The Changing Landscape of Indigenous Gambling in Northern Australia: Current Knowledge and Future Directions

Abstract

Little is formally known about the gambling practices, both regulated (e.g. poker machines) and unregulated (e.g. card games), of indigenous people in northern Australia, nor of the range of social consequences of these practices. To begin addressing this shortfall, a scoping study of indigenous gambling in the Northern Territory (NT) was conducted. This paper reports the key findings of this study and integrates them with information on indigenous gambling from the Northern Territory Prevalence Survey 2005 and from the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey 2002. The emergent picture of indigenous gambling in the NT is one of widespread incorporation of gambling, both regulated and unregulated, into contemporary indigenous social practices with considerable negative consequence. However, the strength of this conclusion is tempered by the paucity of available data, by the limitations of existing gambling research methodologies and by the scoping purpose of the exercise.

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Community Benefit Fund of the Northern Territory Government and supported by the Northern Territory Treasury through the provision of EGM player loss data.

Notes

1. Equivalized gross household income is a standardized income measure which has been adjusted for the different income needs of households of different size and composition. It takes into account the greater needs of larger households and the economies of scale achieved by people living together (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004c).