Page 1512 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 June 2022
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likely to be employed full-time, at 78 per cent. The problem lies with the 38.5 per cent of those people that were classified as at-risk gamblers, of which 3.2 per cent were problem gamblers.
Being an at-risk gambler or experiencing harm from gambling is more than just losing money. It is about experiencing negative consequences as a result of your gambling in your everyday life. It is about your gambling impacting on your relationships, your mental health, your physical health, your financial situation and your work. For example, if a fun afternoon drinks session at the pub with mates means that you cannot pay your rent that week, you are experiencing a level of harm from gambling; if you placed twice as many bets last night on obscure sports because you just had to try to make that money back, you are experiencing a level of harm from gambling; if you feel guilty about the fact that you have been lying to your partner about how much you have been spending on your gambling, you are experiencing a level of harm from gambling.
The data that is outlined is old in the current context of bushfires, hailstorms, pandemics and now the housing crisis and increasing cost of living that has occurred quite dramatically over the past three years. What we do know about gambling harm is that in stressful times, particularly financially stressful times, people turn to gambling. Yet we have no context in the ACT about how the environment has changed, because we do not have any data. What is also concerning is that through this time of lockdowns, when people are less likely to go out and engage publicly, in every aspect of our lives, people have turned online. And the ease with which you can place a bet on your phone, online, any time of day or night is highly concerning. At the very least, to play a poker machine you have to get yourself out of the house and to a venue. There are lots of decision-making points in that process, and there are venue staff that engage with you. And in an ideal world there are fully-implemented, high-functioning codes of practice and self-exclusion schemes that are designed to protect people.
However, in the online gambling environment this is significantly lacking. Dr Paterson would like to note that she has had multiple engagements with people with lived experience of gambling harm from this online wagering industry since starting in her role as an MLA. She describes a sad world of people who have experienced great stress and mental ill-health over the past couple of years, who have been suckered by the advertising. Dr Paterson suggests that, when the seriousness of the situation is exposed, these companies offer minimal compensation. For example, a customer loses $140,000, and these companies, when they find out how distressed the customer is, offer them $5,000 or so and a non-disclosure agreement to keep quiet.
Dr Paterson would like to commend the ACT government for its many reforms to address the harm from poker machines across the territory. Unfortunately, we have not seen the same level of attention towards minimising harm from online gambling. This is largely because the regulation of online gambling is the responsibility of the commonwealth government. The majority of betting companies are registered in the Northern Territory and are subject to minimal tax. As a result of this, most Australian jurisdictions have, in recent years, introduced point-of-sale taxes. In the ACT, this has been established as the betting operations tax—the BOT—which was introduced in
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