One Last Spin: the power and peril of the pokies

By Drew Rooke

A poignant and compassionate work of literary journalism that tackles Australia’s most controversial pastime.

Almost 200,000 poker machines sing and flash in pubs, clubs, and casinos in every corner of the country. They’re highly complex devices, their components designed by mathematicians, musicians, animators, and ergonomic experts. They’re also widely considered the most harmful form of gambling, the cause of the majority of gambling addictions. So how did Australia evolve into a pokie nation?

With startlingly candid interviews from gambling addicts, politicians, manufacturers, neuroscientists, counsellors, anti-gambling campaigners, and gambling advocates, One Last Spin explores how the machines work to hook people in, and the vicious fight being waged to evict them from the country’s social life. It is a confronting tale about the human cost of addiction, of governments pandering to corporate interests, and of the insidious power of the industry’s PR spin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: May 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781925548921

Drew Rooke

Drew Rooke is a freelance journalist and author whose work has been widely published, including in The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, Kill Your Darlings, and Overland. His first book, One Last Spin: the power and peril of the pokies, was published by Scribe in 2018. He is a 2021 Our Watch Fellow.

Book preview

ONE LAST SPIN

Drew Rooke is a freelance journalist based in Sydney. His work deals with contemporary political and cultural issues, and has appeared in publications such as The Saturday Paper, Meanjin, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Drew was a finalist in the 2015 Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers, and One Last Spin is his first book.

Scribe Publications

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

First published by Scribe 2018

Copyright © Drew Rooke 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

9781925713008 (Australian edition)

9781947534483 (US edition)

9781925548921 (e-book)

A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

scribepublications.com.au

scribepublications.com

To all those in Australia who have been harmed by poker machines

Contents

Glossary

Prologue

Introduction

1 The grand jackpot

2 A better mousetrap

3 The vehicle and the driver

4 Out of control

5 A human problem that needs a human solution

6 No such thing as a free lunch

7 A very good image

8 Blow up the pokies

9 A David and Goliath story

10 The unfortunate one

11 Easy to get behind, but very hard to catch up

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

References

Australia has pokies the way America has guns.

-Dr Katy O’Neill, gambling counsellor

Glossary

AGA American Gaming Association

AGRC Australian Gambling Research Centre

AHA Australian Hotels Association

EGM Electronic gaming machine

GTA Gaming Technologies Association

IGT International Game Technology

LDW Losses disguised as wins

PID Player information display

RNG Random number generator

RTP Return to player [percentage]

VLTs Video lottery terminals

Prologue

I’m standing outside Canterbury League Club in Belmore, in Sydney’s west. Several storeys high and occupying an entire block, the club towers above the drab nearby shops and single-storey houses like a monolithic mega-mall. Lining the entrance driveway is an ostentatious tropical garden with groomed hedges, lilies, palm trees, cycads, water jets, and a three-tiered waterfall. In an hour or so, when night falls, the whole garden will be spectacularly illuminated in multi-coloured spotlights.

I follow the driveway around to a porte-cochère so large that over six cars can fit under it, and then walk through a revolving glass door into a foyer that is more extravagant than those of the finest hotels in the city. On either side of the service desk are two ten-plus-metre-high cream columns with fine carvings at their base. Around the walls hang cylindrical, three-metre-long golden lamps that look like oversized organ pipes. In the middle of the foyer, beneath an enormous sky dome fifteen-or-so metres above, another waterfall flows down into and through another tropical garden. Large plastic butterflies hang on invisible threads of string, birdsong echoes from speakers hidden in the foliage, and a faint smell of chlorine permeates the air.

‘Welcome, sir. Are you a member or a visitor?’ asks a uniformed young lady standing at the service desk.

‘Just a visitor,’ I say.

She signs me in, and then, with a wide smile, says, ‘Have a lovely afternoon, sir.’

