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UWA Business School
The recent Productivity Commission report into gambling has found that between 80,000 and 160,000 Australian adults have severe gambling problems, while another 350,000 are at moderate risk.

The report has sparked discussion over whether we should place greater restrictions on poker machines, with the Federal Government announcing plans to set up a committee to analyse the recommendations.

Winthrop Professor Dick Mizerski, a consumer addiction expert from the UWA Business School, says the report fails to address the real issues.

‘The Productivity Commission report is a biased and anti-gambling review that misses the point on what drives people to gamble,' he says. ‘They have the whole theory wrong.'

‘The Productivity Commission wants to guard people by changing their beliefs, not their behaviour. But our research shows that even if you change people's beliefs by teaching them that winning is hard to do, it doesn't change their behaviour.'

Five years ago, Professor Mizerski supervised an experimental study into online gambling as part of Dr. Bill Jolley's PhD thesis.

After running an online casino - complete with jackpots - over the space of a month, the researchers found that customer satisfaction had a negligible affect on the frequency of gambling. Instead, the frequency of gamblers' game play was a far better predictor of their future gambling.

Professor Mizerski therefore suggests that to address problem gambling, we must change the habits of problem gamblers. This means, he says, not just promoting responsible gambling, but also developing interventions that address problem gamblers' habits.

The Productivity Commission has suggested measures that include capping the amount of bets per session at twenty dollars, and not allowing more than one dollar to be waged per button-push.

‘These measures won't make any difference,' predicts Professor Mizerski. ‘People will just move across to the next machine.'

Professor Mizerski suggests that we should instead focus on helping problem gamblers to understand their gambling habits. ‘In the past we've done experiments where every time someone reaches for a cigarette, we've gotten them to write down what they were thinking, forcing them to try and understand why they really picked it up. That kind of intervention is more successful than simply giving people warnings about the dangers of smoking.

‘People say, "Poker machines are the crack cocaine of gambling. This is dangerous stuff." But that's not the case for the vast majority of players. Electronic gambling is like any other frequently purchased consumer product: it follows the same distribution of consumption or play. With further research, we will hopefully be able to identify problem gamblers by their patterns of play.'

According to the Productivity Commission, gambling addicts account for around 40 per cent of total spending on poker machines and cost the community between $4.7 billion and $8.5 billion each year. However, Mizerski disputes these figures, arguing that we are still unable to clearly differentiate between heavy and problem gambling.

Professor Mizerski and his students are expecting to run another online casino in order to further investigate methods of changing habits and reducing problem gambling.


Media Reference
Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
E: [email protected]

Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
E: [email protected]