Australia is a place where gambling is both loved and hated. There is a lot of endorsement and at the same back, there is a lot of pushback against it. When you are on that roller-coaster of pro and against, it’s difficult to say which way the country is headed. However, a new call for more regulation may be helping the ‘against’ camp gain a slight headway.
Gambling Harm Is Done Yearly in Australia
Gambling addiction has been growing on regular Australians who gradually felt the need to seek help. However, once there, help was rarely available. But even more strikingly, it has been long known that addiction actually destroys lives.
In light of this, there have been calls, time and again, for the Barr government to roll up its sleeves and act on those concerns in order to protect regular citizens, prone to slipping into the life-destroying practice.
Australia, as a country, is certainly responsible for a number of its problem gamblers in their entirety, as gambling ads, and even access to such venues are ubiquitous at the earliest age.
If Australians are changing the landscape, they will do so as they should – personally. The ACT Council of Social Service and the Canberra Gambling Reform Alliance has been gathering stories to identify problems, such as poker machine addictions.
The Many Pitfalls of Otherwise Perfect Industry
Opting for high-paying segments that are omnipresent is also dangerous. As demonstrated by the number of people falling victims to poker machines involuntarily. What the ACT Council has been calling for is a threshold of the amounts people can stake, suggested at $1.
A similar limit was imposed on the Fixed-Odds Betting Terminals in the United Kingdom which definitely caused business a lot of trouble, but effectively reduced the amount people spend on the machines. Addicted as you are, there are certain hoops that even you won’t jump through.
The ACT has acted quickly, following a report issued by Dr Charles Livingstone who pointed out that poker machines’ laws are among the nation’s laxest, allowing for significant opportunities to flout them to the detriment of regular bettors.
As a result, ACTCOSS director Susan Helyar has said that she will look into the matters personally and find a way for the new legislation to come into effect and curb the climbing numbers.
Addicts Are Everywhere
In Canberra alone, there are 15,000 cases of people who are severely addicted to gambling and 50,000 are suffering from this to some extent. As it becomes immediately available from the numbers, the issue is definitely not something that you can laugh off.
The main problem is that people right now can go to a poker machine and start putting in bills of $50 and $100 without giving it another thought, which quickly burns through a pile of cash and leaves them in quite the distraught mood afterwards.
Chasing losses is impossible when you have just blown your capital at a heartbeat. This is where the key to curbing addiction lies – in making everyone bet while putting their money in $1 or $2s. This way, the worst you can do about it is blow $100. It’s still a problem if it’s repeated every day, but there have been some great exclusion schemes going.
