Gambling Self-Exclusion Programmes in Australia: Are They Really Effective?
Gambling Self-Exclusion
Programmes in Australia:
Are They Really
Effective?
Juan Zhang
This non-peer reviewed entry is published as part of the Critical Gambling Studies Blog.
Problem Gambling and Self-Exclusion in Australia
In Australia, problem gambling has been recognised as
a “serious problem” for the past two decades with widely
recorded negative impacts on individuals, communities, and society.
Gambling has been directly associated with problems of addiction, crime,
financial hardship, mental health, family and relationship breakdowns, costing
the public at least $7 billion according to a 2017
report published by the Victorian Responsible Gambling
Foundation.
To address the challenges presented by problem
gambling, self-exclusion programs have been rolled out across Australia in
different gaming venues as a primary method of targeting problem gambling since
the 1990s (Gainsbury, 2014; Nowatzki & Williams, 2002). Self-exclusion
allows individuals to formally ban themselves from entering gaming venues or
from betting on specific games (Blaszczynski et al., 2007). This approach could
potentially limit gamblers’ easy access to gambling venues and facilities – a
clearly identified risk factor associated with problem gambling – and thereby
reduce the risk and harm associated with gambling accessibility (VRGF, 2015).
Initially an industry-driven intervention, this approach has become one of the
most widely adopted risk minimisation solutions available in gambling venues
worldwide for the past 35 years.
The Australian government has invested increasing
amounts of funding and support for a nation-wide gambling harm-minimisation
agenda, championing self-exclusion as a best-practice strategy. Such a strong
and consistent push for early intervention and risk mitigation, however, saw
very little positive results. Australia’s gambling losses continued to grow
exponentially during the same period, reaching $24.9 billion in 2017-18, with
an average loss of $1,292 for each gambling adult (QGSO, 2019). For some time
now, Australiana have been among the world’s
“biggest losers” with the highest losses per capita,
dwarfing other casino hubs such as the United States and Singapore.
Critiques of Self-Exclusion Programs
Serious questions have been asked about the
effectiveness of self-exclusion programs, while rising concerns over issues of
public awareness, under-utilisation, exclusion enforcement, and frequent breach
of agreement have been widely reported (Gainsbury, 2014; Fogarty & Taylor-Rodgers,
2016). An early evaluation report of self-exclusion in South Australia called
this approach a “bluff” maintained by industry and government regulatory
authorities (SACES, 2003). Within political circles, Senator Nick Xenophon openly
discredited self-exclusion as “a joke”, one that “doesn’t work and the industry
knows it” (Norrie, 2011). Some of the identified weaknesses and challenges are
not unique to the Australian context as evidence of the limits of
self-exclusion can be found in Canada, the US and Europe (see Blaszczynski et
al., 2007; Hancock & Smith, 2017; Hayer & Myer, 2010; Tremblay et al.,
2008). However, the Australian gambling industry continues to highlight
locally-based self-exclusion as a core component of its latest “responsible
gambling strategy”, supported by claims of psychological benefits to
gamblers and observed behavioural improvement (Hing & Nuske, 2012;
Ladouceur et al., 2007). Money, effort, and faith continue to be poured into
self-exclusion programs across states and territories without alternatives
considered or strategies in place to address their identified limitations.
The program’s under-utilisation points to a persistent
lack of understanding on why gambling individuals make conscious decisions to
reject or avoid programs designed to help them. Both the gambling industry and
policy makers often work under the assumption that once a risk-reduction
program is set in place, it will be automatically welcomed and taken up by
target users. In reality, however, this is rarely the case. Fogarty and
Taylor-Rodgers (2016) reported that public awareness of self-exclusion remains
very limited. Even among those who already know about these programs, few
decide to take part due to a range of personal reasons and preferences. It
remains to be explained why self-exclusion works for some individuals and not
for others. A more nuanced understanding is also needed on who is motivated to
engage with self-exclusion programs, who is disinterested in participating, and
exactly how harm or risk can be minimised under very different individual and
social circumstances.
