Jenan Taylor
20 July 2023
Christian gambling reform campaigners say shifting blame away from betting addiction could help better protect people from gambling harm.
It comes as new federal and state rules aimed at reducing gambling harm were announced in July. In Victoria, they include stricter mandatory closing times for venues with electronic game machines.
The Alliance for Gambling Reform said Australians lost more than $25 billion a year from gambling losses mostly through poker machines, and the changes would go a long way towards minimising the related harm.
But chief advocate the Reverend Tim Costello said any focus on preventing gambling harms needed to move away from a culture of blaming individuals if they struggled to curb their betting.
Mr Costello said treating problem betting as a public health rather than an addiction issue could help bring meaningful change.
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The Lancet Public Health journal launched an urgent inquiry into gambling as a neglected and worsening public health predicament in 2020, citing it as a source of potentially serious harm to people, families, and communities.
A 2015 Southern Cross University study found that 95 per cent of Victorian adults believed that problem gambling was an addiction.
Many of the survey’s 2000 respondents said they characterised affected individuals as impulsive, greedy, anti-social and untrustworthy.
Mr Costello said there were people with clinical gambling addiction, but there were few of them.
“We need a public health approach. The addiction paradigm particularly with its gamble responsibly focus suggests [electronic gaming] machines are harmless and that the few irresponsible people who can’t control themselves are the problem,” Mr Costello said.
“The machines are predatory with the most brilliant psychological games designed to addict, designed to release the dopamine in the brain when you sit in front of them.”
Mr Costello said politicians, other leaders and those with a public voice could help shift public attitudes by focussing on the health consequences of playing the pokies.
He said they needed to talk to and listen to the people who have been damaged by gambling, instead of the gambling industry.
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They could also be aware of the language they used, and not use terms such as “gambling addict”, Mr Costello said.
Anglican Social Responsibilities Committee chair the Reverend Gordon Preece said often a more punitive approach was taken to problem gambling, and a public health one made enormous sense.
Dr Preece said unchecked gambling could cause enormous damage at the family level, causing loss of relationships and divorce, and at the mental health level where the shame and loss of dignity could result in loss of life.
He said it was costly to governments because of the cost of dealing with effects of the social problem.
Treating it as a public health issue could also help remove the stigma that often stopped people who were struggling with harmful gambling addiction from seeking help, Dr Preece said.
He said people needed to be recognised as victims rather than villains, but without denying that they did have some agency.
That agency and responsibility had been badly affected by an industry that deliberately designed programs to addict people, Dr Preece said.
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But he said there was a stronger case for gambling as a public health issue, when it came to considering how young people could be affected.
“Increasingly, children are targeted. They’re being targeted constantly when they’re sitting there watching the footy, and taking in gambling industry messages over and over. Sport is an area that is supposed to be a public health plus and we encourage young people to be involved for a whole range of reasons,” Dr Preece said.
“That has to be addressed as a major public health issue, because children have very little agency in relation to the sports betting and online betting advertising. That is a broader, whole new dimension.”
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