Politics
The gambling disaster
Governments could be doing considerably more to help problem gamblers from losing heavily on poker machines, the Productivity Commission says.
It also finds the legal ban in Australia on online gaming is a failure, with betting traffic heading to overseas sites that offer little in the way of consumer protection.
In its draft report on gambling, the first in-depth national look at Australia’s gambling industry in a decade, the commission finds that gamblers are losing $18 billion a year, of which $12 billion is lost on gaming machines.
It estimates that around 5 per cent of adults play weekly or more on gaming machines, and 15 per cent of those, or around 125,000 people, are problem gamblers.
Productivity commissioner Gary Banks says “a large number of people have problems with their gambling (and) it is vital that they are given a tool to achieve greater control”.
On Tasmanian Times:
James Boyce: Why I will vote for Andrew Wilkie
James Boyce: Federals contempt … includes earlier links to James Boyce analysis