I’m in the studio audience of a quizshow hosted by an Aussie sporting legend.
Only one contestant remains – a bloke around my age. There are maybe 50 of us watching him from the bleachers, including his wife, who is in her third trimester of pregnancy. Twice now, I have heard her be referred to by the station employees as his “missus”.
So far, the contestant has racked up just over $5,000 in prize money: a combination of his general knowledge and the luck of the gamble.
His next prompt flashes on the screen.
To the left, to the left… everything you own in a box to the left.
They’re Beyoncé lyrics and he has to identify which of three songs they’re from.
“It’s definitely not option one” he smirks, ruling out the correct answer. “I’m sure about that.”
There is a collective shoulder drop from the audience. We’re not allowed to audibly sigh.
The host guffaws. “I bet your mates are glad you got that one wrong!”
This episode is almost over now – except there’s one more segment of the show. The contestant can choose to take home his winnings, or he can gamble it all away for a chance to win more.
Gold coins dance on giant screens, like videos on a poker machine. The man looks to us, the audience.
Directly to my left is a woman whose husband is a contestant in the next episode. He’s backstage somewhere, getting dusted in anti-shine. They’re of retirement age, from regional Australia, and have driven hours so that he can be on the show.
She leans towards me. “I’d take the money,” she whispers, shaking her head.
“Me too,” I whisper back.
A station employee riles the crowd up, encouraging us to shout and signal what we think the contestant should do.
The camera pans to the contestant’s pregnant partner.
“What would you do?” booms the host.
“I’d take the money… but I’m more conservative than him,” she offers. “He’s done so well; I say follow your gut babe.”
The contestant’s gut tells him to gamble his winnings. He loses them all, and the episode is over.
A break is signalled, and we head to the coffee and tea station.
*
With our unrelenting “have-a-go” attitude”, Australians love to gamble. In fact, it’s one of our favourite pastimes, deeply embedded in our social and cultural fabric.
2023 data showed that almost three-quarters of us gambled at least once in the past year. Two in five of us gamble weekly. Of all of us who gamble, 46% are “at some risk of gambling harm” – with the figures for men particularly grim when compared with women.
Older folk, too, are especially at risk, with the majority of problem gamblers aged over 50 and living primarily off welfare. In Australia, the highest levels of gambling losses tend to take place in suburbs with the lowest median incomes.
Addictive by design, poker machines remain the most popular form of gambling in the country. Australia has 0.3% of the world’s population, yet 76% of its non-casino slot machines – mostly spread across pubs, clubs and hotels. We have more poker machines than ATMs, more poker machines that post boxes.
“Pokies” were introduced in Australia in 1956 after significant lobbying from community clubs vying for a reliable revenue source – particularly Returned and Services Leagues (RSLs), which were founded during WWI to care for war veterans.
In the 1950s, RSL clubs were created by RSL branches to provide an affordable place for returned servicemen to socialise (and I say men because women weren’t allowed to drink in public bars until long afterwards – 1970 in my home state of Queensland).
These days, RSL clubs are multimillion-dollar organisations, but they have largely split from their non-profit branches – prompting many to call for the “mini casinos” to change their name.
“The real RSL – the veteran support not-for-profit – is about care and welfare,” said RSL NSW President Mick Bainbridge in September. “It’s time for clubs to change the name that they adopted 60 years ago – frankly, it must be returned.”
My nan pours beers at an RSL club in Melbourne – has done for nearly three decades. She’s a pensioner too, but doesn’t get much money from the government, because once you earn more than $300 a fortnight, your payments get docked.
Nan’s RSL is located in a 53-square-kilometre Victorian council region that – according to the Supreme Court – isn’t allowed to have more than 769 poker machines in total. That’s more than 14 per square kilometre.
Residents in this region lose an average of $462 per year on poker machines – but that’s not bad for Australia. Our national average is a gambling loss of $1,635 per person per year: the highest in the world.
“Some of the young ones will come and spend $2,000, $3,000 in one go,” Nan informs me over a bottle of VB as we recline in front of the telly.
“Even on a bad night, we’ll pull between $60 – $70,000 on the pokies.”
