THE LAW’S DISTINCTIONS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21982, 17 June 1933, Page 10

THE LAW’S DISTINCTIONS

It is not necessary to go the whole length with a correspondent this morning, who apparently compares a more or less harmless drawing room game of cards with the game of pak-a-poo, in order to express agreement with his contention that the anti-gaming law is discriminately enforced. It is difficult to read the reports of raids that are made on Chinese premises, where a game to which members of the Chinese community are partial and by which some European people are attracted, and of the punishment that is inflicted on the offenders without a feeling that a distinction is made in the enforcement of the law,’almost wholly to the disadvantage of the alien in our midst. The game of pak-a-poo is one at which, it would seem, fairly large sums of money may be won and lost. And if the discouragement of gambling is the motive that actuates periodical raids of Chinese premises, it is one with which sympathy may be expressed provided that an attempt is made to enforce the law without respect to persons or nationalities. But the evidence of any such attempt does not exist. We shall not, however, do the authorities the injustice of supposing that they are ignorant of the fact that there are Europeans who meet for the purpose of taking part in games from which the element of chance is not absent and in which as much may be Avon or lost as in a game of pak-a-poo. In the circumstances the humiliating conclusion is forced upon us that a discrimination against the unfortunate Chinese actually occurs in the enforcement of the law. The whole position with respect to the anti-gaming law is, of course, hopelessly anomalous. The State has legalised one form of gaming from which it itself derives a revenue of some consequence, and it has sanctioned another fornji of gambling the profits of which are at the present time being applied to the relief of unemployment—to the lightening, that is to say, of a burden which primarily rests on the State itself. The hands of the State which prosecutes the Chinese pak-a-poo players are not themselves spotlessly, clean.