When I reach the top of the escalator at the right of the service desk, it feels as if I’ve landed in Vegas. Before me is a sprawling sea of over 600 poker machines, rows and rows of them filling the entire floor. All combine garish artwork and puerile names like ‘Queen of the Nile’, ‘More Chilli’, ‘Buffalo’, ‘Black Panther’, ‘Five Dragons’, and ‘Where’s the Gold?’. Around half are occupied by men and women of all different ages and from all different backgrounds, most sitting silently with glazed faces in a kind of stupor, tapping, slapping, or hammer-fisting the buttons.

Large flatscreen televisions attached to columns around the area display multiple different jackpots, each linked to a separate bank of machines. The figures rise incrementally, ticking over and over as they are fed by every bet made. $21,860.22 … 50 … 61. $9317.80 … 86 … 98. $2309.42 … 69 … 92. There are no windows or natural lighting, and the ceiling is so low that it seems to press down on the tops of the machines. Hanging from it are golden chandeliers, and security cameras like bulging, black shiny eyes. Small black-and-white clocks are positioned inconspicuously around the walls. The whole space feels designed to disorientate the patrons and dissolve any sense of time.

Smartly dressed waiters and waitresses wander the floor. They speak to customers with flight-attendant friendliness, but amongst themselves they speak without pretence. As two walk near me, I overhear one complain to his colleague about work. ‘What are you complaining about?’ his colleague says sarcastically, rolling her eyes and gesturing towards the gamblers. ‘It’s such lovely company that we have here.’

I take a seat at a machine in a bank of ten. Attached to the side of the machine is a small menu for food and drinks. At the bottom of the menu is the message, ‘A range of complimentary beverages and small snacks also available upon request.’

The woman beside me does not notice me arrive. A black-leather handbag hangs from her right shoulder, and a brown-leather purse sits in her lap. Slouched deep in the padded stool, she plays two machines simultaneously — Five Koi and Big Red. Her left hand plays one, her right hand the other, and her head moves from screen to screen as if she is watching an enthralling tennis rally.

I grab the attention of one of the waiters to buy a beer. ‘Sorry — you have to order using the machine’, she says, pointing at the service button on the screen. I do as instructed, and, moments later, another waiter arrives, holding a computer tablet, and takes my order.

‘Thanks,’ he says as I pay. ‘Won’t be too long, sir.’

Two minutes later, a smiling young woman delivers my drink.

‘There you go, sir,’ she says. ‘Have a lovely afternoon, sir.’

My neighbour gives up on the Five Koi machine, but persists with Big Red. Few wins come. She grows agitated, her hand hitting the buttons harder and harder. When the credit dwindles to $10, she reduces her bet from $2 a spin to $1. Then, when the credit is at zero, she hurriedly feeds in a $50 note. The machine lets out a cheerful ‘bleep’ as it registers the new funds.

The woman raises her bet back to $2 a spin, and gambles on without missing a beat. Then, soon afterwards, she stands and walks in the direction of the ATM. The machine still has $30 credit, but she hasn’t bothered to reserve it. She returns minutes later, clutching her purse in one hand and two $50 notes and a $100 note in the other. She adjusts herself on the stool, feeds in $50, and hits ‘SPIN’. As she does this, she puts the other two notes back in her wallet.

After just a few minutes, the $50 has vanished. The machine ‘bleeps’ again as she feeds it the other pineapple-yellow note.

On the very next spin, a loud ‘BRRRIIIIINNNNNGGGG’ rings out. The message, ‘Six free games’, appears on the screen. She hits ‘SPIN’, and the reels gallop along automatically. When the free games finish, the credit counter reads $345.60. A looped, computerised rendition of Johann Strauss’s celebratory Radetzky March plays, and a fountain of gold coins spurts out from the bottom of the screen, each coin branded with the word ‘WIN’. The blank expression on her face doesn’t change as she presses ‘COLLECT’ and slips the barcoded receipt spat out by the machine into her purse. She swivels on her chair as if about to leave. But when she’s almost on her feet, she swivels back to face the machine, feeds it another $20, and continues gambling.

