If you could walk for a day in my shoes, you’d be keen for poker machine reform. Yesterday, I spoke with a man who spent several years on the street after he’d put a perfectly good Sydney house down the poker machines. Even though he’s lost everything, his addiction remains. I spoke with a very likeable man this morning who wept as he told me of his plans to suicide. He hates his inability to be free of the pokies. My tin pot theory about this addiction is that the cause is not located within an individual’s head andtherefore, neither is the cure. Boredom and isolation appear to play a major role. The kind of community engagement, where people’s contributions are valued and people take part in physical exercise, social fun, hobbies and learning of some kind, are the things that are usually missing in someone who becomes addicted to the spinning wheels that lead to poverty. I have no great feeling about mandatory pre-commitment because it seems to me a cheaper and more effective reform would be to simply limit the value of the bets that can be made. Maybe people would get bored and go home while they still have money in their pockets to pay the bills and feed the family. I urge our Prime Minister and all our MPs to give families a valuable gift this Australia Day.
Courier Mail: Poker machine losses follow Queensland floods
A very sad story in the Brisbane Courier Mail about how poker machine losses in Queensland increased significantly after last year’s floods:
Queenslanders blew $1.9 billion on the pokies last year in one of the state’s darkest gambling chapters, as punters lost $3600 a minute.
The 2011 loss figure is $100 million more than each of the previous two years, with Queenslanders losing record amounts on the pokies as the state battled to recover from a summer of natural disasters.
In a sad twist, experts believe the natural disaster hangover and the millions of dollars in flood assistance payments lining pockets could have ramped up the state’s losses.
“Pokie losses follow summer disasters”
The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne reported last year that 1 in 5 people who attended its Emergency Department after attempting suicide identified problem gambling as the reason for their suicide attempt.
Toai Thi Nguyen, an illiterate 55-year-old Vietnamese mother of four, also gambled at just one club. She racked up debts of $28,000 to loan sharks in 2003 when she first started gambling at The Star (then Star City) before her family got her to sign self-exclusion documents.
But in 2008, she started gambling again, this time at the local St Johns Bowling. Loan sharks lent her $25,000, which grew to $40,000 as her lenders piled on high interest rates.
With no hope of repaying the money, Nguyen succumbed to their threats and flew to Vietnam, where a gun was held at her head. She returned with 10 kilograms of pseudoephedrine, used for making ”ice”, hidden in her bags.
When District Court Judge Robyn Tupman this month sentenced Nguyen to five years in prison, she attacked St Johns for allowing a member, whom she described as ”mildly retarded”, who’d never had a paid job and who had banned herself from a casino, to lose $25,000.
Gabriela went from being a successful professional, loving mother and devoted friend to a shadow of herself – someone whose young daughter caught her stealing money out of her piggy bank.
That night, she sat slumped on her daughter’s bed, tears running down her face as her daughter asked her, “Mummy, can’t daddy buy you a poker machine so you and the money just stay at home?”
