There’s been a lot of debate in Parliament about gambling and ways to cut down on problem gambling.
This week I notice that Arana Leagues Club seems to have taken up the cudgel of action against poker machine restraints along with clubs around the nation.
We have five clubs with poker machines around this region:
Arana Leagues Club with 200 machines
Gaythorne RSL Club
The Grove Sports Club
Keperra Country Golf Club
Bunya Sports Club
and a few in Everton Park.
The question is: What do our local clubs donate to the community for the revenue they get from the community from poker machines?
Can anyone help put together figures that apply for our local community here? The ones I have are averaged across NSW.
These average figures are: $5137 cash donation to ‘the community’ for each poker machine that will take that amount of money out of gamblers’ pockets every 33 days as long as it is there for a total after-tax revenue of about $44000 per machine per year.
One of the problems with community organisations receiving funds from gambling revenue is the conflict of interest it generates. Clubs applying for poker machines typically provide letters of support from community groups who have little other access to funds they desperately need. Some services such as counselling bodies receiving support may even be picking up some of the damage of problem gambling.
The system of donations to community organisations becomes patchwork. Tim Costello says: “It’s a form of a medieval patronage by modern Medicis which leads to a patchwork system of donations. It’s utterly shallow and superficial. It means organisations become indebted and it’s unsustainable.”
The State government could well be said to be addicted to gambling funds. And they put up advertisements literally telling us to “Gamble responsibly”. Personally I deeply object to my government instructing me to gamble in any way at all. I’ve absorbed enough of an understanding of the laws of chance to know that it is a losing game. Where is the evidence that any level of gambling at all is ‘responsible’ for problem gamblers?
The unanswered question I feel left with is where the money from the poker machines in our community goes. What does Arana Leagues Club for example do with the money that is put into poker machines? How does the whole thing operate? Seems like something to go and ask pretty soon.
Another question is: How many poker machines do we have in the upper Kedron Brook valley area on a per capita basis and is that high or low against the national average? Well I can answer the first part of the question pretty closely because I’ve gone around and counted them. Arana Leagues Club has 200. Gaythorne RSL has 100. The Grove Sports Club has 31. Bunya Sports has 15. Keperra Country Golf Club has 10. And Samford Valley Hotel has 20.
Another thing I think about sometimes walking past the poker machine area in one of the local clubs is about the people sitting playing at them. It seems like there is a lot of hypnosis in this. I’ve felt it myself working at a computer screen with data and patterns. It taps into a part of the brain that becomes robotic and absorbed. Sometimes when working like that I wouldn’t be able to talk properly until getting away from it and somehow snapping out of the mesmerised state. It goes into a different part of the brain.
How different is it from people gambling on the Internet on their computers at home? Or betting on the horses at one of our local TABs in the Arana Leagues Club or The Grove Sports Club?
It seems to come back to these questions: Where does the money go that comes out of the pockets of people in our community? And what is the personal cost to these people of putting money into gambling? What is the cost to their families? What is the cost to the community? How do we find out the answers to these questions?
Incidentally in Queensland clubs and hotels electronic gaming machines are programmed to return between 85% and 92% of the amount bet to the gambler. An 85% return means that for every dollar bet on a poker machine 85 cents is typically returned to the gambler. This return is achieved over the life of the machine usually 3–4 years and you can’t expect to receive 85 cents for every dollar you bet in a single gaming session.