Page 5770 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
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The social impact survey being referred to is the Caldwell report, "Casino development for Canberra: social impact report", Commonwealth of Australia, 1 July 1988. That 1988 report was unequivocal in recommending that a service for excessive gamblers be created in the ACT. Much of the report I then found to be either incomplete or unsatisfactory, and I have commented on that elsewhere.
In December 1991, those flaws in the report are even more obvious; but the report had one section with great merit. That section was authored, for the most part - I think there is no doubt about this - by Professor Mark Dickerson, then of the Psychology Department of the ANU and now a professor in the Psychology Department in the University of Western Sydney. His book, Compulsive Gamblers, 1984, is one of the standard handbooks worldwide on the subject. He and his partner used to conduct clinics here in the ACT for compulsive gamblers and he is one of the joint founders of the National Association of Gambling Studies. I was involved with him in that enterprise.
The report is at its considerable best precisely at those points at which not only adequate but excellent research has already been done, much of it by Professor Dickerson. Much of it obviously reflects much previous research, not only by members of the study team but also by other investigators. It is obvious from the text, the quoted evidence, the careful analysis and the bibliography that there are several areas about which the team are not only experts but the best experts in Australia in their respective fields, especially on existing and well-established forms of gambling. I was most favourably impressed with the section on excessive gambling.
It is clear that compulsive or excessive gambling, or addictive gambling, is already a considerable problem in the ACT, and that newly introduced forms of gambling would make that problem worse. As the report stresses:
This predicted impact of a casino has never really been in dispute.
The report rightly recognises - on pages 49 to 52 - the great difficulty in accurately determining levels of excessive gambling. The estimates vary - and I think these figures should be carefully observed - from a notional 752 - he is very specific - to a guesstimate of 5,000 gamblers in Canberra who are already at risk. That was in 1988. I wonder what that figure would be now. I wonder what the real figure is. Might that just disguise the real figure? It will therefore be of considerable concern to Canberrans to learn that:
... it has been estimated that, on average, each excessive gambler causes some significant harm to ten other people in his or her life.
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