NZ - Pokie machines sucking $19m out of city
29.11.2006
By John Cousins
A gambling addiction help agency is urging reforms of the pub pokie industry after disclosures that gaming machines will suck nearly $19 million out of Tauranga’s economy this year.
The impact of gambling on the spending power of city residents was spelt out by Problem Gambling Foundation strategist Adrian Straayer to a city council meeting yesterday.
On the basis that each of the city’s 509 pub pokie machines took an average of $47,500 a year more than they paid out, and an estimated $5.5m was distributed to community organisations, it left Tauranga out of pocket to the tune of $18.7m.
Mr Straayer said 90 per cent of problem gambling addictions were caused by pokie machines.
The council was reviewing its three-year-old policy which controls the total number of pokie machines allowed in Tauranga and how many could operate at each venue.
It recommended lowering the number of pokies from one machine per 147 head of population, to one per 170 people.
Mr Straayer suggested a change to the system in which pub gaming machines are operated by societies that deducted 36 per cent of pokies’ revenue as expenses. A third of revenue is paid out as grants to community groups and 31 per cent goes to the Government.
Six major national trusts handle 60 per cent of the $1 billion pokie revenues and one of them, Pub Charity, was recently named as a Tauranga City Council city partner for its funding of projects, including the museum.
Mr Straayer, a former policeman and Internal Affairs gaming compliance manager, said the societies were multimillion-dollar businesses operating in a non-disclosure and commercially sensitive environment.
One of his suggestions to reform the industry was to bring it under local control by establishing fully accountable community-elected trusts to operate all the machines in its district. Machine profits would nearly all be retained in the local community from which it came. However, the council said this was outside the scope of the review and was an issue for central Government.
Mr Straayer said acquiring and retaining pokie machine venues was becoming critical to the societies. It was being achieved by incentives, maximising payments to publicans up to the equivalent of $196 per machine per week, influencing grants and backhanders through grant processes, he said.
"The amount of money out there is huge and a lot of people are making a lot of money."
Societies that played by the book could not win because someone else was prepared to offer extras, he said.
