By Cara Waters
The pokies room at The Clocks, outside bustling Flinders Street Station, used to be filled with pensioners, but these days, young people are quickly filling the seats at the gaming machines.
People aged 18 to 24 are now the largest demographic of poker machine users in Victoria, having grown up in a culture where their use was normalised.
Young people are using pokies more than other age categories.Credit: iStock
The latest Victorian Population Gambling and Health Study, published in September, shows gambling participation in Victoria has fallen from 69 per cent in 2019 to 53.3 per cent in 2023. However, rates of problem gambling remain stable and gambling harm has increased, according to the study.
The survey of 11,000 people found just over one in 10 adults (11 per cent) had used poker machines in the past year, but the number was much higher in men aged 18-24, with 16.5 per cent of all Victorian men in that age group using pokies.
“The old stereotype was people in their 40s, 50s and 60s,” Charles Livingstone, associate professor at Monash University, said. “There is a trend that people who use pokies are increasingly younger people.”
Livingstone said it is a concerning trend as regular poker machine use can lead to serious financial and emotional harm, and young people are already vulnerable.
“Pokies offer solace to people in dire straits,” he said. “If there is anyone in dire straits, it is young people.”
Livingstone said pokies can be addictive as they generate a flow of neurochemicals, mainly dopamine.
“Young men, in particular, have started going back to pubs and clubs after lockdowns, some are using pokies as an activity to amuse themselves and a large number have felt it provides some relief from their stresses,” he said.
Australians lose $31 billion annually across all gambling products, and $15.7 billion of this is lost on pokies, leading Dr Simone McCarthy from Deakin University to describe them as “Australia’s biggest problem”.
McCarthy has researched the normalisation of gambling and what young people’s attitudes towards gambling products are and said playing pokies for the first time was a rite of passage for many young people on their 18th birthday.
“There is this idea that playing the pokies is part of turning 18,” she said. “So people’s families will bring them down to the casino or the poker machine venues to engage in gambling for the first time. That kind of normalisation really does influence how young people view gambling. They have positive associations with it. It’s seen as very social, even though it’s often something that you’ll do in isolation.”
McCarthy said she was not aware of any research looking at the link between young people’s familiarity with playing video games and their rising use of pokies.
“We do know that over the years, poker machines have become more skill-based, or perceived to be,” she said.
The new generation of pokies feature more digital effects and problem-solving, rather than just passive button-pressing, she said.
“It wouldn’t surprise me that young people feel familiar with these types of games when they turn 18 – it’s not really a learning curve,” she said. “They’re easy to use. They’re familiar with digital products, and this is a high-tech industry.”
Kate Seselja, co-chair of Gambling Harm Lived Experience Experts, started playing pokies as an 18-year-old when her boyfriend took her to a pokies venue.
“One night, I thought, ‘Oh, I’ll sit next to him and play a machine too’,” she said. “I put $20 in and won a few hundred and that was huge money to me back then. It just straight away lit up a pathway in my brain that said: ‘This is easy money, this is fun’,” she said.
Kate Seselja started gambling on poker machines at 18 and nearly lost her life to them. Credit: Martin Ollman
Seselja said it didn’t take long for her to transition from using pokies with her boyfriend to using them on her own.
“That really just captured not only my mental awareness, but it hijacked my sense of hope at that stage,” she said. “I suddenly was hoping for an opportunity to use a poker machine, if I was out and hoping for the next press, rather than be a normal 18-year-old with hopes and dreams of building a future for myself. It just was like the next opportunity to gamble.”
Any available money she had was going into poker machines, and some weeks, she lost her whole pay cheque in an hour on the pokies on payday.
“Over the next 15 years, I lost over half a million dollars and almost took my life in 2012,” she said. “The only reason I’m still talking to you today is I was pregnant and could not figure out how to take my life and not harm my child. So that night, my husband pleaded with me to come home, and it was a real kind of moment where he could finally see just how impacted I was by these machines.”
Now, Seselja educates her own children about pokies addiction and spreads the message more broadly.
“My 15-year-old son was listening to me talk about gambling harm, and he said, ‘Mum, I’m so glad that you’ve told us about this’, and he said, ‘I’m going to make sure that none of my friends ever get harmed’.”
Gambler’s Help 1800 858 858
Lifeline 13 11 14