“The ACT is seriously lagging when it comes to harm reduction measures and effective regulation of gaming machines,” Shane Rattenbury, ACT Minister for Gaming, stated at a symposium organised by the Canberra Gambling Reform Alliance and the ACT Council of Social Service (ACTCOSS) today.

There are nearly four thousand “addictive” electronic gaming machines (EGMs) in the ACT “that can trap and ruin people”, Mr Rattenbury said. Every year, Canberrans hand over $180 million of net revenue to gaming machine owners.

“They have very limited restrictions on what people can bet, how long they can play, and nothing on how much they can lose,” Mr Rattenbury said.

33,000 people in the ACT experience gambling harm, and gambling losses have significantly risen since COVID lockdowns, Labor MLA Dr Marisa Paterson, former director of the ANU Centre for Gambling Research, stated. She called for reforms last year.

At the national level, Independent Senator David Pocock stated, Australians are “the biggest losers in the world when it comes to gambling”: $25 billion go every year to multinational gambling companies. “It’s obscene.”

The gaming industry spends $280 million on gambling, targeting young men, Senator Pocock observed; as a result, 75 per cent of eight- to 16-year-olds think sports betting is a normal part of enjoying sport; 5 per cent of 16- to 17-year-olds place bets; and Gamblers Anonymous Australia reports that teenagers are accessing their services.

Although the number of gaming machines in the ACT has decreased (from 5,022 in 2015 to 3,790 this year), Mr Rattenbury believes that is no cure; indeed, the losses from them, he states, are not reducing, and it would take two decades to reduce the number of machines in the jurisdiction to zero.

Mr Rattenbury’s solution is a centralised monitoring system (CMS) linking all the gaming machines in the ACT into one network, “whichever venue they are in”. This, he states, would act as a “guardrail” around the entire ACT gaming industry, “rather than ad hoc interventions at individual venues”.

“If you play in one venue, and reach your loss limit, you can’t then just walk to another venue and start again.”

The government would then use a CMS to introduce loss limits linked to a universal cashless player card, an approach employed in Tasmania. There, gamblers’ losses are capped at $100 per day, $500 per month, and $5,000 per year; once they reach that limit, they can no longer play.

The Greens originally proposed bet ($5) and load-up ($100) limits, Mr Rattenbury acknowledged. More recent evidence and advice suggests that the CMS and loss limit would be more effective, he believes: the ANU Centre for Gambling Research maintains that maximum bet and credit amounts would result in little to no reduction in gambling harm.

The government began a four-week market sounding for a CMS last month. The ACT is the only jurisdiction without a CMS, and both Mr Rattenbury and the Alliance for Gambling Reform believe it is necessary; by not having one, Mr Rattenbury said, the ACT is “an anachronism”.

“If,” Mr Rattenbury said, “we want to get real and immediate harm reduction reform done in the territory, if we want to protect people now without waiting for another 20 years for electronic gaming machines to hopefully disappear, then getting this monitoring system installed, and getting in loss limits and other protections, is the way to go. Our doorway is open, and we need to run through it.”

But Dr Paterson considers it expensive and ineffective. Mr Rattenbury did not reveal how much installation would cost, only that it was not prohibitive. Dr Paterson, however, calculates it would cost $70 million, based on Tasmania’s experience. She considers that sum an investment in machines: “Will it become harder to continue to reduce machine numbers if we are significantly investing in gaming machines?”

It would, she argues, take significant numbers of years to implement a CMS; and it is not a harm reduction measure in and of itself.

“You could implement it tomorrow, and not a single thing will change,” she said. “It is a machine operations oversight tool that governments can use to understand machine revenues numbers and losses. So it is very disingenuous to say the central monitoring system is a guardrail.”

Does the ACT even need a CMS? Dr Paterson thinks not. Unlike NSW, which has 86,000 poker machines, the ACT has 3,700, or 23 times fewer; and unlike Tasmania, the ACT has reduced gaming machines by nearly 25 per cent over the last two terms.

But the decrease has slowed, Dr Paterson observed: in the last term of government, under a Labor minister, there was a 20 per cent reduction (1,000) in the number of machines; in this term, only 2.5 per cent (98). Dr Paterson claimed that the only gaming bill Mr Rattenbury had passed was in respect to making clubs refuges during smoke and heat emergencies; Dr Paterson, concerned it would expose vulnerable people to machines, brought amendments, which she says were not supported.

Dr Paterson, moreover, said she was concerned the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission, which an independent body responsible for gaming, was neither transparent nor accountable; she only has limited access to data from its gambling incident register or how it is minimising gambling harm. In her view, too, In her view, the self-exclusion policy (by which people can voluntarily ban themselves from venues) has been “completely left to fail”: the numbers of self-excluding people have significantly reduced; more people have revoked their exclusions than ever; and there is a major gender disparity in the numbers of people who self-exclude (75 per cent male and 25 per cent female), which is contrary to international trends.

Mr Rattenbury will argue for the government to endorse these measures before the end of term; if not, they will become Green election policy.

“Blocking these reforms would be a terrible blow to harm reduction,” Mr Rattenbury said. “I don’t believe there are justifiable policy reasons to block this reform.”

Labor will announce its election policy in the coming months, Dr Paterson said.

Nationally, Senator Pocock said, 70 per cent of Australians, however, want reform; in his view, that is a mandate for change. Major parties backed Peta Murphy’s review into online gambling; however, although Labor said it would respond in six months, nine months have passed, and Senator Pocock is worried it will be “kicked down the road even more”. He promised to push federal Labor on this issue.

“It’s overdue; it needs to happen; it has community backing; but clearly there’s some vested interest in the revolving door of government staffers who go to work in the sports betting industry, and a real lack of transparency about some of the lobbying activity that happens.”