NZ - “Gambling addicts strip family homes to feed habit”
Author: James Ihaka
Source: New Zealand Herald
Published Date: Nov 23, 2007
Full Document:
NEW ZEALAND — Desperate poker machine gamblers are stripping homes of essential fittings to finance their habit.
Some Housing New Zealand tenants in South Auckland have ripped carpet, ovens, stair rails, doors and water cylinders from their homes and sold them to scrap yards and pawnbrokers.
A Manurewa woman, who did not want to be named, told the Herald her husband’s problem gambling had escalated from spending “$10 every now and then” to selling his family’s hot water supply and oven for his pokie fix at a local bar.
“He ripped out the hot water cylinder and sold it for $230 at a scrap metal yard,” she said. “I think it was later that week when he took the oven and sold that too - it didn’t seem to bother him that we had two children to feed.”
