$150bn gambling bill

09 February 2003

Australians have gambled away about $150 billion in the last 30 years, with current losses running at almost $14 billion a year.

Tomorrow, the gambling industry will mark the 30th anniversary of the opening of Australia's first casino - Wrest Point in Hobart.

Anti-gambling campaigner Rev Tim Costello said the anniversary should be a day of mourning for the lives lost to gambling.

Within five years of the first card deck being shuffled, Australians were losing $1 billion a year on horse races, gaming, lotteries and at the casino.

Since then, losses have risen to more than $14 billion a year - from about $90 per person to almost $1000.

Adjusted for inflation to today's dollar value, the losses are still stark - $3.8 billion in 1975-6 to $14.3 billion 25 years on.

From July 1975 to July 2001, Australian gamblers lost $135 billion - a total by now almost certain to have exceeded $150 billion.

In 1975, two decades before Melbourne's Crown Casino opened, Victorians spent 1.2 per cent of their disposable household income on gambling.

By 2001 that figure had more than tripled to 3.8 per cent.

Figures from the Tasmanian Gaming Commission and the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveal the stunning growth of the gambling industry since the first cards were turned at Wrest Point.

Among the statistics:

THE gambling industry had an income of more than $11 billion in 1997-98, an increase of 42 per cent in three years.

GOVERNMENT revenue from gambling shot from $338 million in 1975-76 to peak at $4.4 billion in 1999-2000.

POKER machines account for almost 60 per cent of gambling industry income.

THERE are 330,000 problem gamblers in Australia - according to official estimates - who each lose about $12,000 a year.

IN 1975, two-thirds of money gambled in Victoria was spent at horse races. By 2001, that had dropped to 12 per cent.

MORE than 87 per cent of Victorians' gambling outlay in 2000-01 went on gaming - including pokies, casino tables, lotteries and scratch tickets.

Mr Costello said there was little to celebrate for most Australians in 30 years of gambling culture.

"It's cost lives and it has cost the freedom of people who have gone to jail," he said.

He said Western Australia, where there are no pokies outside the casino, proved the public did not want poker machines in the community.

"There is no group (in WA) asking for pokies - no one wants it," he said.

And he dismissed claims that gambling profits were sliding since the introduction of smoking bans in venues.

Problem gambling expert Paul Symond said he saw no end to Australia's love affair with gambling.

"I think it is just so entrenched in our culture that it will always be there," he said.

Despite gambling being legalised in Victoria several decades after NSW, we had almost caught up with our northern neighbour, he said.

"We have gone from basically nothing to a glut of poker machines in six years," he said.

"Victorians have just taken to them like a duck to water."

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