In-venue based detection and exclusion, enforcement
also remains ineffective across contexts. Breaches and
early termination of such exclusion agreements are very common (Fogarty & Taylor-Rodgers,
2016). Currently, there is no strategy in place to keep self-excluded gamblers
away from undertaking other forms of gambling, or to stop them from gambling
elsewhere (e.g., online betting or gambling in overseas destinations). Gambling
venue employees find it particularly difficult to carry out in-venue detection,
identification, and exclusion enforcement. The experiences of gambling service
providers remain largely unknown, especially the different kinds of incentives
and disincentives they face in the context of enforcing self-exclusion orders
on a daily basis. Kingma (2015) notes a fundamental paradox in the gambling
risk management agenda – gambling venues are supposed to do the policing,
turning away customers who bring profits to their business. This
paradox reflects a major conflict of interest when the gambling industry acts
as its own gatekeeper to turn customers away. This
conflict of interest puts service staff in a difficult position; they may
demonstrate strong hesitation in exercising strict enforcement (also see
Hancock, 2012; Hancock & Smith, 2017).
Gambling Mobility Poses Further Challenges
A further problem with current self-exclusion measures
is a lack of understanding on gambler mobility. When exclusion orders are
limited only to a single venue, or multiple venues within reachable proximity
(e.g., in neighbouring cities or states), such orders perform symbolic
functions and offer no real effective deterrence. Individuals can easily cross
city or state boundaries to gamble in venues unidentified in their agreements.
They can also engage with online gambling platforms or visit venues overseas. These
challenges will likely undo any governmental efforts put in place to minimise gambling
harm through voluntary self-exclusion measures.
Constrained by a sedentary perspective, studies of
problem gambling continue to assume that gambling practices, harms and risks
are bounded by place. Gamblers frequently cross state and national boundaries
constantly in search of a new place to play and a new experience to enjoy.
Indeed, it is no secret that Australians enjoy travelling overseas for the
purpose of gambling, spending between $64m-$400m in a wide range of activities
and locations including illegal offshore venues (DSS, 2021). Popular overseas
destinations include Singapore, Macau S.A.R, Vietnam, Cambodia, and the
Philippines. This growing trend presents major challenges to place-based
exclusion programs when travelling gamblers spend money overseas and bring back
possible debts and associated problems upon return. A mobile perspective is
therefore urgently needed in gambling studies to assess the impact of physical
and online gambler mobility on self-exclusion and other responsible gambling
strategies, and to extend investigation of accessibility, gambling risk and
harm beyond the bounds of national territories.
Understanding Gambling Risk Regimes with Ethnographic
Approaches
A lack of first-hand experience of self-exclusion
experiences, limited empirical knowledge on individual motivations and actions,
and the restrictive sedentary view that ignores the increasingly mobile nature
of gambling, generate serious empirical and theoretical gaps in knowledge on
problem gambling and preventative strategies. Current research on
self-exclusion still predominantly relies on large-scale surveys and one-off
short interviews as a means of collecting primary data (e.g., Kotter et al.,
2019; Lischer & Schwarz, 2018). While helpful, the research findings shed
little light on individual agency, long-term motivations, and actions from a
first-person, grounded perspective. Ethnographic approaches offer crucial
insights, with a focus on long-term, sustained engagement and observation with
individuals who are duly recognized as agentic actors capable of explaining
their actions, understanding their circumstances, and making decisions about their
future. Self-exclusion needs to be understood from an ethnographic perspective
because it is not just simply a government program – it reflects human
conflicts, tensions, different interests, and politics, as well as changing
individual choices and actions.
In addition to ethnographic approaches critical
investigation of notions such as access and accessibility, risk and
responsibility, exclusion, and regulation at the core of the current policy
framing on problem gambling in Australia and beyond is required. Michel
Foucault’s theories of different regimes of power and governmentality (1991)
enable a focus on heterogeneous and dispersed forms of power that work through
dominant risk management paradigms, with a specific emphasis on proactive risk
reduction and containment (see also Keane, 2002, and Nicoll, 2019 on a
Foucauldian approach to addiction and gambling in everyday life).
