Lockdowns from the coronavirus pandemic have scratched sports and knocked out casinos, but every cloud has its silver lining. And in Australia’s case, the silver lining has to do with money that is not wagered.
“Australians are saving 1 billion U.S. dollars a month,” said Tony Mohr, the executive director of Alliance for Gambling Reform. “And that is money that is appearing in people’s bank accounts and they are able to pay the bills and put food on the table.”
Australians lose more money to gambling than people in any other country, almost AU$25 billion (US$16.3 billion) a year. More than half of that money goes into electronic gambling machines.
“A woman at Easter had told me that she had money to buy Easter eggs for her children without trying to work out where to get the money from for the first time in years,” said gambling reform advocate Anna Bardsley, who had a 10-year addiction to electronic gambling machines. “I’ll never get that time back and time that I could have been doing much better things, time that I should have been spending with my children.”
Still the shutdown has done major damage to the country’s gambling industry. NSW Clubs, which represents more than 1,200 locales in New South Wales that offer electronic gambling machines, estimated they have cut more than 35,000 jobs.
As restrictions begin to ease across the county and gambling places prepare to re-open, Mohr worries about the accrued savings and the funds received from wage subsidy programs.
“If we just go back to the way it was it will actually be going back to a worse situation than we had and that is because people are under so much more financial stress now,” he said. “Hundreds of thousands of people are under employed now or who have just lost their jobs and they are also losing money to poker machines that is going to hit them much harder, affect their lives a lot more.”