I roam the floor again. As I do, an excited female voice comes through the speakers. It calls out a name and then a membership number. No gamblers near me seem to even hear it; they remain focused on their machines. I ask one of the staff members what the announcement is about. ‘So we’re running a promotion,’ the besuited man says. ‘All you have to do is put your membership card into the machine, and the more you play, the more points you get, and the more chances you have of going in the draw to win.’ The prize is a cruise for two. Fifty trips are being given away.

I take a seat at another machine towards the middle of the floor. Beside me is a middle-aged woman betting $2.50 a spin on a Five Dragons game. She whispers mantras to herself, and winces when a winning symbol is just off. Sometimes, in between spins, she rubs the mouth of the cartoonish dragon that looks down on her from the top screen in the vain hope of attracting luck. Next to her, another woman rests her heavy head in her right hand while slapping the buttons of a Five Koi machine with her left. She churns through $100 in just a few minutes. When she wins, she hits the button even more frantically, trying to hurry along the machine’s celebration so she can continue playing. Across the aisle, a skinny young man plays a Buffalo machine, leaning so far forward that it looks as if he is slowly being sucked into the screen, and an elderly couple sip chocolate milkshakes in silence as they bet ten cents a spin on a More Chilli machine.

In my periphery, I sense eyes on me. I turn to my right and see a besuited, managerial-looking man staring directly at me, biting the arm of his glasses. His lips are pursed, his eyes cold. I turn away, slowly close my notebook, and pretend to play the machine I’m sitting at.

Not a minute later, the man is standing over me.

‘You’ve got me curious,’ he says with raised eyebrows, looking down at the notebook on my lap. ‘What exactly are you doing?’

‘Uhhhh,’ I mumble. ‘Writing.’

Threateningly, he says, ‘Well, you’d better not be describing any of my customers.’

Trying to throw him off, I say quickly, ‘No, no. I’m also playing. I’m just taking a break.’

‘Oh, right.’ The man’s tone becomes friendlier. ‘Well, that’s okay. But if you’re not playing, then you’ve got to go downstairs or leave.’

‘Sure. No worries, Tom,’ I say, noticing his name badge.

With that he departs, casting a glance over his shoulder as he saunters away.

I make my way to the ‘outdoor’ smoking terrace, connected to the main gambling area by a revolving glass door. It is entirely enclosed with only air conditioning and one grated wall acting as ventilation. Through the wall I hear the lonely call — an ascending, high-pitched ‘coo-eee’ — of an Eastern Koel bird outside calling amid the approaching night.

Nearly all of the 160-or-so poker machines in the ‘outdoor’ terrace are occupied. The people gambling have cigarettes dangling out the sides of their mouths or wedged between their fingers. Some do not even bother using the ashtrays provided, instead flicking the ash on the carpet.

At one of the machines, a father holds a cigarette and gambles with one hand, while holding with his other the hand of his disabled adult son, who sits in a wheelchair just beside him. Two women walk into the terrace, and I hear one of them exclaim, pointing to a row of machines against a far wall, ‘The jackpot’s 20,000 on those ones. Mustn’t have paid out for a while.’ Two young tattooed men enter moments later. One, full of confidence, says to the other, ‘The way I play, mate, you can win ten grand! Bet small, small, small, then raise it big.’

I sit at a machine opposite an elderly man betting 20 cents a spin. He is calm, gently tapping the buttons as he takes long draws of a cigarette. A tough-looking young man dressed in jeans and a tight T-shirt paces up to the machine beside him. There are beads of sweat on his forehead. He frantically puffs a cigarette. Without sitting down, he feeds the machine $50, and immediately raises the bet to $10. He slaps the buttons hard. After five spins, his credit is at zero. Another $50 note disappears into the machine. It lasts as long as the first.

‘Fuuuuuuucckk,’ the man says through clenched teeth, startling the old man. He paces away to play another machine.

Moments later, Tom appears in the terrace. He’s speaking on a mobile phone, looking hawkishly around like a secret service agent. He spots me. I fumble with the buttons of my machine, but know from his stern look that my acting is unconvincing. He stares and moves the phone away from his ear, then exits the terrace. He returns not a minute later, accompanied by a muscular security guard. They walk quickly towards me.

