FIFTY new poker machines could be approved in Ballarat’s CBD.
If given the go-ahead, it would lift Ballarat’s gaming density to 8.85 electronic gaming machines per 1000 adults, the 11th highest in Victoria.
Geelong only has 7.80 EGMs per 1000 adults while Bendigo has 6.78, Mildura 7.13 and Shepparton 6.96.
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It would also put Ballarat just below some of Melbourne’s highest gambling suburbs, including Maroondah, with 9.32, and Dandenong, 8.94.
Queenscliff has the state’s highest gaming density, with 18.83 machines per 1000.
In Ballarat, applicant Jayeesar Pty Ltd has applied to the Victorian Commission for Gambling Regulation to turn the Robin Hood Hotel in Peel Street North into a gaming venue, complete with 20 poker machines.
The Bended Elbow in Lydiard Street North has also put in for 30 machines, which will be debated at tonight’s Ballarat City Council meeting.
Council will also vote tonight to support or oppose the Robin Hood application.
If all 50 are eventually approved, there would be more than 180 poker machines located in five venues within just a few blocks of each other, in line with council’s gaming machine community policy to concentrate EGMs in the CBD.
Gambler’s Help Ballarat co-ordinator Kathy Griffin said she would like council to take a “balanced approach” to the applications.
“We would welcome a reduction in machine numbers overall,” Ms Griffin said. “But if they were to centre them in the CBD, I think we would see that as a good thing rather than in the suburbs.”
Council’s community planning and research officer Nicole Wiseman said Jayeesar Pty Ltd would buy and redevelop the Robin Hood Hotel if the application was approved.
In her report to council, Ms Wiseman said the hotel was located in a “more desirable location for gaming machines” as identified in the gaming policy.
“While council is concerned that the Ballarat Central Statistical Local Area has low weekly household incomes and that the LGA has higher than average unemployment, neither the suburb of Ballarat Central, the Ballarat Central Statistical Local Area nor census collection districts immediately surrounding the venue have a relatively high level of disadvantage,” the report said.
She also said the venue was not in a high traffic area, was not on a strip shopping area, was not near concentrations of disadvantaged people, had safe travel nearby and would not cause amenity impacts on neighbouring uses.
Similarly, the Bended Elbow application has also been assessed as “striking an appropriately balanced outcome in respect to the competing land uses which surround the subject site”.
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