We have a refreshed and revitalised Australian government , enriched with great political capital.
Authors
- Charles Livingstone
Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University
- Angela Rintoul
Principal Research Fellow - Gambling and Suicide, The University of Melbourne
During the last term of parliament before the election, opportunities to address Australia's raging gambling habit were neglected .
Could this government now have enough authority and courage to take on the gambling ecosystem?
A massive issue
Australians are the world's biggest gambling losers .
Many attribute this to some inherent Australian trait . But what it really comes down to is the proliferation of gambling operators and their products.
They're everywhere, along with their marketing and promotion.
Half of the gambling problems in Australia are associated with poker machines, ubiquitous in all states and territories other than Western Australia (WA).
Consequently, and unsurprisingly, WA has the lowest rate of gambling harms . The state has 2,500 pokies at a single Perth casino and none in clubs or pubs.
New South Wales boasts nearly 90,000 pokies , the highest pokie "density" in Australia, and its clubs and pubs make $8.1 billion a year.
Overall, pokie losses in Australia total $15.8 billion per year.
Wagering (betting on sport, racing and even elections), is now mainly online, and reaps another $8.4 billion in Australia. This is the fastest growing gambling sector, with growth, adjusted for inflation, of more than 45% between 2018-19 and 2022-23.
Pokies grew by a more modest 7.6% during the same period. Only casinos went backwards.
Overall, gambling costs Australians more than $32 billion annually.
This has been fuelled by relentless promotion and marketing and the expansion of the gambling ecosystem : the network of commercial actors who reap a major dividend from gambling losses.
It includes the bookies, pub and club chains as well as sporting leagues, financial services providers, software and game developers, charitable organisations , broadcasters, and state and territory governments.
Of course, gambling comes at a cost: it is strongly linked to broken relationships, loss of assets, employment and educational opportunities, and crime rates .
Intimate partner violence and neglect of children, along with poor mental and physical health, are also connected to gambling accessibility. As, unfortunately, is suicide .
However, there are ways to reduce gambling harm.
Six ways to tackle the problem
1. First up, we need a national gambling regulator. This was an important recommendation in the 2023 report of the all-party parliamentary committee chaired by the late Peta Murphy.
Currently, gambling is regulated by each state and territory. Some have reasonably robust systems in place. Others, somewhat less so. None are best practice.
A national system is long overdue, as many gambling businesses operate across multiple Australian jurisdictions.
In the absence of national regulation, the Northern Territory has become the de facto national regulator for online wagering . It offers a low-tax and arguably low intervention regulatory system .
Yet the vast majority of losses from punters come in other jurisdictions.
National regulation would also assist in standardising tax rates and maintaining reasonable uniform standards of regulation and enforcement.
2. Poker machines are Australia's biggest gambling problem , but a national precommitment scheme would provide a tool for people to manage their gambling.
This proposal has been frequently mooted in Australia since the Productivity Commission recommended it in 2010.
It has worked well in Europe: forms of it now operate in 27 European countries .
Both Victoria and Tasmania have proposed it, as did the Perrottet government in the lead into the last NSW election.
Unfortunately, the power of the pokie lobby , supercharged by the addiction surplus it reaps from punters, has slowed or stopped its implementation.
But it's eminently feasible and is highly likely to significantly reduce the harm of pokies.
The technical challenges are far from insurmountable, despite what industry interests argue.
3. Limiting accessibility to pokies is an important way to reduce harm.
Nothing good happens in a pokie room after midnight, yet they are often open until 4am, with reopening time only a little later.
Closing down venues after midnight and not opening until 10am would help a lot of people.
4. We can't talk about political access without considering some key tools of the gambling ecosystem.
Pokie operators have enormous ability to influence politicians. Donations are a typical method to ensure access, backed up by the "revolving door" of post-politics jobs.
Politicians also enjoy a stream of freebies from the gambling ecosystem, which allow these businesses to bend the ear of a guest for hours at a time, at lunch, over drinks, or during an event.
To address this, we need better rules around acceptance of hospitality and gifts. Some states have moved towards such arrangements but there has been little action on the national front.
5. Another major recommendation from the Murphy committee was the banning of online gambling ads .
The majority of Australians want it to happen, and gambling ads are banned for almost all other forms of gambling.
The special treatment for this rapidly growing, highly harmful gambling product makes no sense.
6. Finally, we need to properly resource research into gambling harm and its prevention.
Much gambling research ( and its conferences ) are funded by the gambling ecosystem , either directly or via representative organisations.
This raises massive conflicts and has lead to a poor evidence base for policy making.
The time is now
Anything that stops people getting into trouble with gambling will be opposed by the gambling ecosystem because their best customers are those with the biggest losses.
But nobody is saying we should do away with gambling.
The evidence-based ideas above would help people with existing problems, and stop many more from ending up in trouble.
Gambling is a problem we can solve.
It does need political effort - but the Albanese government has the political capital to solve this problem.
Charles Livingstone has received funding from the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, the (former) Victorian Gambling Research Panel, and the South Australian Independent Gambling Authority (the funds for which were derived from hypothecation of gambling tax revenue to research purposes), from the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and from non-government organisations for research into multiple aspects of poker machine gambling, including regulatory reform, existing harm minimisation practices, and technical characteristics of gambling forms. He has received travel and co-operation grants from the Alberta Problem Gambling Research Institute, the Finnish Institute for Public Health, the Finnish Alcohol Research Foundation, the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Committee, the Turkish Red Crescent Society, and the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand. He was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council funded project researching mechanisms of influence on government by the tobacco, alcohol and gambling industries. He has undertaken consultancy research for local governments and non-government organisations in Australia and the UK seeking to restrict or reduce the concentration of poker machines and gambling impacts, and was a member of the Australian government's Ministerial Expert Advisory Group on Gambling in 2010-11. He is a member of the Lancet Public Health Commission into gambling, and of the World Health Organisation expert group on gambling and gambling harm. He made a submission to and appeared before the HoR Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs inquiry into online gambling and its impacts on those experiencing gambling harm.
Angela Rintoul holds a postdoctoral fellowship funded by Suicide Prevention Australia. In the past she has received funding from the Victoria Responsible Gambling Foundation, which was supported by allocations from the Community Support Fund, a government administered trust fund constituted from direct taxes on EGMs in hotels. She has also received funding from the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust and ANROWS. She is a member of the WHO meeting on gambling and received travel funding from the Turkish Green Crescent Society and consultancy funding from WHO. She has been paid to review grants by the British Academic Forum for the Study of Gambling, which administered via Gambling Research Exchange Ontario, funded by regulatory settlements from gambling companies who have breached the law.
