It is strange to me we don't act on gambling the way we acted on smoking.
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We knew smoking was bad for us. The government knew smoking was bad for us. It acted to protect us. Sure, it's true, some people smoke and get away with it (I wish that had been my mother) but most smokers suffer harms of some kind.
Same with gambling. Some get away with it but most suffer harms of some kind. If it's true your first contact with gambling sets the tone for your gambling habits, no wonder I never took it up. Las Vegas on a trip in 1983. Lost $50 in a very brief amount of time and it was no fun, anyway. Like tearing up money into confetti and watching the wind blow it all away.
This week, we learned about the very worst of the harms of gambling. Marlene Kasurinen revealed her husband Raimon (Ray) took his own life after going broke. He'd poured thousands of dollars into poker machines at the Hellenic Club, Canberra.
Marlene says staff did nothing to stop him. She told The Canberra Times club staff would deliver "milkshakes, hot dogs, toasted sandwiches, pastries, cheese, cake, ice-cream" to her husband free of charge as he sat, gambling.
It's now been four years since the much-loved Canberran made the decision to end his life. Mr Kasurinen's son-in-law, former policeman David Chambers, emailed an official at the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission on October 13. He wrote: "I consider your agency to be completely incompetent and unworthy of public support or public funding."
And so far no action - but the heartbreaking revelations of Ray Kasurinen's family tell us the real story beyond gamblers themselves.
Most of the research around gambling concentrates on gamblers. But new Australian research now reveals the effects of gambling on others, those related socially to the gambler, those who live in the same household.
Matthew Rockloff, professor of psychology at Central Queensland University and head of the Experimental Research Gambling Laboratory, tells us people who live in households with no gambling problems have the highest wellbeing of any Australian households.
He and his team combed through the HILDA (Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia) data and found even when they adjusted for other factors, there were relationships between living in a household with a gambler suffering problems and the poor health and wellbeing for those living with the gambler.
Depression. Anxiety. Financial dissatisfaction. All rise when living with a gambler.
Is that true across Australia? Sure. But one state in this country is much better off.
Yep, the state which brought us the concept of State Daddies, the state with the glorious Kimberleys, the state which knows how to get its fair share of the GST. Yep, that one. It has just one place you can pour your savings into poker machines, and that's the casino. Yep, only in one casino in the entire state. Western Australia has the lowest rate of gambling losses per capita in the entire nation. And it turns out poker machines are the most harmful form of gambling you can get. Guess it's the 24-hour unending greediness of the machines.
It's also true, says Rockloff, the closer you live to a gambling venue, the more likely your household is to experience gambling harms.
"You can eliminate the problem by limiting supply. Australia has one of the highest spends in the world per capita and has also one of the highest rates of availability of gambling in the world," he sais.
So, apart from taking the advice of those illustrious chroniclers of Australian life, The Whitlams, "to blow up the pokies and drag them away", there are actions governments can take to protect Australians.
Or we could ask governments to blow up the pokies. At least limit them to one place per state, one place every 2,527,013 square kilometres. Doubt it, though. States love money.
But we should insist on precommitment legislation. Low stakes. Low limits. We need to build in safety features in order to protect gamblers, the people they live with and all the others who are impacted by harmful gambling.
"We have the technologies to limit supply and prevent people from spending an inordinate amount of money," says Rockloff.
As he points out, a regular wage earner can't afford to lose money on a regular basis, can't gamble every week without experiencing harm. On average, a loss on a poker machine is $1200 or more per hour. That's the average. You can lose more. Much more.
Sure, we all spend money on entertaining ourselves. We go to fancy dinners or we see Taylor Swift or binge endlessly (yep, halfway through all the seasons of The West Wing right now and am still recovering from Bad Sisters). But it stops.
And while it's true television is addictive, the cost of streaming is reasonably (more-or-less) fixed.
Gambling isn't like that.
Which is why every single state and territory in Australia needs to adopt mandatory precommitment for poker machines. Make the maximum limit as low as possible. Gambling promoters will always say limits should be high. A limit of $1 million might be perfectly suitable for Richie Rich but the rest of us need more realistic limits. Voluntary precommitment will never work. Think of how much willpower you have and recognise that's how all of us function.
States and territories are at various states of progress with mandatory precommitment. In the ACT, it's predicted costs to make the necessary changes would be about $70 million. The Kasurinens are estimated to have lost nearly $500,000.
To the family of every problem gambler, $70 million is a bargain. All governments need to act now.
Jenna Price is a Canberra Times columnist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.
Jenna Price is a Canberra Times columnist and a visiting fellow at the Australian National University.
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