Instead of focusing on the individual or the industry
as separate risky subjects with different
expectations of responsibility, applying
a risk regime framework recognizes multiple forces in shaping gambling
practices and gambling governance. This enables
us to understand how risky subjects are produced as a result of global forces
and local social and economic policies. More nuanced accounts of how gamblers,
gambling venues and government regulators develop different understandings and
experiences of risk, reward and responsibility will lead to new insights on the
different interests and positions of each party within gambling transactions.
Gambling related risks are complex and interlinked.
These can be economic (e.g., business profitability), political (e.g.,
regulatory and government legitimacy), social (e.g., community welfare and
crime) and health related (e.g., addiction), defined in different terms and
conditions by different stakeholders. Current policy and research focused on
gambling risks continues to lean heavily towards definitions from a regulatory
perspective (e.g., Johansson et al., 2009). Within this public framing of
gambling risk and responsibility, some gamblers are categorised as “problem
gamblers”, some as “at risk”, and others as responsible and risk-free,
reflecting a top-down “project of subjectification” (Huxley, 2008) that can be
rigid and stigmatising. As an alternative, a risk regime perspective may bring
forward an in-depth understanding of how gambling individuals develop their own
notions of risk and exercise their own risk management strategies, which may
look drastically different from government and expert-led approaches. The lived
experiences of individuals help to shed light on risk and responsibility
outside of the dominant perspective as individuals rationalise their interests
and practices in a day-to-day context. It unveils how different individuals
understand responsibility in different ways, and act in ways that are informed
by both the dominant public discourse and their situated interpretations. These
highly contextualised understandings and actions are needed to provide
empirically grounded knowledge useful for the improvement of current gambling
policies and the development of more targeted programs.
Ethnographic understanding will also unveil the
interlinked paradoxes and tensions in the current gambling risk minimisation
strategies. It helps, for example, to interrogate how voluntariness in
self-exclusion is understood and exercised, and how gatekeeping by service
providers is performed and challenged on the ground. And it highlights everyday
conflicts and tensions take place in the context of gambling self-exclusion,
and how service staff exercise judgements and strategies to practice in-venue
exclusion situationally and flexibly. Individuals
involved in self-exclusion agreements are not just problem gamblers or venue
service providers; they are embedded in multiple social and professional roles,
as consumers, workers, managers, consultants, and regulators. Depending on the
structural positions available to subjects in the gambling risk regime, individuals
have to make sense of what problem gambling and responsible gambling mean
within their specific area of action and care.
I have argued that the critical issue of gambler
mobility needs to be understood as central to transforming gambling practices
and risk management as the industry grows globally. It may be time to move away
from approaches that predominantly focus on state-centred, place-bounded
practices of self-exclusion programs to examine how travelling bodies and
differentiated national frameworks challenge the very basis of such programs.
In the past ten years, gambling in the Asia Pacific has taken on transnational
characteristics (Zhang, 2016) thanks to the transforming casinos and luxurious
integrated resorts offering new leisure experiences to Australian gambling
tourists (Lee, 2019). These latest developments radically defy conventional
assumptions of gambling being a fixed and territorialised practice. Current
research has yet to move away from a form of persistent “methodological
nationalism” (Wimmer & Schiller, 2002) that offers a skewed view on
gambling risks and governance. New theoretical developments, methodologies, and
empirical insights on the increasingly mobile nature of gambling are therefore
needed to shed light on heterogeneous experiences on the ground with a more
reflexive understanding of responsibilisation and risk management for better
policy making and service provision in future.
Juan Zhang is Senior Lecturer of Social Anthropology at the
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Bristol. Her research
interests include transnational mobilities, labour migration, and casinos as
speculative urban development in Asia. She has published in journals including Environment
& Planning D, Environment & Planning A, Pacific Affairs, and Mobilities,
among others. She co-edited a book The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations
Across China's Borders with Amsterdam University Press, 2017.
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