EDITORIAL: Tight rein needed on pokies

LOUIS PIERARD
The love of gambling runs deep ... and there is no want for choice. Weekly, we are lured with the message that, with the beneficence of the siren Lady Luck, a massive windfall can come our way for a meagre investment.
Most who indulge in Lotto, for example, may idly wonder what they would do with that huge win but they would recognise the chances of holding the magic numbers are so remote the anticipation of riches is the only pleasure.
But there are some who are enslaved by their own dreams. And the shackles are there, waiting to receive them.
Unlike other forms of gambling, the poker machine is the junkie's friend. Deep within its dimly lit den it flatters and lulls, disbursing little gifts to reward credulous persistence. While smothering the senses with an array dazzling lights and sounds, gradually it bleeds the mesmerised victim - usually one who can least afford to feed it - while concealing the truth that the more you spend, the more you lose.
That is its design. One of the more regrettable products of a schooling in behavioural psychology, the poker machine is built with the sole purpose of entrapment. Some players can resist its charms and walk away after a harmless flutter, but many are drawn back, time and again.
It is a goldmine for its owner, its one redeeming feature being that a portion of its takings are forcibly extracted to fund community groups (though, like tobacco taxes, that gives it an undeserved virtue).
Since legislation was introduced to limit the proliferation of gaming machines, their numbers have declined. Except in Napier, the city that despite having the largest number of pokies removed since the law was passed, still has the highest density of machines in New Zealand.
Napier's unflattering ratio is less of an indication of its residents' addition to gambling than the fact that canny operators were quick off the mark and rushed the machines in ahead of the new law. The council can only stop new pokies being established. Nevertheless, it is essential a tight rein is kept on machines that trap the weak and blight lives.
When the $150 million women's prison opened in Wiri late last month Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor pledged to tackle addiction to pokies, which is blamed for the surge in women prisoners.
A survey of prisoners reported in the Journal of Gambling Studies last year found 33 percent of female prisoners were probable lifetime pathological gamblers, compared with 21 percent of male prisoners. Women were more likely than men to gamble, almost twice as likely to have committed a crime to pay for gambling or a gambling debt, and more than twice as likely to have a conviction for a gambling-related offence.
With that kind if evidence, no council should ever worry that it might be too severe in its anti-pokie policies.