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GAMBLERS HAVE TO
LOSE! WHY?
(Investigator 230, 2026 September) Australians are the world's greatest gambling losers — averaging $1600 lost per adult per year compared to $800 in the USA. Online gambling became significant during the Covid pandemic, and about one in three adult Australians now participate. At https://gambling-toll.australianinstitute.org.au is a "live tracker" which increases by 1100 every second. It represents the dollars Australians have lost by gambling since July 2023. When I checked on August 25, the total shot past $109,593,000,000 representing a weekly average loss of $666 million or $66,000 per minute! This is comparable to Australia-wide expenditures on items like alcohol, home utilities, rent, food, sex and cars. The social costs of gambling include debt, family breakdown, domestic violence, bankruptcies, increased crime, and suicides. In 2023-2024 Australia’s "big five" betting companies won $5400 million from Australian punters. The companies paid $700 million in state taxes, $720 million in compulsory fees to racing and sporting organizations, $600 million in advertising and promotion, GST on some services, state payroll tax on employee wages, and licensing and compliance costs. The total taxable profit after all this was $400 million on which they paid $100 million in federal company tax. The winners are government, the companies, and the employees who have jobs. This describes just the "big five"; there's also all the other gambling. And it's all paid for by the losses of gamblers. The Murphy Inquiry (2023) — titled "You win some, you lose more" — was a federal parliamentary report with 31 recommendations to overhaul Australia's online gambling laws. This included bans on advertising of online gambling and at live sports events. Although most Australians want such bans, the federal government in its Interactive Gambling Amendment Bill 2026 stopped short. The reasons may be that tax revenue could decline, and because Australia's lobbying industry has well-paid lobbyists, some working for betting companies, who purchase "face time" with politicians to influence their votes. The Alliance for Gambling Reform says: "The Alliance is
concerned that powerful vested interests from the
gambling industry, and their allies, have a growing influence via
increasing access to Australia's Parliament House, due to a lack of
regulation and transparency."
Investigator Magazine, since 1992, has shown that gamblers mostly lose. That gamblers have to lose can be proved from the science of mathematics, but also by the observation that gambling venues, betting companies, their taxes and advertising fees, and salaries of employees, are all financed by gamblers' losses. $66,000 per minute! The Alliance for Gambling Reform https://www.agr.org.au/policysubmissions https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/over-104-billion-lost-to-gambling-since-murphy-review/ The Hon Anika Wells MP (19 August, 2026) https://alp.org.au/news/strongest-ever-gambling-reforms-passed/ (BS)
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