‘Alright,’ Tom says firmly. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to go downstairs. You’re not playing. You can’t just sit down, watching people play. If you want to do any of this, you’ll have to contact management and get approval from marketing before you do your research up here. But you’re quite welcome to sit downstairs. You can write all night down there.’

‘What’s the difference?’ I ask.

Tom responds hastily. ‘People get paranoid. And it’s just the by-laws. They don’t allow people just to sit around.’

Given the looming presence of the security guard, whose crossed arms are almost as thick as my thighs, I decide it’s probably best to not protest anymore. I exit the terrace and walk back through the main area of poker machines towards the escalator. Tom and the security guard trail me until I reach it. When I’m halfway down, I turn and see them standing at the top, both still staring at me.

As I head towards the revolving glass door to leave the club, the young lady at the service counter who greeted me earlier smiles, and says, ‘Have a lovely night, sir.’

Introduction

As a child, I regularly visited Canterbury League Club with my family. It was close to home, offered good, cheap food, and had multiple flatscreen televisions much larger than the outdated one in our living room, which made watching sport a far more entertaining and exciting experience. Visiting always felt like a special treat, an opportunity to not only eat out but also to spend time in a place that was more grand and glamorous than any other I knew at that age. I remember the excitement I felt on arriving and seeing the huge entrance garden, the disappointment I felt on leaving, and the many times I wished we were going there for dinner instead of eating at home.

Back then, I knew nothing about why Canterbury League Club was so grand and glamorous; nothing of the hundreds of poker machines on the floor just above where my family and I ate and cheered on our favourite rugby league team.

Back then I knew nothing about poker machines, period. But that has since changed.

With their playful looks, poker machines could, to the uninformed eye, be easily mistaken for new-age arcade video games. But looks, as they say, are deceiving. Far from childish entertainment, Australia’s poker machines are one of the most intense forms of gambling available in the world, radically different from the fruit machines offered in pubs in the United Kingdom or the pachinko machines in Japan. They accept high-denomination banknotes (except in South Australia, where they still only accept coins), can be loaded up with thousands of dollars in a moment, can be played once every couple of seconds, offer enormous jackpots reaching into the tens of thousands of dollars, and — depending on which Australian state or territory they’re located in — allow maximum bets of either $5 to $10 per spin. If played at their maximum bet and maximum speed, they are easily capable of consuming between $600 to $1,200 in a single hour.

Across Australia, there are approximately 193,000 poker machines. That’s one machine for every 120-odd people, which, excluding casino destinations such as Macau or Monaco, is the highest per-capita rate in the world. But their abundance in Australia isn’t the only thing that is unusual by world standards. So, too, is their accessibility.

In other places where Australian-style poker machines are legal, they are largely restricted to their natural habitat: a casino. In Australia, however, the vast bulk of poker machines are spread throughout local pubs and clubs. They are advertised in New South Wales — because of advertising restrictions in the state — by euphemistic signs like ‘VIP Lounge’, ‘Royal Lounge’, Players Lounge’, and in other states by more direct ones that simply read ‘POKIES’.

Australia’s two supermarket giants have a large stake in poker machines. Woolworths is the majority owner of the Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group, which owns around 400 hotels and clubs across Australia, and around 12,000 poker machines. This makes Woolworths the single largest operator of poker machines in Australia. Coles’ stake in poker machines is smaller but still significant. Its parent company at the time of writing, Wesfarmers, owns 89 hotels and over 3,000 poker machines.

According to the Productivity Commission’s 2010 report into the national gambling industry, only a minority of Australians — around 25 per cent — play a poker machine once in any given year. Those who play poker machines regularly — that is, once a week or more — account for only 4 per cent of the adult population.

But this low popularity does not correlate to the machines’ low profitability. In fact, poker machines are the lifeblood of Australia’s enormously profitable gambling industry. Of the $23.6 billion spent gambling in 2015–16 — the highest per capita amount spent anywhere in the world — $12.1 billion, or over $600 per adult, was poured through poker machines.* If current trends continue, this figure can be expected to grow in coming years. It was up from $11.5 billion in 2014–15 and $11 billion in 2013–14.

