-venue at 56 Bridge St, Tokoroa, and another 18 at 38 Bridge St, some 90 metres down the street. 'That's obscene, and it's totally against the law,' says Bridle.

The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), however, disagreed, and recommended that then Internal Affairs Minister Peter Dunne give the green light.

But then Colin Bridle met Grant Hewison and David Hay.

'FUNDAMENTALLY EVIL'

Hay and Hewison have been mates since they worked together for Manukau City Council in the early 2000s. Hewison, a lawyer, had left corporate work and was now spending much of his time working for much lower rates helping communities fight against bottlestores and pokie dens. As the work (however poorly paid it was) began to flood in, he enlisted Hay to help.

Hay had just as strong a moral drive. A former Green Party and Auckland Mayoral candidate, he's a career civil servant who had worked on the Auckland Supercity's gambling policy. 'After which,' he says, 'I came up with the politically neutral, unbiased evidence-based point of view that pokies are fundamentally f…… evil.'

Hay researches the gaming side, Hewison handles the alcohol and together they navigate local groups and campaigners like Bridle through the bureaucracy.

On their advice, Bridle formed a pressure group (Feed Families Not Pokies), instructed Hewison as the group's lawyer, submitted Official Information Act requests and figured out what to object to and how.

The law requires every local authority to have a policy on gambling. It's a costly, bureaucratic process but at the end of it, most come up with the same idea: what's called a sinking lid.

It means they won't allow any new pokie machines in their area, and whenever a venue shuts down, those pokies must go and cannot be replaced. Over time, the number drops.

In 2005, Bridle began asking the South Waikato District Council to adopt a sinking lid. In 2009, they did.

The planned merger of the Tokoroa and Putaruru clubs was a way around the sinking lid policy. Any new venue, regardless of the sinking lid, is limited to nine pokies. The only exclusion to this is two clubs (not pubs) merging to form one, 30 machine venue (as long as it means an overall reduction in machines). But this club was actually keeping two sites, and so some 48 machines - increasing the numbers in Tokoroa itself, while reducing in the district overall.

The DIA ministerial briefing said the merger met the law, but ignored the single-site caveat, and advised it go ahead. It was one of many, often esoteric legal questions that Hay, a careful student, raised. There was no money to push to a judicial review so instead, Hay and Hewison complained to the Ombudsman.

And that effectively killed the whole thing: the DIA had to reconsider, and hired gaming consultants to investigate. Meanwhile, the 'territorial consent' (the local council permission to run a venue) for the site lapsed. Everything stalled for a year or so. A combination of economics and the DIA's indecision helped Bridle out. Late last year, the Olde Establishment went bust. So did Pockets. Pockets' general manager Wendy Cook, a local councillor, claimed they'd done the responsible thing and sought voluntary liquidation. In fact, the IRD had forced it over $755,000 of unpaid taxes.

Bridle reckons the DIA 'failed miserably'. The OIA documents he ferreted out showed the department had been fretting about the Pockets club since 2009 - about one staffer using a club credit card to withdraw cash to play at casinos (later repaid), about their financial health, about whether they really were a club at all (clubs can keep their pokie money, instead of distributing it to the community like pubs have to). And in particular, about the domination of the committee by two particular local families.

Bridle can't understand how the DIA agreed, then recanted and delayed when they knew Pockets was in financial difficulties. He says the DIA never acted on their highly-critical audits of the club. 'Why can DIA not follow their own policies?'

Local authorities, he says, are 'fighting an uphill battle' against a department that doesn't actually like the sinking lid policies and does things that undermine it.

Hay and Hewison point to the so-called 'Waikiwi Decision,' in which the High Court mandated that a pub can change its physical location and still retain its licence, and its pokies and so avoid a sinking lid as long as it remains close by, keeps the same staff, owners and name and the clientele regard it as the same pub.

There's also the ongoing saga of a Christchurch bar called Ted's Bar and Grill. The Halswell pub burned to the ground in September 2013. Despite law saying that pokie licences lapse after six months of inactivity, Ted's Bar retains its licence to run pokies and is likely to be rebuilt on a different site, retaining its licence.

Internal Affairs acting director of gambling Chris Thornborough refused to comment on the Ted's case, beyond saying they 'assess each case on its merits'.

A 'PEASANTS' REVOLT'

Colin Bridle sees the entire Tokoroa saga as the oppression of a voiceless poor by the town's inner circle, a 'grubby' process in which he's felt shut out. 'As part of the poor and the great unwashed, I am saying enough is enough: the peasants are revolting.'

He's had one small victory - an assurance from the new owner of the Olde Establishment site that the pokies are gone. That's nine machines fewer. At the start of 2018, there were 133 in total for this town of 13,600 - a count of one for every 102 citizens. By comparison, in the leafy Auckland council ward of Orakei, there are 69 machines, or one for every 1159 residents. Tokoroa's pokie machines swallow $7.5m a year.

He thinks the government could use Tokoroa as a test case, remove every pokie, and see how the town fared. '40 cents in the dollar going back to the community: if you really want to donate money to worthy causes give us the whole dollar, not 40 cents in the dollar.'

Those 40 cents add up though, and rarely will a venue shut without someone else wanting to open up and stop the lid sinking. Since the Pockets empire began in 1999, some $52m gross revenue has gone through their machines.

Now new groups are trying to re-open the two Tokoroa Pockets venues, keeping a total of 34 machines whirring.

Bridle must gird himself for another fight, and this time without Feed Families not Pokies, which fractured and folded earlier this year. He's not dissuaded and has filed a laundry list of objections to both licences - many of which the local alcohol inspector dismissed as 'frivolous and border[ing] on the vexatious'. He says the inspector failed to consider that the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act compels them to consider community harm.

His agitating forced the council to devote a full day to hearing the cases, instead of a single afternoon, and the appointment of an independent chair from outside the district (the decision is pending).

What Colin Bridle would really like is someone to stump up the funds to take all his allegations of corruption, collusion and incompetence to a Judicial Review. He's burned out after a decade with the Salvation Army and has nerve-pain issues. If someone else steps in with the financial backing, in return he'd promise to work as hard as he can regardless of the criticism. 'I don't mind being pilloried,' he says, 'because I'm standing up for what's right.'

* In part three of 'The Unlikely Avengers,' meet the grandmother on a walking frame who fought a liquor license in her community from her hospital bed.