Tasmanian Labor Party leader Rebecca White has picked a fight with the biggest opponent she could have found in the state - the gaming industry. Credit:Janie Barrett As though to answer that question, in December, White picked a fight with the biggest opponent she could have found in Tasmania – the gaming industry. White declared she would remove every pokie from every pub and club in the state. That month a shock poll found Labor neck-and-neck with the dominant Liberals, a government buoyed by its own effective management, by a booming economy and by its well-liked leader Will Hodgman. Suddenly there was a contest. Though audacious, Labor's pokies policy was not a bolt from the blue. With the current deed over the pokie licences set to expire, both parties needed to enter this election with a policy on how to manage them into the future.

Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman is emphasising the state's healthy economy and its own economic management credentials in the lead-up to the election. Credit:Janie Barrett The Farrell family, which currently has a monopoly over every machine in every pub and club in the state, as well as in both of Tasmania's casinos, realised it would have to cede some ground. It proposed a system in which its monopoly would be broken up, and pubs and clubs would take over the licences for the machines already installed in their venues. This was a particularly generous scheme to the Sydney-based family because it had already bought the 12 most lucrative pokies pubs in the state. It closely resembles the one the Liberal Party adopted. The Club Hotel in Glenorchy, a lower socio-economic area on the outskirts of Hobart, where poker machines are more concentrated than in the affluent areas of the city, displays its political signage. Credit:Janie Barrett The Farrells were used to getting their way in Tasmania. Over 50-odd years of running Tasmania's gaming industry they had built a fortune estimated at around $500 million, and no party had dared challenge them yet.

What the Farrells had not detected, what the Tasmanian Liberals had not detected, is that White's elevation to Labor's leadership was not the only change in the political climate. With David Walsh, the founder of Mona, wanting to establish a pokies-free high-roller casino on the site of his famed gallery, the Liberal government established a parliamentary inquiry. Observers say the Farrell family seemed unconcerned by this development – after all, Labor was represented on the inquiry by shadow treasurer Scott Bacon. Bacon is well known around Tasmania not only as a bloke not afraid of a flutter of his own – he prefers the nags – but as the son of former premier Jim Bacon, who in his time had backed the Farrells' business operations. Scott himself had been no enemy of the gaming industry when he served as tourism minister in a previous government. In the inquiry, Bacon heard compelling evidence from outside experts about how the machines manipulated players' perceptions of their odds of winning. He heard that they generated little employment and sucked money out of communities. He heard compelling testimony from Robert Kreshl, a recovering pokie addict who once lived in a drainage ditch while working full-time to sustain his habit. There was something else the Farrells didn't know. Before White began her political career as a staffer for a Labor MP, she had carried a tray at the faded jewel in their crown, the Wrest Point Casino.

"I had to work in the gaming rooms around the pokie machines and I saw people who were lonely," she explains. "I saw people who were so exhausted from sitting at the machine for so long without taking a break that they fell off their chair and had to be taken to hospital. I saw people wet themselves at the machines because they did not want to leave because they thought their next spin was going to be their lucky spin. I saw people who peed in the coin cups because they did not want to leave. So I saw how addictive the machines are." White and Bacon began to kick around potential policies in response. According to observers there were some in Labor that wanted to take a more moderate stance. They could run with harm-minimisation measures of the sort proposed by the industry, they could impose lower maximum bets. But evidence had been presented at the inquiry that suggested none of these measures would make much difference. White decided to go all-in. Pokies would be removed from all the state's pubs and clubs and hunted back to the two casinos. Representatives of the Farrell family were summoned to a meeting before the public announcement was made. One of them was so shocked he began to "twitch", says one observer. The public announcement stunned the state. Recalling the day it happened, as he drinks a beer in a Hobart pub – where he is welcomed warmly despite the pokies out the back – Bacon says that the fact there was not a single leak is evidence of the broad support for the policy. It is also clear that the policy has served another purpose for Labor and for White. It draws a dividing line not only between Labor and Liberal, but between new and old Labor, new and old Tasmania. It casts White as a tough leader, one with the principles to take political heat for a policy she believes in.

And the pain has been significant. At one level, the campaign in Tasmania is being fought over familiar ground: Labor talking up its credentials in social services and backing up White's campaign with a roster of visiting federal heavyweights, including Bill Shorten, Tanya Plibersek and Katherine King; Will Hodgman's Liberal Party emphasising the state's healthy economy and its own economic management credentials and chucking a twist of law and order into the mix, with a proposal to toughen laws against protesters. But because of the amount of money coming in from groups supporting and opposing Labor's pokie policy – including a campaign called "Love your Local" backed by the Federal Group and its allies in the Tasmanian Hospitality Association – the pokies issue is dominating the campaign. Many of the state's pubs are draped in banners urging a Liberal vote and social media and airwaves are jammed with advertising on the issue. White insists the attention is to Labor's benefit and is fracturing the Liberal Party. "I think internally the Liberals are in quite a lot of pain over this issue. You've got an interesting make-up of Liberal Party members on this issue, some of whom are are close to religious organisations. Religious organisations in Tasmania have been very vocal in their opposition to poker machines in pubs and clubs and they have been lobbying very heavily those Liberal members who have religious affiliations. "Even after we announced our policy, some of those faith leaders were still sure that the Liberals would change their position, they thought that the Liberals would adopt Labor's position, so there would be tension in the Liberal Party between those who would have a political perspective and think that this is good for the Liberal Party, and others who would be getting a lot of pressure from their constituency to remove pokies."

Tasmanian Premier Will Hodgman dismisses this. In an interview he graciously endured during a jet-boat ride in the middle of a campaign-stop showcasing the government's tourism policy, Hodgman says the Liberal Party room is united in supporting not only the party's pokie policy but its support of the Farrell family, which runs not only casinos and pubs but high-end resorts. He backs people's freedom of choice to play pokies, and says they provide not only critical employment but important leisure activity. "The businesses we are talking about are small pubs and clubs spread across the state, they are at threat. It may be a matter that the Labor Party cares less about, but for us, a party that strongly supports jobs across the state, it is something worth fighting for." The Farrells, he says, are very generous contributors to the Tasmanian community. For Labor, the heady days of December are long gone. No public polling has recently been conducted but there is a sense that the deluge of pro-Liberal advertising is taking its toll. Labor insiders believe the party has been swamped by mainland pokies interests determined to kill the policy lest it spread. Clubs NSW and Clubs Australia say they might have been approached for advice, but say they have not funded the anti-Labor campaign.

Either way, the industry on the island itself is big enough to do its own damage, and with Tasmania's donation transparency laws the weakest in the country, we might never know how much they spent. Internal Liberal polling suggests the party is now enjoying a substantial lead with a week to go. Though political analysts doubt the reliability of that data, there is a strong sense that Hodgman has the wind at his back. There is a perception that White's Labor has not only been outspent, but out-organised and out-campaigned. When you talk to Labor insiders now you learn that most have accepted that a win even a win taken with the support of the Greens - is out of reach. The Liberals hold 15 seats and Labor seven in a 25-seat house. If White can take four seats, she considers herself – and her pokies policy – safe. If she takes five, she will force the Liberals into minority government, historically a poisoned chalice in Tasmanian politics.

Whatever happens, says one of the state's most esteemed political analysts, Wayne Crawford, in breaking the 50-year political nexus between the major parties and the gaming industry, White has already proved herself to be one of the state's most courageous political leaders.