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The government needs to ban gambling advertising, health experts say, because the cost of gambling on the health and welfare of Australians is too high.
The Federal Government is increasingly under pressure to respond to a parliamentary committee inquiry into online gambling released in June 2023. The report provided 31 recommendations that apply a public health lens to online gambling to reduce harm to Australians.
However, despite bipartisan support, it’s been reported that Labor are planning a watered down proposal, which would fall short of the total ban recommended in the report. One reason they give is that a gambling ad ban could damage regional media, which already operates on thin margins.
However, Head of the Monash University School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine’s Gambling and Social Determinants Unit, Associate Professor Charles Livingstone, told InSight+ that the risks of even a partial ban are just too high.
“If indeed the broadcast industry is so desperate for funds that it can’t survive without gambling industry money, then the question we have to ask is: should we therefore impose the cost of this on a new generation of young people who will become addicted to gambling and end up bearing, in many cases, extraordinarily heavy costs?” he asked.
What are the costs of gambling?
The impacts of gambling are wide ranging.
“There’s a lot of evidence that gambling exacerbates mental health issues, but it’s closely associated with developing those and almost certainly instigating some of them … There’s also an increasing amount of evidence about the physical health problems associated with gambling, and they appear to expand to include cardiovascular problems, including coronary heart disease and other circulatory problems,” Associate Professor Livingstone said.
“The other issues are that gambling institutes considerable financial stress on families, households and individuals, and can lead to catastrophic loss of major assets. That can lead to relationship breakdowns due to a loss of trust associated with a gambling habit, which tends to be concealed from other family members.
“It’s also associated with neglect of children, certainly financial neglect but sometimes also emotional neglect and a lack of attention to children’s needs and so on,” Associate Professor Livingstone continued.
Gambling is also linked to domestic, family and sexual violence (DFSV), with an expert review released late last month recommending a total ban on gambling advertising.
“Minimal attention has been paid to the connection between problem gambling and DFSV, and regulatory decisions to date have barely taken DFSV harm into consideration. Evidence clearly shows that, where gambling co-exists with DFSV, it often escalates its frequency and/or severity,” the report said.
There is also a strong link between crime and gambling. A study released in Addiction last week found that each 10% increase in gambling expenditure in NSW annually is associated with:
- 7.4% increase in assaults;
- 10.5% increase in break and enter (dwelling) offences;
- 10.3% increase in break and enter (non-dwelling) offences;
- 11% increase in motor vehicle theft offences;
- 8.2% increase in stealing from motor vehicle offences; and
- 7.4% increase in fraud offences.
“The results presented here provide the first unambiguous evidence of a causal link between the level of expenditure on gambling and the rates of property and violent crime,” the authors wrote.
“A much stronger addiction”
According to Associate Professor Angela Rintoul from the Federation University, part of the problem is just how addictive gambling is.
“A lot of people say to me that they feel that gambling is a much stronger addiction, so that they might say that they’ve been able to quit smoking, they’ve been able to stop drinking. Some people who’ve used ice, they said they’ve been able to stop using ice. But gambling is something that just sticks with them, that they find very hard to overcome. It may be that we still don’t know a lot about what’s happening at a neurochemical level,” she said.
This level of addiction means that people continue to chase their losses when they know it’s irrational.
“People describe a lack of control and a lack of agency once they’ve developed a gambling addiction. And so this means that even though they have good intentions and they wish that they weren’t gambling, they can’t control it, and they can’t stop it. It’s a very distressing space to exist in,” she said.
A study conducted by Associate Professor Rintoul and colleagues found that 4.2% of suicides in Victoria were because of gambling.
“Suicidality is a really common experience for people who are in that space because they can’t control what they’re doing, and they’re also in a really difficult position in terms of feeling that they’ve created a burden that they’re unable to see a way out of,” she told InSight+.
“We also found that, unfortunately, there were people who were the parent, the partner, the adult child of someone who had gambled, who had also died by a gambling related suicide. So it does have this ripple effect,” she continued.
Studies have shown that for every person who is a problem gambler, there are at least six others who are directly affected.
“In some kinship cultures, they found that actually it’s 20 people who are directly affected by someone who’s got a gambling problem. And so when you think about Aboriginal communities where there’s a person experiencing a gambling problem, if you have 20 others directly affected, that’s huge,” Associate Professor Rintoul said.
Advertisements normalise gambling
There are many suggestions about how to reduce gambling related harms, including the 31 recommendations in the parliamentary inquiry.
Associate Professor Rintoul said one priority should be stronger regulation and access to data.
“One of the key things to preventing gambling harm from occurring and escalating, is having access to proper data, so that regulators should have access to individual account information to be able to do their job properly in terms of regulation. Often we don’t hear about someone who’s been encouraged to spend extraordinary amounts of money unless they decide to make a complaint,” she said.
“We need regulators that are resourced to and curious about compliance, and also who have the ability to apply considerable penalties where operators are found to be in breach of their codes of conduct,” she continued.
Associate Professor Livingstone said the full gambling advertisement restrictions need to be implemented. Even partial restrictions will still normalise gambling and potentially expose children to risk.
“You can’t say it’s an unhealthy product, but still allow broadcasters to display advertising for it when kids are sitting there with their parents… It’s a major issue that is not addressed by these reforms.
“If you really want to be serious, you’ve got to shut all these loopholes. You’ve got to stop it being normalised. That’s the thing me and my colleagues in the public health movement are concerned about, that we’re normalising an activity, which has incredible consequences for people and can destroy their lives, literally,” he concluded.
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