This week, gambling addict Laurie Brown monumentally undermined the clubs' claims they minimise harm. Professor Brown had the courage to speak out about her addiction, which led her to lose $230,000 at two Raiders clubs, with seemingly little intervention to stop her over 18 destructive months. It is yet to be seen whether the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission has the legislative teeth to act.

The clubs' internal stoush will thwart their ability to rebuild public confidence. The infighting is so bitter that a group of breakaway clubs is setting up a rival association that threatens to leave Clubs ACT in tatters.

The disarray allowed Chief Minister Andrew Barr to dismiss Clubs ACT as a "joke" and declare he would deal with the new group being set up by the Tradies clubs – run by Labor's friends in the construction union. In another setting, it would be untenable for a head of government to pick and choose the industry groups he deals with in this way, but Clubs ACT's mishandling of last year's ACT election made Mr Barr's stance politically possible.

The Tradies groups has created its own credibility problem after the leaking of its demands in return for supporting poker machines in the casino – demands that amount to an expansion of gambling in clubs and sit uncomfortably, to put it mildly, alongside a professed desire to reduce clubs' reliance on pokies.

There is an argument that poker machines should be in the casino, where gambling belongs, if it belongs anywhere, rather than spread throughout the suburbs in family venues. This argument convinces the Greens, but they also want other changes – capping spins at $1 and mandatory precommitment, whereby gamblers nominate a maximum loss before playing – which leaves the future of pokies at the casino unclear. The Greens hold the balance of power, but cannot push their campaign so hard that Labor and the Liberals unite against them.

Labor has its own internal contradictions. Mr Barr is no friend of the industry but is hamstrung by the power wielded in Labor by the construction union, and hopelessly conflicted by Labor controlling one of the city's biggest club groups. It is intriguing in this context that Mr Barr has appointed Gordon Ramsay as gambling minister; a man whose pre-political life left him with a genuine feeling for the harm caused by problem gambling and determined to do something about it.

The Liberal Party is a friend of clubs, but its appointment of Mark Parton as gambling spokesman was perhaps misguided. His enthusiasm for gambling and his colourful expression, honed in a lifetime in radio, do not play well in an arena as sensitive and replete with broken lives as gambling – and make it more difficult for clubs to sell a message that was already unconvincing.

At the end of this conflict and confusion sit the clubs, which support sporting and community groups and provide social venues important to many Canberrans. They also made $94 million in pokie profits in the same year that caused such devastation for Professor Brown and her husband.