The Popularity of Gambling in Australia Has Grown Comparing with Vegas

Recently, Australia exceeded the success of Las Vegas as its sum of yearly individual losses in gambling games became bigger!

It’s quite surprising, but not unexpected. According to Yahoo Finance, there were around 65000 clients daily playing in Crown Melbourne in the second half of the 2010s. However, it’s quite strange as only 12 employees were monitoring gambling addiction.

However, the number of workers can’t be a reason for the gambling establishment to lose its gaming license according to royal Commissioner Ray Finkelstein. This issue was raised on a royal commission but remained without any results.

The number of staff is not a single precedent questioning the casino. Following the official rules of Crown, a client may play up to 12 hours per once. Nevertheless, it was confirmed that there was a case when a player didn’t leave the gaming room for 36 hours!

Despite the numerous unbelievable examples of neglecting the law by gambling establishments, the problem is more complex and global indeed. Back in 2017, Australia broke the record of the highest gambling losses per person in the world! Their sum was around $1000. Consequently, for today such an amount considerably exceeded the previous one for sure.

Another shocking fact is that gambling takes a large part of the low-income households’ finances. They spend around 10% of their disposable income to play gambling titles, while it takes 1% for high-income households.

The Benefit of Gambling to the Government

Nevertheless, gambling establishments don’t receive the whole income from their extremely profitable business as a significant part of it goes to the Australian government. The tax sums are quite impressive. For example, in 2019 it reached $500000 million.

As it was stated by the Australian Gaming Council, the biggest income comes from pokies. People lose around $13 billion playing such games per year. More than half of this sum is usually from customers located in New South Wales. For instance, there was around $7 million lost by clients playing poker machines. Such an amount equals the GDP of Fiji.

One of the main features that make gambling in Australia so successful and big is the allowance to locate gaming machines outside gambling establishments. In this way, more than 20% of poker machines are located in Australia. In this case, it’s not a problem to find a pokie anywhere. For example, a customer may just visit a local bar to play it.

There already were 200000 poker machines in 2017 across all of Australia. Around half of them were located in New South Wales. They have a quite large role in the life of Australians. For example, almost all AFL teams use their gaming machines and they have a big impact on collecting the revenue.

Online Gambling Is the Leader on the Market Due to Lockdown

The global pandemic and lockdown seemed a disaster for the gambling industry, but statistics evidence to the contrary. When the land-based gambling establishments closed, a third part of the players moved to online platforms. Surprisingly, they began to play much more according to the report. For example, the number of customers playing several times a week increased from 23% to 32%.

However, the number of players having gambling addiction problems expanded as well. The recent report stated that around 80% of interviewees already had gambling issues or have them right now.

The awareness campaigns vary in different states and territories of Australia. The majority of them warn clients saying “play responsibly”. Nevertheless, according to the survey in 2019, about 70% of Australians don’t think that such a caution, may somehow impact the prevention of gambling issues.