It would be interesting to hear the basis for your sweeping and definitive conclusions. According to the survey I have linked below, percentage of problem gamblers in Australia is 1.6%.
Old / Expired Link
Firstly, in Australia, there are exactly ZERO 'independent' (and therefore, objective) studies done in regards to problem gambling. The closest you'll get are ones like this one you've linked to, sponsored by? The South Australia state government - for whom, the hundreds of millions of annual tax revenue from the gambling industries clearly creates a conflict of interest and makes the report worthless, in my opinion.
Now, and I realise many will disagree with me on this, if you cut out all the fluff about gambling being 'entertainment' (which it certainly is, if only a super tiny % of your income is spent on it)....the hardcore truth of the matter is that ALL gambling on negative expectation wagers is, by clinical definition, PROBLEM GAMBLING. So, if you're being brutally honest and objective, 99.999% of gamblers in Australia have a PROBLEM with their gambling (especially considering that TAB and SportsBetting agencies run on 16% spreads, pokies are almost all 13% HA, casino game rules range from 2-3% for perfectly played BJ and roulette to over 15-20% for Caribbean Stud and sidebets like Perfect Pairs and jackpots). Lotto games like PowerBall and others have HA as high as 80% or even higher. Well over 50% of adults in Australia buy lottery tickets, which are available at every newsagent in the country. Australia has over 1/5th of the WORLD'S slot machines. We are a nation of 20 million or so.
Now, we can argue all day about where to draw the line on what % of income expended turns a recreational pastime into "problem gambling" - the honest-to-god truth is that 95% of the (otherwise highly educated) adult population of Australia has no clear understanding of the concept of "house edge", and 99.9% would not be able to tell you what % house advantage is on the wagers they are making. If they truly understood, they would be nauseous - many are just not intelligent enough to grasp the concept, others have no real interest either way, others might understand the concept but consider themselves *lucky* and therefore unaffected by the mathematics. 99.9999% (no exaggeration) simply do not truly understand the nature of variance - 99.99% of successful online poker pros don't truly understand the nature and power of variance.
I say all this to explain that the people doing these studies, the "experts" if you will, aren't nearly intelligent enough to even begin to create objective and intelligent studies into the issue. I've had conversations with "experts" of this nature (who VERY much were objective and interested in what I was trying to explain to them - but the simple fact, and I apologise if this sounds arrogant, is that they simply aren't intelligent enough to comprehend this kind of stuff - shit, I was a mathematics geek and studied statistical modeling and sample size confidence intervals at university level, and I couldn't even become close to understanding the true nature of these issues until many years into a hugely successful professional gambling career).
Now, the study you've linked to is from 2005. We're now in 2009 and the internet gambling explosion during the last 4 years makes this particular study obsolete to the point of hilarity (obviously).
The number of people represented by this rate was approximately 18,000 adults (range 16,000 to 20,000), of whom 5,000 are high risk gamblers.
This is one of the "key findings" on page 3 of that report. This "finding" is so ludicrous, I'm going to struggle to even read further. In my first year working at Jupiters, I saw WAY more than 5000 high risk gamblers come through that place, and we're talking about a single tiny land-based casino not even located in the state capital.
Frequent gamblers (respondents who gambled every week or fortnight) were asked about issues that indicated problems with gambling, and about the impacts that gambling may be having on their life.
Do I really need to point out the ludicrous nature of this method of "studying" an issue? Please tell me I do not. Please tell me that you understand that surveying gamblers as to how they personally felt about their gambling activities will give you results so redundant, the "doctors" and "experts" who conducted this study should be ridiculed.
I could go on and on, but the key issues I believe I've covered.
Cliffnotes:
State and Territory governments in Australia derive > 10% of their annual revenue from gambling taxes. All studies commissioned by government departments are, by this very fact, impossible to classify as 'objective'.
The number of people in Australia who truly understand the somewhat complex key issues (an understanding required to even attempt such a study) is probably less than 1000 people. This is a serious estimate.
All gambling that is negative EV (expected value) is, by definition, *problem* gambling. Clearly, if you make $50,000/annum after tax and wager $5/week on a lottery ticket, you do NOT have a gambling problem. But you have to understand the first sentence of this paragraph. Negative expectation gambling, despite efforts by the gambling industry to label the activity as 'entertainment' or 'leisure activity', is problem gambling. You are handing money to another party on every -EV bet.
All the available "studies" (of which you can probably guess my opinion/s as to their 'value') seem to be conducted in 2005 or thereabouts. The last 4 years has seen massive explosion in internet/online gambling, to levels that would blow the collective minds of interested non-industry involved persons.
Surveying gamblers for their responses and personal opinions on gambling is so ludicrous a research method, I'm torn between laughter and anger. Any further expansion on this point is redundant.
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A crude, but far more accurate, method to get a rough idea of the levels of problem gambling would be to compare per capita gambling expenditure (assuming we can even rely on the accuracy of these figures, knowing that they are delivered by non-objective sources) with average per capita income.
I'm too lazy to spend more than a few minutes online for a recent per capita number, but a 2007 BBC article has the following numbers:
Since 1990-91, real per capita expenditure has increased from $A470.60 (US$360) to $A931.64 in 1999-2000. The figure now is likely to be much higher.
1991? lol. "now likely to be much higher?" lollllllllllllllllllllllllllollercaust. Ah, BBC, you crack me up. How does BBC hire a journalist who doesn't understand the concept of CPI or...um...the INTERNET as it's developed from 1991 to 2007. The world makes me laugh at times.
Oh, here we go - a more recent figure on per capita expense from the UK Telegraph:
The country has an estimated 300,000 "problem gamblers", the highest level per capita in the world, who lose an average of A$12,000 a year on "pokies" - glorified fruit machines promising hefty payouts.
On pokies. This number is for pokies only. Just pokies people. Pokies in Australia account for probably 30% (guess only) of gambling expenditure.
After-tax average salary in Australia is something like $20-30,000. And this number is heavily distorted by the "80/20 rule". Ignoring that, after mortgages, utilities, vehicle/transport costs...the average 'expendable' amount an Australian adult has is probably something like $10,000/year (to spend or save).
I'll end this post now, but I hope I've done a decent job of explaining that I'm not talking out of my ass - I kinda know this shit. And it's kinda fucked up, to be honest.
That 1% number. How do I feel about it? I guess...."lol?"