A seven-step adjustment of pokies could prove to be the perfect foil for the electronic machines that prey on vulnerable people, a Tasmanian anti-pokies campaigner says.
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Rein in The Pokies convenor Pat Caplice, who has been battling to see poker machine reform in Tasmania for five years, said the adjustments were specifically developed and targeted to combat addictive tactics programmed into the states machines.
Mr Caplice said the tax rate of pokies differing between pubs and clubs and casinos had dominated debate, but harm minimisation - like that which could be achieved through proposed alterations - should be central.
"In the past the whole debate has simply become about whether pokies were completely removed from pubs or not," he said.
"But there's more than one way to skin the pokies addiction dead cat.
"What I see as the central matter is the opportunity for genuine harm reduction."
Mr Caplice said the proposed Future of Gaming legislation was focused on how poker machine winnings were shared equally between Federal Group and pubs, but how it impacted players fell off the agenda.
The seven steps Mr Caplice had proposed to be introduced into the legislation had been workshopped through discussion with leading Australian addiction and poker machine experts and were deliberately designed to help people affected by addictive elements of machines, not recreational players.
"Most people who play pokies are able to walk away and aren't affected by the addictive elements, but we're wanting to help the 30 per cent who are," he said.
The seven adjustments are:
- Maximum bets reduced
- Spin speeds dragged out to to six seconds
- Maximum jackpot reduced
- Increase the bet amount "Return to Player"
- Disallow losses disguised as wins
- Disallow false near-misses
- Provide regular machine shutdowns
Monash University school of public health and preventative medicine associate professor Dr Charles Livingstone is an eminent expert and poker machine researcher.
He said the way pokies worked was a "perfect storm of conditioning" aimed at potential vulnerabilities of at-risk people looking to escape stress.
"The two basic principles that are designed into poker machines are called operant conditioning and classical conditioning," he said.
"You get operant conditioning - that is a series of intermittent rewards which provide their own set of reinforcements - and then you get classical conditioning - which consists of the bells and whistles going off every time you get a modest win.
"They're very, very much playing on people's psychological vulnerabilities."
The forms of conditioning are ingrained human psychological responses studied over decades.
Dr Livingstone said combining the two forms of conditioning meant pokies were "very carefully engineered reinforcement machines designed to extract as much money as possible from as many people as possible".
He said more recent research had revealed poker machine gambling led to the release of dopamine - a chemical released in the brain that incites a pleasant feeling and reduces stress.
Both conditioning systems stimulate the dopamine reward system in people's brains and that's the core of the addictive process of poker machines.
- Dr Charles Livingstone
Dr Livingstone said more modern machines were finely tuned to make them more addictive through the amount of lines playable disguising losses as wins, the number of wheels and symbols encouraging near misses and using design to target specific demographics.
"Poker machines are essentially a random number generator which is part of a computer system which basically comes up with a solution to a range of numbers within a particular pre-designated range," he said.
"The number of possible outcomes is around the order of 10 million or so ... the first thing to remember is as soon as you push the button the outcome is known. The spinning around is just a simulation and has nothing to do with the actual outcome."
Finding a balance between profit and harm minimisation has remained on the agenda in Tasmania since 2018 when the state election was partly personified by stakeholders battling to have their voices recognised while a new deal for gambling legislation was negotiated.
Dr Livingstone said the situation in Tasmania was different to other parts of Australia.
"Tasmania's distribution of poker machines is the most regressive in Australia," he said.
"They are overwhelmingly located in areas of disadvantage."
The Future of Gaming public consultation paper describes the harm minimisation framework in Tasmania as "best practice".
It said the new framework did "not propose any specific changes to the harm minimisation framework", but that "harm minimisation has continued to be front of mind during the development of the changes to be introduced under the new arrangements".
The next steps for the Future of Gaming legislation will see it introduced into the Tasmanian lower house at some stage this year. If it passes the lower house, the upper house will take their turn at scrutinising the legislation.
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