Feature Australia has a ‘pokies’ gambling problem, but is change coming?

At the lowest point of her addiction, Kate Seselja sat in front of an electronic gambling machine for hours, crying as she stared at the glowing nil balance.

Her phone buzzed on an intermittent loop - her worried husband calling “a hundred times”, and increasingly desperate to find her.

Overcome with feelings of dread and shame, she thought about ending her life - but didn’t because she was pregnant with her sixth child.

“I was so mentally, physically, [and] emotionally done with this existence, this addiction” she tells the BBC.

“But I couldn’t figure out how to take my life and not hers.”

After 12 years of destructive gambling, she had lost about A$500,000 (£273,000; $336,000).

Ms Seselja’s story, while shocking, is familiar to many Australians - about one in 100 has a gambling problem.

If gambling losses were averaged over Australia’s entire adult population, each person would lose about A$1,200 a year, according to H2 Gambling Capital. This is significantly more than for other nations.

Driving this are electronic poker machines, or slot machines - known colloquially here as the pokies. Critics liken them to “electronic heroin”.

But Australia could be on the cusp of the biggest reform to the industry since the machines were first legalised in 1956.

World’s pokies hotspot Australia has just 0.33% of the world’s population, but a fifth of its pokies.

Rows of machines fill not just casinos but thousands of pubs, clubs and hotels too. Each year they rake in about $13bn - more than casinos, lotteries and sports betting combined.

Recent inquiries have found the machines are being used to launder money in Australia. But this is nothing compared to their personal cost, opponents say.

Often concentrated in areas of socio-economic disadvantage, the machines contribute to suicides, financial offences, domestic violence, family breakdowns and poverty, research has shown.

“You’re taught about smoking and drinking alcohol, but nobody warned me about pokies,” Ms Seselja says.

And so, at the age of 18, she slipped a $20 note into a machine one night at her boyfriend’s urging. She instantly won hundreds.

As the lights flashed and the machine sung out, Ms Seselja remembers her heart pounding in reply. “It made me feel like I was lucky or clever.”

“Every time you’d go out with friends, there was pokies available,” she says. “It wasn’t like I left the house thinking yes, I’m going to go gamble tonight.”

But before long, Ms Seselja was feeding all her earnings into the machines. She began lying to loved ones, taking money from her family business, and maxing out credit card after credit card.

“I quickly became somebody I didn’t recognise,” she says, crying. “But I now hold compassion for her, because the reality is I was so unprotected, as a consumer, against addiction by design.”

Researchers like Charles Livingstone say electronic gaming machines (EGMs) are designed to deliver the brain’s happy chemicaldopamine - “in spades”, even when players are losing money, which makes them highly addictive.

“If you wanted to look at the worst example of exploitation of a vulnerable community by a legal product that is poorly regulated, it will be hard to find a better example than the [pokies] industry in Australia,” Dr Livingstone, from Monash University, tells the BBC.

The man who pioneered the use of pokies in Australia - Len Ainsworth - has previously rejected the notion they’re addictive, calling it “nonsense”.

“I mean, if you like something you’ll continue to do it… it’s like kissing girls,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 2017.

Australia’s Gaming Technologies Association also defends the machines, saying they are made according to regulations which prioritise “fairness, probity, and harm minimisation” as “paramount objectives”.

It also points to a failed lawsuit against a pokies manufacturer in 2018. A Federal Court judge found the applicant had not provided enough evidence that features of the machines were addictive and deceptive.

“Playing EGMs is a legitimate recreational activity that millions of Australians enjoy safely,” a spokeswoman said.

Ms Seselja finds that argument ridiculous. “If it’s able to take $10 from you every three seconds, that does not equal harmless entertainment,” she says. Hurdles to reform

There has been growing appetite for change in Australia - and an election on Saturday in New South Wales (NSW) could bring it.

Advocates say NSW, with half of Australia’s pokies, is “the beating heart” of gambling in the nation.

The state government and opposition have committed to policies which target problem gamblers. Premier Dominic Perrottet’s government has also promised - if re-elected - to require all players to set spending limits and to make all machines cashfree within five years. BBC