It is a quiet night in Fairfield, in Sydney’s western suburbs. Inside a small brick building, a dozen Gamblers Anonymous members help themselves to coffee, tea and miniature meat pies. The meeting is taking place in a suburb that has one of the city’s lowest median incomes, and highest levels of gambling losses. A fifth of the state of New South Wales’s 25 most profitable gaming clubs are here, according to government data.
One of these clubs, Fairfield Returned and Services League (RSL), is just a two-minute walk away. It is a building totally at odds with the modest apartment blocks and shabby train station nearby. A pedestrian walkway inside is lined with palms and ferns, it has an elaborate fountain, a grand lobby. It seems incongruous, that is, until you realise that its surroundings are its blood supply. Inside the club, just out of view of the street, are hundreds of gaming machines. Fairfield RSL and Clubs Australia did not respond to requests for comment.
New South Wales is second only to Nevada – home to Las Vegas – when it comes to the number of gaming machines. New South Wales is home to about 90,000 machines, the equivalent of one for every 88 people. Nevada, with a population of 3.1 million has about 120,000.
But it is a problem throughout the country. Australia has less than 1% of the world’s population. It has 18% of the world’s poker – or slot – machines, according to the Australia Institute. The world’s biggest poker machine manufacturer is an Australian company called Aristocrat. Most of the world’s poker machines are in dedicated gaming venues, like casinos. But of those worldwide that are not, 76% are in Australia. It might be no surprise then that Australians are also the world’s biggest losers per capita, gambling away $25bn a year, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
That huge sum is in part because in Australia most gambling doesn’t takes place on big nights inside flashy casinos, it happens quietly in the pubs that sit on every street corner, or at the local RSL. In most states, a pub is more notable for not having gambling machines, known in Australia as pokies, than for having them. The only exception is Western Australia, which allows them only in casinos. It has the lowest per capita gambling losses in the country.
And online gambling can happen from anywhere. A report from Australian National University’s centre for gambling research, released in July, warned that online gambling had “exponentially increased” in Australia, with a third of survey respondents having placed a bet online in the last four months.
Most of Australia’s online gambling companies are licensed in the Northern Territory, which has lower taxes and fees. The territory is home to just 1% of Australians and an economy of $32bn. In 2023 the Guardian reported that the $50bn online betting industry was largely regulated by just six people in Darwin, its capital.
‘They own mateship’
Tim Costello, chief advocate at the Alliance for Gambling Reform, has compared gambling in Australia to guns in the US. Like gun control, the majority of Australians want stricter gambling advertising laws.
“63 cents in every dollar going through a poker machine comes from someone addicted,” says Costello. There are no definitive figures for the number of suicides caused by gambling in Australia, but, based on Hong Kong, which has lower gambling rates, it is likely about 20%, he says.
Recently, the national conversation over gambling has grown louder, sparked by Australia’s Labor government proposing a partial ban on gambling advertising – falling well short of recommendations from a landmark 2023 parliamentary report calling for a total ban. Some media companies have lobbied the government to impose a softer ban over concerns about ad revenue.
Meanwhile the government is facing opposition from its own backbenchers, while Independents have called for a free vote on a total ban.
“As if two tobacco ads an hour would be fine,” says Costello. Advocates recommend gambling be treated like smoking: as a health issue. Australia banned smoking ads in 1992. Today, fewer than one in ten Australians smokes daily. A 2022 survey found three-quarters had gambled in the last year.
The body representing online gambling companies is called Responsible Wagering Australia. Its CEO, Kai Cantwell told the Guardian that the organisation was “committed to reducing the exposure of children and vulnerable individuals to gambling advertising while still backing sports and broadcasters that rely on this funding. It’s crucial to strike a balance that prevents Australians from turning to illegal offshore providers”. In 2023, the Guardian announced that it would no longer accept gambling advertising.
If Australia has a national religion, it is sport, says Costello. And with lucrative sponsorship deals from betting companies, and high viewership for ads, sport and gambling are bound together. But there is nothing inherently Australian about gambling, says Costello.
“We have the most lax regulation of anywhere in the world. That’s all there is to it.”
Banning gambling ads would protect children, reduce domestic violence and, he says, it necessary to protect Australian culture. If you watch the sports betting ads, “They own ‘mateship’. Every ad is young men, and it’s ‘gamble with your mates’.”
A ‘dramatic increase’
The proliferation of gambling ads is a relatively recent phenomenon. When a 2008 high court ruling found in favour of a betting company, there was a “dramatic increase” in gambling advertising, according to the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation.
“This is the first generation of parents that have had to explain to their kids watching AFL or NRL what a multi is,” says Costello referring to bets on multiple outcomes packaged into one – ultimately just offering more options to bet on.
Over the last decade, there has been a “significant increase” in the amount of gambling advertising that young people are exposed to,” says Dr Hannah Pitt, a Vic Health research fellow at Deakin University.
Her research has found that the age by which some Australian children can identify different sports betting companies is eight. The age by which they can recall specific promotions by those companies is eleven.
‘It’s everywhere’
As the GA members tell their stories, the sheer number of ways to break a gamble-free streak of a day, or six years, or 20 becomes clear. You can gamble on your phone, in pubs, clubs, and sports betting shops. You can bet on sports, politics, reality TV, horses, greyhounds, harnesses and poker machines. One man says he is proud of himself for exercising again, even though it means walking past several places every day where he could gamble.
Attendees have lost marriages, gone to prison, gambled away their homes, lost their jobs, families, friends, and suffered drug addiction. One woman, six years gamble free, has spent the week watching her brother gamble his $40,000 of retirement savings. A man of 21 has already tried, twice, to kill himself.
When Mary*, whose name has been changed, was in her forties, her husband, then 50, was diagnosed with early onset dementia and motor neurone disease. Soon he was living in a nursing home. She started stopping in at the pub on the way home from visiting him. The pub had poker machines so she started playing. And soon, she couldn’t stop.
She had given up paid work to look after their children, and when her husband died, she sold one of their houses to make ends meet. Suddenly, she had a lot of cash on hands.
Mary started staying at gambling venues until the early hours of the morning, leaving her children, the oldest of whom was 18, the youngest six, to feed and look after themselves. Eventually, the Department of Community Services removed her children from her care.
She isn’t sure banning advertising will make a difference. There are ways to gamble “on every corner,” she says. “It’s everywhere.
Four of her children have since returned to her care, but her eldest daughter, who looked after her siblings when Mary could not, has still not forgiven her.
“I’m getting a bit worried that it’s become too big for us to re-reconcile,” she says. “But one day, I’m hoping.”
In the UK, support for problem gambling can be found via the NHS National Problem Gambling Clinic on 020 7381 7722, or GamCare on 0808 8020 133. In Australia, Gambling Help Online is available on 1800 858 858 and the National Debt Helpline is at 1800 007 007. In the US, call the National Council on Problem Gambling at 800-GAMBLER or text 800GAM.
• This article was amended on 8 September 2024. An earlier version referred to West Australia instead of Western Australia.
