One afternoon in mid-2024, a desperate Randwick man typed up an email to the prime minister.
During the previous three years, the man had sunk tens of thousands of dollars into poker machines, leaving him unable to pay for his final year of university. It also left his marriage in serious trouble.
He singled out as a major contributor to his compulsive gambling habit the ubiquity of highly addictive gambling machines throughout NSW, a situation unlike anywhere else on Earth except Las Vegas.
“Pokies are literally everywhere, they are dangerous and programs put in place by the NSW government do not work,” he said.
“I am ashamed to have fallen into this trap but I am devastated that my government and local community have allowed it to happen.”
But the man’s cry for help, which was forwarded to NSW Premier Chris Minns, is less revealing for its content than the effort by the government on crafting its response, a process that took more than 12 weeks and engaged at least 11 public servants.
The correspondence was captured under a call for papers by NSW Greens MP Cate Faehrmann, including emails, ministerial briefing notes and meeting minutes related to gaming reform. They tell a story of glacial reform and buck-passing, often to the frustration of the regulator, and a preoccupation with optics.
More than 18 months have passed since the independent panel for gambling reform handed to the Minns government its 30-point roadmap to reduce gambling harm and money-laundering. Since that time, the government has brought in numerous gambling measures, but the number of poker machines in operation has increased, and quarterly losses are up year-on-year.
Last week’s budget papers indicate that the government is banking on this trend continuing. Treasury has forecast that taxation revenue from pokies in hotels will increase by 7.5 per cent in each of the next four years to hit $2.2 billion by 2029-30.
The man who wrote to the prime minister said he had tried to avoid the pokies by joining the self-exclusion program for venues in his area, but the venues continued to let him in. The NSW gambling regulator told him when he complained that, although it was mandatory for venues to offer self-exclusion programs, it was not an offence for them to admit excluded patrons to their premises, and it was also the responsibility of the patrons not to enter.
“If only battling a gambling addiction was this easy,” he replied.
Fortunately for the prime minister’s office, all the issues raised in the email spoke to work being done at state level, so they flicked it to Minns, whose staff immediately forwarded it to NSW Gaming Minister David Harris.
It was then cast into the bowels of the department, which gave itself an initial deadline of seven weeks to respond. A report was entered into the workflow tracking system. Checks were made with the compliance team on what inquiries had been made with the venues named in the email.
An initial draft response contained the line, “I am sorry to hear about the problems you are facing”, but someone later thought to remove this and replace it with, “I am sorry to hear about what you have been experiencing”.
The minister’s office also asked for paragraphs that referenced money-laundering, criminal activity, the independent panel on gambling reform and cashless gambling to be deleted, and asked for some points to be added about self-exclusion. These extra sentences required a three-week extension of the deadline and involved several more department staff before a senior officer approved them.
Finally, shortly before close of business on September 23, three months after the complaint was received, the Randwick man got his response. It expressed sorrow, offered to make further inquiries, outlined the government’s commitment to reform and gave him the details of a free counselling service.
A spokesperson for Liquor and Gaming NSW told the Herald it was unable to comment on details of individual complaints but said all matters raised by the man were “assessed and addressed in accordance with regulatory requirements”.
The spokesperson confirmed that while venues are required to operate a self-exclusion scheme, there was no penalty for allowing an excluded person to enter a venue or gaming area.
The government is working on a statewide exclusion register that would allow venues to identify excluded patrons with facial recognition technology, but the privacy implications of this are still being worked through. Venues currently work from photographs of their excluded patrons.
“The NSW government is committed to evidence-based gaming reform to reduce harm and preventing money-laundering while supporting local communities, jobs and the hospitality industry,” the spokesperson said.
Minns has indicated that he does not intend to follow the independent gaming reform panel’s top-line recommendation to fit the state’s poker machines with cashless technology that would require gamblers to set their own spending limits in advance, and use identification checks that would make it more difficult for criminals to use machines for money-laundering.
He told journalists last year that he could not justify spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a compliance network for pubs and clubs when schools and transport needed the funding. More recently, he said it would be too expensive to compensate pubs and clubs if there was a reduction in machines.
Faehrmann said it was apparent that the government had given up on trying to rein in “the pokies scourge”.
“In last week’s state budget, the Minns government dropped any pretence that it’s going to act on the significant harm that pokies cause to the people of this state,” Faehrmann said.
“For almost 18 months, the government has sat on its hands and refused to even formally respond to recommendations from the two reviews undertaken into gaming reform and ClubGRANTS. Now, it’s shamelessly factoring in a 7.4 per cent increase in the taxes it expects to receive from what people lose to pokies over the forward estimates.”
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Bevan Shields is a senior writer, and former editor of The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners
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