New Australia

Cutting back on Commercial Gambling

Aristocrat's 'Queen of the Nile' (Image: Wikipedia)

NewAustralia supports curtailing gambling. This may involve:

• Limiting the number of poker machines.
• Limiting the opening hours of poker machine venues.
• Limiting how much money poker machines can consume in a given time.
• Limiting how much welfare money can be spent on gambling.

Allowing Low-Bet Gambling

At the same time NewAustralia suggests deregulating low-bet social gambling. This would allow gambling between groups of people playing specified social gambling games where the maximum bet size was $1.00 and the typical game length was five to ten minutes. Various venues may encourage this type of gambling on their premises to gain custom, but would not be the 'house'.

This approach should draw people away from high-bet commercial gambling to more social low-bet gambling.

Pokie Windfall

14^th Jan 2008: "POKIES billionaire Bruce Mathieson is among a small number of gaming industry chiefs set to share in a $750 million annual bonanza generated by a makeover of the Victorian gaming industry." more...

Pokies Lead Losses

31^st Jan 2008: The cost of Victoria's gambling addiction is surging towards $5 billion a year, with gambling losses up almost half a billion dollars in just four years....Gambling losses averaged $1,200 a person. more...

Record gambling losses

31^st Jan 2008: Victorian gamblers have lost more than $1.3-billion on poker machines in just the last six months. And that doesn't even include the poker machines inside Melbourne's Crown Casino, which refuses to release information on its revenues. more...