By now we have all heard, and perhaps even participated in the debate on the issue of problem gambling and how governments, or more to the point the Gillard federal Government, can legislate the use of pre-commitment technologies to enforce the amount so called gamers (read gamblers) will wager in a given period.
Now I’m not going to get into the psychology of gambling - the personality risk factors, the impulsive personality, and perhaps the influence this has on the development of an impulse control disorder and possible pathological gambling.
What I do want to say is relatively simple. If the commercial viability of hotels and clubs is based on the economics of poker or slot machines – then the obvious (maybe naive) question has to be why. Surely if pokies have such an impact on the bottom line then perhaps hotels and clubs should all call themselves “casinos” and stop describing their venues as family friendly, promote association with sporting bodies, and exist on every street corner.
Secondly, how is it, (and this is from the 1999 Australian Productivity Commission) that there were 180,000 (more recent reports estimate this to be around 200,000) poker machines in Australia. Given that there is/was an estimated 860,000 machines in the world – Australia represents about 21% of all the gambling machines in the world. Put another way, we have over 20% of all the gaming machines in the world. Given the size of our population – it won’t take a genius to see we have an underlying problem.
On a per capita basis, Australia has more than five times as many pokies and other gaming machines than the United States.
Here are some stats:
38.6% of adult Australians play the pokies - In 2003 / 2004 gamblers lost $9.1 billion on pokies. The average chance of winning the jackpot playing 1 line is 1 in 50,000,000 and the average chance of winning the jackpot playing 20 lines is 1 in 2,500,000.
