The fresh faces of Australia’s chronic addiction to gambling
BY KIRRALEE NICOLLE
A classroom full of teenagers with additional needs, a support dog, teachers and caregivers.
It isn’t the setting you would normally imagine for a lively conversation about gambling.
But with Australians now spending more on gambling and betting than any other nation, The Salvation Army’s education efforts are expanding into new, younger environments.
The Salvation Army’s Melbourne Counselling Service Community Engagement Practitioner, Simran Pande, said that when she first started at the service, she assumed the typical gambler was always a man in his 50s or 60s, particularly someone who was retired and had a lot of free time.
But the reality turned out to be quite different.
“I realised that the most common age for someone to gamble in Australia is actually from 18 to 24,” she said. “And that shift has been largely because of how accessible [it is]. Sports betting is now one of the most common types of gambling in Australia. I could be sports betting on my phone during work, and no one in my life would know.”
I’m at a Know the Score training session at Croxton Specialist School in Northcote, Victoria.
Simran is educating students in Years 11 and 12 about the different types of gambling, why people gamble, statistics on how much money Australians spend on betting and gambling, and how gambling advertising works so well. The event is one in a three-part offering from Melbourne Counselling Service, which also includes a training session on the link between gaming and gambling and another on general financial literacy.
At one point, Simran pauses the session to answer a series of questions from a student trying to understand the difference between arcade games and gambling.
“But you use a ticket to try to win items, so is that not gambling?” the student asks.
“If you are spending a lot of money that wouldn’t otherwise spend, it might be gambling,” Simran says. “Gambling is about risk versus reward.”
Students are visibly shocked when Simran reveals that, on average, Australians gamble twice as much as Americans do, that we have few legal restrictions on gambling access, and that Australian betting companies spent over $238 million on free-to-air advertising between May 2022 and April 2023.
“Gambling is riskier when it’s continuous, easy to access and almost limitless,” she tells the students. “Twenty-four/seven access to gambling is a very dangerous factor.”
Simran also educates the students on the different kinds of bets – bonus bets, multi-bets, free bets – and how to be aware of what they attempt to do psychologically to the user.
Croxton Year 11 and 12 Coordinator Connie Skliros sees gambling education as important knowledge to pass on to a group such as her students. She said particularly with coin features on gaming apps, her students could easily develop patterns of gambling without realising it. She said she would like to see more control over which apps and games vulnerable teenagers could access, making it harder for them to fall into a trap.
“They don’t realise the impact that it has on their lives,” Connie says. “And they’re quite vulnerable, too, because they quite often get a Disability Support Pension … [so] they’ve got a little bit of cash.”
“Often they have no idea that [they are] actually gambling.”
Simran agrees that coin features on apps are a way of grooming users towards the normalisation of gambling and says algorithms tend to foster a “gentle” introduction to more heavy-handed gambling habits.
Because gambling in Australia is so prolific, Melbourne Counselling Service is not only working to treat the concerns around gambling with financial counselling and care for those facing addiction but also provides harm minimisation through training programs such as the one at Croxton. The service also sends Venue Support Workers into venues such as casinos to identify and respond to evidence of persistent gambling behaviours and raise awareness of support services available.
As a former alcohol and other drugs support worker, Simran is no stranger to the effects of addiction. Heartbreakingly, she has found gambling to be a more isolating addiction than most.
“Sometimes we get people from multicultural communities who come in and gambling is haram, or not allowed in their culture,” Simran says. “And so that leads to so much shame and dishonesty within their community.”
Recent data from the ANU Centre for Gambling Research found an exponential increase in online gambling over the past 15 years, and researchers found online gambling was associated with more frequent gambling and an increased risk of gambling-related harm. Participants in the study who engaged in online gambling also reported a higher rate of loneliness in the previous week than those gambling in venues.
Simran says while risk factors for gambling addiction are similar to those of other addictive behaviours – trauma and mental illness, financial instability and housing instability, to name a few, there are unique, troubling incentives for those who develop an addiction. She says that for women who are at risk of domestic violence, gambling venues offer more than just a mental escape.
“A lot of women that we get coming through our office go to pokies venues because they are a safe place for them to go when home isn’t safe,” Simran says. “Somewhere with electricity, food and water.”
It strikes me that perhaps the worst vices offer just enough benefits to keep users coming back, first as an idea of something new to try and eventually as an attempt to simply survive. With Australian life rapidly becoming more unaffordable and relief getting harder to find, gambling companies will continue to reap the benefits of human suffering.
Hopefully, with the help of training such as that offered by Melbourne Counselling Service, today’s school students will be able to stay just one step ahead.
To find out more about Melbourne Counselling Service, see here.
