Ideas@TheCentre
How (not) to pick a nanny-state winner
Hot on the heels of the Wilkie and Xenophon-led pokies debate, a Southern Cross University report released this week has warned of the next big bogeyman. Online gaming, like everything else online, is growing fast.
Australians now spend $600 million annually gambling online, and problem gamblers lose an average of $825 per month, according to the report.
The report will no doubt excite the hand-wringing brigade (‘we must do something!’) but it should also set their alarm bells ringing. While the boffins are preoccupied thinking up clever and complex ways to stop us from putting money into machines, Aussies have found an even more efficient method of blowing their hard earned cash: via a credit card and a few keystrokes in their lounge room. Could it be possible that the pollies are a few steps behind?
This sudden explosion of online gaming highlights the difficulty of regulating vice. Whether it is sex, drugs, punting on the horses, or eating Big Macs – if people want to do it they will find a way. We can regulate pokies and regulate online gaming, but in the blink of an eye some other as-yet-undreamed-of technology will spring up to replace it.
With the trend for all things retro, perhaps we’ll even see a resurgence of illegal backyard shed casinos, fumigated with Chop Chop and lubricated by moonshine RTDs.
What makes online gambling all the more difficult to regulate is that so many of the gaming websites are hosted overseas. Are digital poker games such an outrageous problem that we think it is necessary for government to block foreign websites? A few years back, Senator Stephen Conroy’s attempt to ‘filter’ the Internet taught us what a fraught – and fruitless – exercise that would be.
Governments and the do-gooders that egg them on can try all they like to protect us from ourselves. But they can’t get away from the fact that, ultimately, some people just don’t want to be protected.
Jessica Brown is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.
