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AUSTRALIA
by Australians being quite affluent at the moment; they go out a lot for entertainment.
What tends to happen is Tabcorp, for example, the largest casino operator in Australia (with
The ‘Great Southern Land’ is home to 200,000 gaming machines – an incredible number Star City in New South Wales and the Queensland casinos), build business by increasing
when you consider there are only 13 casinos in all of Australia. The bulk of the machines visitation and increasing spend per visitation, which slowly increases revenue.
are not in casinos; known as ‘pokies’, they are in bars, clubs, all manner of locations. Their “Macau has taken away a lot of the high rollers, but high rollers are high risk, steady
proliferation has seen the slot machine take the blame for problem gambling in the Victoria growth is actually preferable. The growth in Australia is not double-digit in gaming revenue
region, with fingers pointed by religious groups but local government unable to take action but it’s solidly into four or five per cent, which is very good when you consider the
because the drop in taxes would mean financial suicide for the authority. Consumer Price Index is going up at about 2.5 to three percent.”
John Willis, Senior Product Manager for market-leading slot manufacturer Aristocrat,
explained: “With 200,000 machines, we’ve got around as many as Nevada has. The poker, or
‘pokie’ machine, is a casino-standard machine, and it’s the same machine as we sell in the
US, Cambodia, Tasmania, everywhere. The only difference is that different jurisdictions have
different standards; in Australia, we are governed by national standards, but because we are
a federation every state has its own annexure. The market is individual.
“By far the greatest majority of games in Australia are one cent games. The payout on one
of these is 90 to 91 per cent to the player; that’s pretty standard across the nation.”
So have the religious groups made any progress with banning gaming? “That’s in Victoria,
not really anywhere else in the country. Victoria is historically our most conservative state.
Of the major states, they were the last one to go with poker machines, and the only reason
they did was because the state went broke. They had to go with poker machines because
they needed the tax revenues to get back on track.”
Part of what the anti-gaming lobby states is the problem is the availability of these slot
machines; only a small percentage of them are in casinos. John said: “There are 11,500 slot
machines in traditional casinos in Australia; it’s essentially the same product as the rest of
those machines; it’s usually a five-reel, 20-line 500 credit max bet one cent machine.
“By far the greatest number of gaming machines in Australia are in what we call licensed
clubs. These are not-for-profit organisations where the gaming revenue subsidises other
activities within the venue, which might be a gym, a library, swimming, exercise classes,
whatever you like. Part of that subsidy might also be with a bistro or a restaurant. So people
might go and eat a subsidised meal, then go and play the machines, so it balances out to
the same sort of cost as going to a medium-priced restaurant elsewhere.”
With a small number of casinos but a massive number of slot machines in the country,
how can Australian casinos expand their business? “There won’t be any more licenses
issued. The only possibility – and this is a long shot – would be a second casino in Sydney.
That is unlikely though. There’s natural growth in the Australian casino industry. It’s fuelled
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