Whether it’s Liberal or Labor, the people in charge are beholden to the pokies industry

Kate Seselja is one of Australia’s leading gambling reform advocates, particularly in the field of poker machines. I spoke to her on Thursday in the wake of the damning report by the NSW auditor-general, which criticises the government for “not setting any targets for reducing harm associated with gaming machines”.

Fitz: Thank you for your time. I know your passion and expertise this field is founded on your own experience as a victim of gambling harm. Tell us something of it?

The first time Kate Seselja used a poker machine she won $1000. Credit: Martin Ollman

KS: I was born and raised in Chris Minns’ electorate in Sydney. I grew up and went to school right next door to the Kingsgrove RSL, which was where I first gambled when I was 18.

Fitz: And did something terrible happen, like you won the jackpot?

KS: Yes, exactly that. I was with my older boyfriend, who gambled, and I just wanted to spend time with him. So the first time I did it, I sat next to a machine, put $20 in and, after just a couple of presses, I won $1000. It just absolutely set off something in my mind and body, which I had absolutely no preparedness for. I was shaking, just sitting there, going, how can this be real? Then a man came over with a clipboard and the cash and handed it to me at the machine. And that proved to be the only time I ever left the venue with cash in my hand.

Fitz: And then did you put it back through the machines in the next few days?

KS: Yeah, it didn’t take long. It quickly progressed from me doing it with my boyfriend, to me noticing how many venues in that area that I could gamble at that I had previously not even noticed on my radar. There were at least 20 just in my neighbourhood! They were in every single social space I went to with my friends – in the pubs, the clubs, the nightclubs. And as soon as you are attuned to it, and the sounds register in your brain, it does something to you that they understand. They’re designed that way, and the average person has no clue what you’re up against: your life versus this machine that is specifically built to take every last cent of your money, if it can. If I hadn’t been still living at home I would have been facing homelessness.

Fitz: At what point did your parents notice?

KS: They didn’t. I ended up meeting my husband, getting married within a year, moving to Canberra and thinking I’d left all that behind. And then, 18 months into our marriage, the mother’s group that I was meeting with our firstborn, decided that they’d meet in a club. I heard that sound again, saw those machines and I was just absolutely drawn back in, which then impacted the next decade of my life … I lost half a million dollars, out of our own business, out of our mortgage, out of personal loans and credit.

Poker machines at Bankstown Sports Club.Credit: Janie Barrett

Fitz: OK, so let me ask this, gently. I know this is gauche, but … so we can understand. When you were losing, day after day, week after week, year after year, ruining your business, your life, and getting to the edge of suicide, why did you go on doing it?

KS: Addiction is a world unto itself and I had been fully, absolutely mentally hijacked by a machine that had been built to do exactly that to me and others.

Fitz: How did you escape?

KS: It took my husband, and a village. And it took me switching from self-hatred to being curious about what had impacted me. How had this happened to me, and to hundreds and thousands of others?

Fitz: What is the core of the problem, as to why successive governments can’t seem to be able to get on top of it?

KS: The core of the problem is that the people who are in charge, whether it’s Liberal or Labor, are beholden to an industry that has ruled the roost since 1956. That’s when Len Ainsworth brought poker machines into New South Wales. He went from making dental chairs to making poker machines in Sydney, and then he unleashed an absolutely horrific machine into our social spaces. He and people like him have spent a lifetime since refining the tech to make it more addictive, more mind-bogglingly dangerous. He’d gone to America where, in the early 1900s, poker machines in their most primitive, ugly, ridiculous form were gathered up, beaten with sledgehammers and thrown in the Hudson because of the power that they wielded over people – that’s why they put them in the Vegas desert.

Here, we just turned a blind eye to it, and not only allowed them into every space, but let them proliferate. Poker machines are the most powerful they have ever been and they exploit human behaviour and neuroscience with precision, to manipulate and groom the human brain to become addicted. Len Ainsworth himself boasted that he “built a better mousetrap”.

Fitz: But the control over politicians by the gambling industry comes via donations?

KS: Absolutely. They’ve been the biggest donor to both major parties since forever, and Clubs NSW is the most powerful lobby group in Australia. It’s akin to and trained with the gun lobby in America. They’ve controlled the legislation, the regulatory space and the politicians. Any time reforms are put up to politicians, they just say, “Yep, you know, we’ll tinker around the edges; we’ll change this, we’ll dot this ‘i’, we will cross that ‘t’.” But essentially they do nothing to stop harm at the source.

