ONE LAST SPIN: The Power and Peril of the Pokies
DREW ROOKE
Scribe, 2018, 325 pages
Review by Phil Shannon
Ever wondered if it possible
to win against the pokies? Why not ask
someone who should know, like a poker machine technician - ‘I make these
machines in order to grab your money. I
would not be so stupid to play myself’, said one such techo when asked by freelance
Sydney journalist, Drew Rooke. In his
book, One Last Spin, Rooke expands on
the simple truth that pokies machines are rigged to make you lose.
The ‘one-armed bandits’ are deliberately
engineered to hoover up the loose change from the pockets of casual punters and
to deep-mine the bank accounts of the addicts, concentrated in the poorer
suburbs, from whom the real pokies profits (40% of them) are to be made. These jackpot junkies, the ‘problem
gamblers’, have their lives shattered in the process.
A typical pokies machine can
chew through $600 to $1,200 of a person’s hard-earned every hour by dangling
the shiny lure of the big payout, with just enough tinier wins and frequent near
misses engineered into the machine’s program to keep the desperate glued to
their seat.
The machines lie in wait in
massed battalions – there are 193,000 pokies in Australia, which (excluding the
casino jurisdictions of Macau and Monaco) is the highest per capita rate in the
world. Australia has achieved global
leadership by allowing the pokies to colonise much of the pubs and clubs scene.
The pokies are highly
profitable for these community venues. In
2014-15, pokies accounted for $76 million of NSW rugby league club,
Canterbury-Bankstown’s, total revenue of $87 million. They anchored $52 million of Rooty Hill RSL
club’s $84 million revenue. With the
exception of only the North Melbourne Kangaroos, nine of the ten AFL football clubs
based in Victoria run pokies, taking in $90 million in revenue. Across the whole sector, pokies generate 28%
of total revenue for pubs and 61% for clubs.
The upper reaches of the
pokies industry also profit handsomely. Pokies
machines creamed $40 million in profit in 2016 for the Sydney-based
corporation, Aristocrat Leisure, the second largest pokies manufacturer in the
world. Australia’s two supermarket
giants know a solid income-stream when they see one. Woolworths is the majority owner of
Australian Leisure and Hospitality Group which owns 12,000 machines in 400
hotels and clubs. Coles, through its
parent company, Wesfarmers, owns 3,000 pokies in 89 hotels.
To ensure the House always
wins, pokies manufacturers employ vast teams of “mathematicians, software
engineers, sound engineers, musicians, artists, graphic designers, industrial
designers and animators” to keep their human cash cows engaged in upwards wealth
transfer. All the bells and whistles of
the machines augment the activation-by-gambling of the reward centres in the
brain in the same way that substance addiction does, with pokies addicts
chasing the next high from the ‘feel-good neurotransmitter’, dopamine.
The pokies industry covers its
drug-pushing tracks with PR spin every bit as cynical and loaded as the spin of
the machines’ reels. They acknowledge
the issue of problem gamblers but lay the blame on the individual addict as a
matter of personal psychological flaws whilst touting the confection that the
industry is an altruistic, community-minded provider of harmless entertainment and
an essential financer of community sports, charities, schools and hospitals, despite
their donations being miniscule as proportion of their total expenditure.
The industry’s camouflage of
public beneficence is embroidered by two main auxiliaries – the
anti-nanny-state ninnies and the usual academics-for-hire, at a loose end now that partnership
opportunities with Big Tobacco have been stubbed out, who produce the
industry-friendly research that attempts to lend some intellectual gloss to the
corporate self-interest and social harm of the pokies.
The industry has its powerful state
enablers, too. Despite strong public
opposition to pokies (70-80% of those polled want restrictions on their use), state
and federal governments adopt feather-touch regulation, unable even to broach a
one-dollar maximum bet per spin.
Governments are content to merely require limp-as-lettuce sloganising to
‘gamble responsibly’ - a term devised by the gambling industry and adopted wholesale
by governments precisely because it combines apparent concern with thoroughly
innocuous, status-quo-preserving policy.
The reason for government
inaction is not hard to discern. Between
2000 and 2014, state governments received $45 billion in gambling taxes, a not
insignificant average of 6% of total state government revenue. Cross the industry by crimping their profits
and the political costs will be huge, including electoral campaigns against pokies-constraining
candidates, and ending the flow of political donations to the big parties.
Rooke lays out a compelling
case against the pokies but there is an even more damning writ to be served
against the very institution of gambling.
For what each poker machine, or lottery, or sports wager, is demonstrating
is that capitalism can not provide an adequate income for all. If not born to wealth, your only hope for
financial security is dumb luck, with a fortunate few ‘Have-Nots’ getting to
join the ‘Haves’, and accelerating wealth inequality whilst stoking envy and
resentment in their neighbours. As with
the pokies, so with capitalism – the few win, the many lose. The only way to beat the pokies is not to
play them. The only way to beat
capitalism is to reject it.
