There’s a long-forgotten history to Australia’s poker machine culture. First, the machines were largely foisted on an unsuspecting public when they were legalised in New South Wales in the mid-1950s. Second, there was a concerted campaign to ban them from the outset.
Today Australia is the poker machine capital of the world; with just 0.5% of the world’s population we have the unenviable distinction of housing 25% of the globe’s poker machines. Pokies have long carried a well-known dark side: high rates of personal addiction aggregated into community distress, especially in lower socioeconomic areas.
The poker machine story started about 70 years ago. Back in the early 1950s, freed from the privations of war time, a public clamour arose for more sophisticated forms of entertainment. In 1954, the NSW Labor government of the time responded by licensing hundreds of new, not-for-profit clubs: rugby leagues and RSL clubs were at the forefront of an entertainment revolution.
Two years of lobbying from clubs resulted in the NSW Labor government granting them a special deal: exclusive rights to the installation of poker machines. Clubs grew rich and powerful on the back of tens of thousands of pokies and mass membership. Ordinary people were provided with undreamed-of access to lavish entertainment, cheap meals and palatial facilities. The presence of pokies lent an air of excitement similar to a casino.
However, the arrival of poker machines never enjoyed broad public support. A 1957 University of Sydney questionnaire that sampled 1,000 people from the state electoral roll, asking what people thought of poker machines, found that 60% of men and 70% of women were either opposed or strongly opposed to them.
During the late 1950s, a broad coalition of opponents to poker machines campaigned for them to be banned in NSW. These included big city retailers, regional chambers of commerce, the housewives’ association, and sections of the media and judiciary. Opponents worried about money being taken out of the real economy and the social harm being done to individuals and families.
In 1961, the agitation resulted in the introduction of a private member’s bill into the NSW parliament to enforce a ban. It was roundly defeated when the Liberal and Labor parties opposed it. It was the last attempt made to ban poker machines in the state. The clubs, boasting tens of thousands of members, had quickly become a powerful political force. Politicians learned not to raise a finger at the lucrative new business model.
Nevertheless, reports kept surfacing of their social toll. In a four-page article in the February 1966 edition of the Australian Women’s Weekly titled “A poker machine addict”, a woman told her story of living with her addicted husband. As their lives spiralled downwards, she wrote to the peak lobby group ClubsNSW insisting that it take some responsibility for the plight of people like her. She told the magazine she never heard back.
In November 1970, a correspondent with the Canberra Times reviewed the impact in NSW of poker machines, commenting that most people in the state knew of “at least one instance where substantial sums and even homes and businesses have been lost through this addiction”.
In a 1971 study in one of Sydney’s large clubs, researchers found that at the end of an evening’s gambling on the pokies, 25% of players couldn’t recall whether they had won or lost, or how much money was involved.
By the mid-1970s, local welfare organisations in western Sydney voiced alarm at the increase in compulsive gambling in the area, with some of the worst cases reported to the Parramatta Lifeline centre. In 1977, on the 21st anniversary of legalisation in NSW, the influential Bulletin magazine headlined an article “The Great Poker Machine Menace”.
But nothing was done by successive NSW governments to rein in the pokies or address the problems they were causing. The problems were left to the churches and a few poorly funded non-government agencies. No data was being collected on the problem, a situation that remained unchanged until 1999 when the Productivity Commission produced a landmark inquiry into gambling. Governments, meanwhile, continued to reap the rivers of revenue from taxing the machines.
The accumulated knowledge of poker machines’ social damage was ignored when state governments around the country, bar Western Australia, deregulated machines in the early 1990s. In what amounted to a global social experiment, 200,000 machines were dispatched to the community. They were snapped up by hotels, the growing number of casinos, football clubs and even surf life-saving clubs. Hotels had lobbied hard for the move.
Since the 1990s, numerous studies have confirmed that poker machines are purposely designed to attract and retain vulnerable gamblers. They are heavily concentrated in lower socioeconomic communities where they continue to cause widespread misery.
The same laissez-faire approach to poker machines has been taken by governments to the approval of 14 casinos and to the arrival of online gambling. The damage being caused by the linkage of sport and online gambling, and the mass advertising of the industry, was outlined in a 2023 parliamentary inquiry headed by the federal Labor MP Peta Murphy, who tragically died soon after the report’s release. Its main recommendation to limit harm was to phase out gambling advertising. The silence from the Albanese government was deafening.
Online sports betting now vies with the pokies in causing widespread problem gambling. And, just like the power of the hotel and casino lobbies that propelled the mass release of pokies, the power of the online gambling industry is embedded in a system of corporate power. History is simply repeating itself.
Quentin Beresford is the author of Hooked: Inside the Murky World of Australia’s Gambling Industry (NewSouth Publishing, RRP $39.99)
