Pubs and clubs in NSW claim that their social infrastructure is unsustainable without gambling. Then there’s the social infrastructure that exists alongside it. For a long time, NSW has had a lot of social infrastructure which claims it’s dependent of gambling revenue from sports clubs and social clubs.

They take in a huge amount of dollars from poker machine venues - upwards of $1 billion in NSW, Victoria and Queensland each, per annum. This brings in a variety of social issues: the primary one is that that governments themselves tend to be addicted to the revenue. You can reprogram the machine you can restrict how many are available you can also impose obligations on venues who host those machines but you can also just get rid of them. Gambling on poker machines is described as the “crack cocaine” of gambling, because of the nature of how these machines are designed with the dynamic created between the individual and the machine. Horse racing or lotteries are less addictive, although they do have their own problems. Other kinds of gambling are less addictive, because there’s more breaks in play, there’s less of an engagement with the machine.

Increasingly, sports betting is taking up a larger portion of all the gambling spend in Australia. Poker machine gambling accounts for around a half of all the gambling spend. There is a huge amount that can be done by government to minimise the harmful aspects of certain kinds of gambling particularly poker machine gambling. If you treat it as a health problem, over time you could see a situation where you know cigarettes are prescribed to someone who gradually reduces their addiction rather than not able to be sold at all and therefore people who might be addicted resorting to criminal behaviour. Instead, we need to focus on phasing out, as much as possible, these addictive forms of gambling in much the same way that cigarettes aren’t banned, but we are doing everything we can to minimise the impact of that industry.

Banning it suggests that then there would be some kind of criminalisation of continued gambling. We need to find ways to minimise the harm that’s caused by gambling. What motivates that kind of language that gambling addiction is a health issue it has all sorts of ongoing consequences socially, beyond just the person who might be addicted. Australia leads the world in gambling losses

Nsw poker machine revenue