The Herald is reporting that the SkyCity deal to increase human misery pokie machines in exchange for a white elephant convention center was done at 8pm this evening (which must be a record for burying a story on a Friday).
As Matt McCarten (who heads the union that deals with SkyCity) recently commented:
I was in an elevator with a senior gambling executive five years ago. It was a few days before John Key ousted Helen Clark’s government.
We chatted about what might happen in the gambling industry if National became government. He surprised me by claiming Key would be Tourism Minister.
My lift companion smiled when I responded that a prime minister doesn’t take on a portfolio traditionally delegated to a junior cabinet minister.
He winked that Key was committed to the “leisure” sector in its broadest sense. A few weeks earlier, a SkyCity senior manager had said something similar about tourism, that it and gambling were bedfellows.
And thus it came to pass.
So while everyone was getting angsty about Labour trying to find a better way to represent women in parliament, National was making sure they represented their mates just fine.
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