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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Thursday, 24 June 2004) . . Page.. 2667 ..

New evidence from a study of over 200 regular pokies players (A final study in a sequence of projects involving separate samples totaling over 700 such players funded by the Casino Community Benefits Fund.) shows that:

• The experience of impaired control i.e. being unable to stick to limits of time and money spent gaming is very common among players who play pokies once per week or more often, and

• the main cause of this impaired control is the enjoyable strong emotion experienced during play (enhanced by more playing time and prior levels of mild negative mood)…

In other words the commonly reported impaired control over cash and time budgets is not necessarily an indication of pathology but is a natural response to modern sophisticated and entertaining poker machines. Players who spend several hours per week playing come to experience strong enjoyable emotions during play and the loss of control over time and money expenditure is likely to be a result of this emotion, increased by how long is played and any negative emotions ‘brought’ to the venue. This seems so utterly commonsensical and far removed from problem/pathological gambling that it merits a close and careful examination.

Dickerson notes that he had previously reported:

The typical regular egm player in NSW makes 832 consecutive purchasing decisions in a session of play. During such a session 43.8% of regular players will report that they experience “an irresistible urge to continue”…i.e. an urge to continue purchasing more of the entertainment product…and the next game is being offered. It is still being offered to the player after 1, 2, or 10 hours of continuous play.

The conclusion Professor Dickerson draws from all this is that:

…the current strategy aimed at changing the machine for the player to not lose control is ill conceived and derived from the alcohol context. A more appropriate aim from a consumer protection perspective is to maintain the integrity of the gaming experience-it is clearly enjoyable and what the consumer wants-and yet to prevent the enjoyed loss of control resulting in excessive, and potentially harmful expenditure.

His recommendation is to focus on measures that are made available by new electronic monitoring systems and by the potential for cashless systems so that so-called pre-commitment measures are the very best protective measures. The proposal has some uncomfortable privacy implications, but it is the sort of thing that needs to be taken into account in assessing and developing the central monitoring system. In the meantime, the other thing it shows is that it is probably useful to limit the amount that can be fed into the machines at any one time.

Note acceptors are one part of this. Ms Dundas is proposing to simply ban note acceptors or, failing that, my proposal is to impose a cap of $20 on amounts that can be spent via note acceptors on any one game. When that cap was used in Queensland, there was a significant reduction in revenue, which is to say there was a significant reduction in the amount of money lost by players.

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