Fitz: And NSW is the worst because, as the Herald has pointed out, we’ve got half of the machines in all of Australia?

KS: Yes. In NSW, people lose a million dollars an hour, $24 million a day, to pokies. Of that $8 billion annually, some goes to taxes, but mostly it just goes to the pokie barons and clubs.

Fitz: Which brings me to the next thing I don’t understand. Those figures are beyond outrageous. Most people with even half a brain can see the problem. We know action has to be taken but successive governments completely fail at it. Even this Minns government – which by and large is well regarded and is against an all-but-invisible opposition, so has plenty of political capital to spend – seems completely hamstrung. Why?

KS: It’s absolutely maddening. There has never been more evidence of the harm done. The NSW auditor-general just came out with a damning report and said that the state is doing nothing effective to support harm minimisation outcomes. Caroline Lamb, the chair of the Independent Liquor & Gaming Authority, recently said that clubs and pubs have “no social licence to rape and pillage the community”. Now, these are backed with so much evidence that it is unfathomable that there isn’t immediate meaningful action. This is a public health crisis that is being wilfully ignored by the NSW government. We know what to do. It’s about stopping the harm at the source. We need to have a carded system that is linked to identity, that limits how much you can lose. The Tasmanian model would work: with very sound limits of $100 a day, $500 a month, $5000 a year.

Fitz: Is that what they’ve got in Tassie?

KS: That’s what they proposed. But what the industry likes to do is flex its muscle, and at the moment it’s stalled.

Fitz: Colour me shocked. Defenders will say, however, if people choose to spend their money on this for entertainment, it’s none of your or the government’s damn business.

KS: It’s not just entertainment. That is a lie. When we believe that, we are vulnerable by default and the industry maintains the status quo. The clubs are in the business of generating profits using poker machines to exploit their customers. Everything else they provide is window dressing for their core business, and that is what they work so hard to protect it, via political influence. In any other country if a venue derives 70 per cent to 80 per cent of its revenue from gambling it is called a casino. Here we call them clubs and pubs.
Instead of looking after the people as servants of the public, the politicians are servants to predatory industries, while people are dying, going homeless, turning to crime, committing domestic violence and living in intergenerational poverty. And this has been going on for decades in NSW since the ’50s and nobody has had the political strength to stand up to this predatory industry. It’s such a broken system. The clubs themselves are imposing a toxic product in what should be our safe social spaces. My heart breaks for the millions of people across NSW who have been abandoned by those in power who should have stood up to this industry decades ago and instead stood by and allowed all the human collateral damage to pile up, for the sake of huge profits and a tax revenue stream. I work every day to remove shame from people harmed by gambling – the shame actually belongs to the perpetrators of harm, this industry and to those in power who are doing nothing to stop it.

Fitz: And yet the government itself keeps rabbiting on about the need for the clubs to “self-regulate”.

KS: The industry never has, and never will. The clubs themselves are harming their own members, intentionally. They’re financially exploiting the people that they “care about”. And they don’t give a shit. And the worst part is they have weaponised shame, so in not only taking zero ownership in the harm that they cause people, they then put this label on them and call them “a problem gambler”, as if the problem is not the industry itself, just these people. The first thing I do when I speak to people who’ve been addicted is, I say to them, “there is absolutely nothing wrong with you. You used that product exactly how it was designed – to addict you.” And that just absolutely lifts this barrier of shame off people that think that they are profoundly broken when they’re not; they have fallen into a trap – Len Ainsworth’s “better mousetrap” – that was laid out intentionally for them, with no consumer protections in place.

Fitz: Thank you. Enough. I understand this much better than I did. With the nitty-gritty in NSW, who – beyond the premier – is the politician who needs to act now?

KS: David Harris, the NSW gaming minister.

Fitz: OK. He and his people will read this on Sunday and I’ll ask for an interview in this space for next week, and let’s see what can be done. Thank you for your time.

KS: Thank you. It’s simple to me: you either listen to all of the evidence, the recommendations, or you do nothing, and publicly acknowledge your conflict of interest and that you were a servant to the gambling industry.

Peter FitzSimons is a journalist and columnist. Connect via X.