*
Nan didn’t always drink VB. Before the pandemic, she only ever drank Carlton Draught.
“It’s Australia’s national beer!” she – crestfallen – had informed the waitress at a pub in regional Ireland when we were on a roadtrip and they didn’t have it.
When COVID was at its peak in Naarm/Melbourne, Nan’s boss at the RSL gave her a slab of VB. She thanked him, but grumbled internally, because it wasn’t Carlton Draught.
It was free though, so she drank it all.
Now, Nan won’t drink anything else. Loves it – so much so that a VB-shaped fridge now sits proudly next to the kitchen bench.
Like most pensioners, it’s not just freebies Nan loves – it’s any windfall. She slips acorns in my handbag to help me “come into money”, speaks with fondness of winning the door prize one year at the Cash Converters’ VIP Christmas Party, and loves having a punt on the Calcultta.
In fact, the one time my auntie managed to convince Nan to see a psychic, the only thing Nan asked was, “Am I going to win Tattslotto?”
“No,” the psychic informed her.
Though it didn’t stop Nan buying tickets (she’s part of the 63% of older Australians who play the lottery), thankfully, her current income combined with her risk management skills mean she isn’t likely to lose everything she owns.
That can’t be said of everyone else, though.
“On pension day, people leave crying,” Nan says of the RSL. “It’s so sad.”
In 2020, politician Fiona Patten asked the Victorian Veterans Minister a question in Parliament.
“[This year], RSL poker machines turned over $260 million in revenue, but less than 4 per cent of that revenue, $9.8 million, went back into the community and veteran welfare.
“We know that veterans are disproportionately represented in homeless populations, with higher rates of mental health issues, higher rates of drug and alcohol dependence and higher rates of gambling addiction.
“There has been a concerted push … to get pokies out of RSL clubs, arguing that it is not worth the return. Will the minister work with veterans organisations to achieve this outcome?”
“I think the chamber and the rest of the community would actually be quite horrified if a minister of the state government was interfering with the RSL,” came the reply.
*
A week or so after visiting Nan, I find myself at a pub in Copmanhurst, NSW: the state with the greatest number of pokies (half of all Australian machines, to be precise). Though it’s not an RSL, the pub is a shrine to returned service people.
Murals of Vietnam vets adorn the walls; cabinets are stacked with model planes and uniforms; the halls are lined with newspaper clippings, photos, memorials and more. There are also a bunch of poker machines.
In 2018, the NSW government made a commitment to reducing the number of pokies in what it deems “high-risk zones”. All this means, though, is that additional machines can’t be installed, “ensuring the number of machines in these … areas can only ever fall,” said Racing Minister Paul O’Toole, as if he was overseeing something impactful.
This didn’t stop new machines being installed outside of these zones though – and in 2023, the number of pokies in NSW grew by almost 1,000.
Over a glass of house red, I check Copmanhurst’s census data on my phone. At last count, more than half its residents weren’t working, median weekly income was extremely low, and there were four times the number of retired ADF servicepeople there than the national average.
Despite this, Copmanhurst is not in the government’s high-risk category for poker machines.
On the wall of the pub, I see a cartoon of a man returning from the Vietnam war to a woman watching television. She doesn’t look up from the screen. Next to it is the same image, but this time it’s a man returning from Afghanistan being ignored.
Don’t let it happen again! says the caption. Lest we forget.
*
*
Back at the television studios, I settle into the bleachers for another episode of the quiz show. The final contestant ends up being the husband of the woman I was sitting with earlier.
By the end of the show, he’s racked up a few thousand dollars by answering a bunch of trivia questions correctly. He tells the host he wants to use his prize money money to retire and start a small business in his regional hometown.
“Well, what do you want to do?” the host asks. “Take the money, or empty the bank for a chance to win the jackpot?”
The station throws in a holiday to a tropical island paradise.
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?! Retire and go on a holiday!”
The camera pans to his wife in the audience. What she would do?
“I’d take the money,” she says nervously.
The audience erupts again.
The contestant decides to vy for the jackpot.
He loses everything, then he and his wife get in their car and begin the long drive home.