Halve number of pokie machines, says economist

An Australian author who has probed the links between the "pokie" industry and the state says Australia and New Zealand should halve their numbers of poker machines.

Dr James Doughney, an economist at Melbourne's Victoria University and author of The Poker Machine State (2002), will tell a conference in Auckland today that the gaming machine industry imposes Australia's most regressive tax, taking much more from the poor than the rich.

He says the state profits from the industry through a 33 per cent tax. The tax rate is similar in New Zealand through a 20 per cent gaming tax, 12.5 per cent GST and a 1.1 per cent levy to fund problem gambling services. "It became evident to me that policy was being formed without any consideration of the ethical background," he said yesterday.

He said the numbers of poker machines should be halved so that punters had to queue for them.

"If you get queuing for machines, you are forcing people to stop playing. They have a break in their play and they can consider what they are doing," he said.

New Zealand's smoking ban, imposed in 2004, has had a similar effect, forcing smokers to go outside for a break and leading many of them to go home. Spending on pokies dropped by 12 per cent in the year to this June and calls to the gambling helpline have dropped by 33 per cent.

Dr Doughney said gambling was more regressive than any other tax, even taxes on alcohol and tobacco.

He quoted a Clubs Victoria spokesman who told Australia's Productivity Commission: "This is a poor man's sport, playing gaming machines. It is simple, unstimulating and non-interactive but poor, lesser educated [people] like it more than do rich, educated people."

In 2004-05, losses on pokies in Melbourne's poorest city, Dandenong, averaged A$1042 for every adult - seven times the average loss of A$147 for every adult in the richest city, Boroondara.

Heavy gamblers lost an average of 54 per cent of the average annual income in Dandenong, against only 4.4 per cent in Boroondara.

Average losses on each machine are not yet available in New Zealand, but there are 11.7 poker machines for every 1000 people in Census areas rated in the second-to-poorest tenth, compared with only 1.5 for every 1000 people in the richest three-tenths.

Only the poorest tenth of Census areas break the pattern of more pokies with increasing poverty, with 8.2 pokies for every 1000 people.

Overall, New Zealand has five pokies, and Victoria 5.4, for every 1000 people.

Victoria "capped" pokie numbers in Dandenong and four other poor districts to 11.7 machines for every 1000 adults aged 18 and over in 2001. But Dr Doughney said this was not enough.

"Small capping is not going to work because you still have vacant machines," he said. "You put in a big cut in the number of machines and you start to have an effect."

A former New Zealand director of public health, Dr Colin Tukuitonga, told the same conference at Auckland University of Technology that gambling was "a problem of inequalities".

In New Zealand, Pacific people were "still a marginalised group" with lower incomes, higher unemployment and lower educational achievements than Palangi (Pakeha). Pacific people were also 13 per cent of problem gamblers in 2002-03, about twice their share of the population.

Dr Tukuitonga said New Zealand's gambling law was "progressive" in world terms.