- In short: One of the first cashless gaming trials in NSW found the technology made little difference to the behaviour of gamblers.
- The Wests New Lambton trial has received criticism from gambling reform advocates, who say it did not include a card with binding and default limits.
- What’s next?: The Independent Panel on Gaming Reform will provide findings from an expanded statewide cashless gaming trial.
Gambling shouldn’t be privatised. Idk why we allow people to profit from addiction. Their incentive is just to make it worse.
Personally I’d say we should take the approach we did to smoking. Ban its advertising, severely restrict where it can be done (in this case, ban pokies outside of casinos), and tax the shit out of it.
Gambling in general, not just pokies.
Which bit? Yes ban all gambling advertising. It’s mostly sports betting that needs to take the hit there. Tax it all, yes, preferably in a way that isn’t directly translatable into higher fees for users, so like an increased land tax/rates bill, for example, rather than “5% of every gambling transaction”. But the pokies thing is very specific to Australian pubs and clubs. Poker isn’t really an issue, and sports betting obviously happens online and not in physically space, so it doesn’t really apply.
I agree to an extent.
My opinion is we need a bit of a brute force approach to help correct how far off course compared to the rest of the world we are.
Ban advertising.
Tax the venues with pokies - rla revenue profit model that makes having them in clubs / pubs net negative to anyone running a venue.
Tax online gambling, ban their advertising.
Block non conforming online gambling sites.
Etc.
We are over 5 times the per capita spend of second place on gambling spend globally. Until we aren’t first things need to drastically change.
Why would you expect changing the method of payment to effect spending habits…?
You wouldn’t, which is exactly why the industry is pushing for a scheme like this.
I know that the whole cashless gaming is supposedly targeting tax cheats blah blah,.
But the whole cashless thing is making me twitch.
You are further distancing money from a physical/logical good to an abstract thing that doesn’t really mean anything.
The move away from cash to cashless is having the same effect.
Paying $15 when you only have a $20 in your wallet to last you to payday is a lot different to just tapping your card for those new shoes, or another $500 of ‘points’ to flush through a pokie.
idk, maybe I’m an old guy barking at the moon, but something feels really off. I think I’m going to pull out $500 in cash, and use that to pay for everything and see if it changes my perspective.
