Australia gambling

“At first they were a bit of fun,” said Seselja, who sought help after almost joining the estimated 400 Australians with gambling-related problems who commit suicide every year. “It’s so normalized in Australia. There’s machines on just about every street corner.”

About one in six Australians who play regularly has a serious addiction and loses on average about A$21,000 a year, according to government data. The social cost of gambling to the community is estimated to be at least A$4.7 billion a year.

“Most customers are consenting adults happy to be entertained, and are educated enough to know what their odds are,” Hill said, adding his club’s machines are programmed to cost gamblers an average 8 cents of every dollar played.

The first spin elicits a release of dopamine in the same way as a drug affects an addict, said Charles Livingstone, a lecturer at the School of Public Health and Preventative Medicine at Monash University in Melbourne. Then any wins trigger more surges of the hormone, he said.

“Getting onto the machine and starting to use it provides an anticipatory rush,” said Livingstone, who has studied gambling and its effects for 20 years. “The lack of notice for when a prize actually arrives is also part of the thrill. People find it extremely difficult to give up gambling and often turn to help only when they’ve exhausted all of their funds.’’

As many as 500,000 people in Australia either have a gambling problem or risk developing one and slot machines pose the biggest risk, the government estimates. Problem gamblers can lose around A$21,000 a year each, it says.

Pushing for more protective legislation, some lawmakers gathered in Sydney on Tuesday to urge gaming addicts and industry insiders to tell their stories. Pokies use “misleading strategies” to hook “vulnerable and stressed Australians,” Greens Senator Larissa Waters said.

The most successful slot machines condition humans to behave in a certain way, the 2010 inquiry by the government’s Productivity Commission found. The commission drew comparisons with work on animals by Harvard professor Skinner in the mid-20th century.

‘Pathological Gambler’

Skinner trained a pigeon in a box to peck a disc to receive food. He found that if food appeared intermittently, rather than after each peck, the pigeon would repeatedly tap the disc in anticipation. He argued this system of random rewards was at the heart of gambling and a pigeon could become a “pathological gambler” in the same way as a person.

Kate Seselja was once one of them. A recovering gambling addict from Murrambateman in rural New South Wales, Seselja says she felt hypnotized by pokies and spent more than A$500,000 on the machines.  

“You keep pressing the buttons whether you’re winning or losing,” she said. “It sounds laughable, but I fooled myself into believing there was skill in playing.”