[* This expenditure is only for the amount gambled on pokies in clubs and pubs, not in casinos, where the data is not disaggregated for government reporting purposes. In 2015–16, $5.2 billion was lost in casinos. Poker machines account for an estimated 30 per cent of casino revenue.]

For context, in 2015–16, $2.9 billion of Australia’s total gambling losses were spent on racing, while $920 million were spent on sports betting.

Annual losses in New South Wales, where around half the country’s poker machines are found, are highest at around $1,000 per adult, and lowest in Tasmania at around $300 per adult. But while per-adult losses have dropped in recent years, per-gambler losses across most states have either remained steady or increased, suggesting that those who continue to gamble on poker machines are spending and losing more. As documented by gambling researchers associate professor Martin Young and Francis Markham, per-gambler losses on poker machines in New South Wales and Victoria are around $3,500; in the Australian Capital Territory, around $3,000; in South Australia, around $2,500; in Queensland and the Northern Territory, around $2,000; and in Tasmania, around $1,600.

Poker machines are regularly described by their manufacturers and operators — as well as by some politicians and some of the general public — as ‘entertainment’, akin to movies, video games, and television shows. This is an appropriate description for some who play them; many gamblers I spoke with in gambling venues told me they played poker machines ‘for the thrill’, ‘for a bit of fun’, or ‘to pass the time’. But for other players, poker machines are far from a harmless form of entertainment: they are more like a destructive drug.

Quantifying the exact number of gambling addicts in Australia is impossible, but there are reliable estimates, the most reliable of which comes from the Productivity Commission. In its 2010 report, it estimated that there were 115,000 people suffering from a gambling addiction, and a further 280,000 at risk of becoming addicted.

Poker machines, the commission found, were the culprit in 75 to 80 per cent of these cases. ‘Different gambling forms pose varying risks for people, with gaming machines posing the greatest problems,’ the commission wrote. The commission also reported that 15 per cent of regular poker machine players experienced some harm from their gambling, that gambling addicts accounted for an estimated 41 per cent of total expenditure, and that those at risk of becoming addicted accounted for a further 19 per cent of total expenditure. It said these figures were backed by ‘robust and persuasive’ evidence.

The commission also responded to suggestions by some segments of the gambling industry that the small number of gambling addicts in Australia meant the social-policy significance of the issue was also small. ‘Small population prevalence rates do not mean small problems for society,’ it said. It also reminded those within the industry that the annual number of people admitted to hospital for traffic accidents and the annual number of people who use heroin was lower than the number of estimated gambling addicts.

The commission highlighted the key flaw with the argument that small adult prevalence rates meant that the social-policy significance of gambling addiction was also small: it failed to consider the ripple effects of the issue. Like all public-health issues, gambling addiction harms not only the individual directly involved, but also their family, friends, colleagues, and the broader Australian community in a multitude of ways. It has been estimated that for every gambling addict, a further seven people are affected. On top of the real money losses associated with gambling addiction are family breakdown; family violence; neglect of responsibilities at home; emotional and psychological distress; health problems arising from heightened stress and anxiety; reduced performance at work; bankruptcy; criminal activity; and suicide.

Accounting for all of this, the Productivity Commission estimated the total annual cost of gambling at between $4.7 billion and $8.4 billion. This made gambling addiction comparable in size to other major public-health issues. As the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation wrote in 2016, it is an issue ‘on a similar order of magnitude to major depressive disorder and alcohol misuse and dependence’.

Even more alarmingly, it is an issue that disproportionately harms Australia’s poorest and most vulnerable. This is for a simple reason: poker machines and the losses incurred on them are concentrated in some of Australia’s most disadvantaged local-government areas. Fairfield in Sydney’s west is the worst example of this: in 2014–15, the 3,000-plus machines located there had a turnover of over $7 billion, making it the poker machine capital of the country.* Another example is Brimbank in Melbourne’s west, where, in the same year, gamblers lost over $143 million on 1,000-odd machines. A large portion of people in both of these areas — and there are many more that could be listed as examples — have low income,