ClubsACT CEO Craig Shannon has strongly criticised a research report by the Australian National University (ANU), which claims the ACT clubs industry has not experienced any revenue losses from the removal of gaming machines in venues.
The research by ANU’s Centre for Social Policy Research examined the impact that gambling reform had on gaming machine expenditure between 2016 and 2024.
Since 2016, the ACT government has been slashing the number of gaming machines in the ACT from 5,000 to 3,500, which it hopes to achieve by July 2025.
However, authors of the report Francis Markham and Aino Suomi concluded there was “no evidence — at the venue level or for the ACT as a whole — that the EGM surrender scheme did anything to change the amount of money lost on EGMs”.
They continued pointing out remaining gaming machines were instead “more intensively” used.
“If surrender schemes continue to operate in the same way, we expect that this pattern will be repeated,” the authors said.
However, Shannon has described the report as being “cynically dropped as a political intervention” and is “flawed on so many levels”, citing that the research is being produced without consultation from the local clubs industry.
“It stuns me that these reports keep getting produced in a vacuum with no engagement with the club industry they target,” he said.
“Canberra is one of the few jurisdictions where poker machines are predominately operated by not-for-profit venues with strong commitments to harm minimisation.
“The travesty revealed by the report is the academics use of club ‘revenue’ being used as a ‘proxy’ indicator for gambling harm, which in and of itself is ridiculous, counter-productive and poorly evidenced.”
Shannon goes on to highlight that since 2015, ACT is the only jurisdiction that has reduced machine numbers by approximately 30 per cent.
“As a community, we have the highest per capita income in the country and a very educated community,” he said.
“It’s shameful the way some anti-gambling advocates continue to catastrophise the issue in the ACT when industry and government have achieved so much.”
Over the weekend, ACT Labor secured its seventh consecutive victory in the ACT elections. The party has promised to further cut the number of gaming machines in the ACT to 1,000 by 2045.
Last month, all three major political parties agreed to establish an independent inquiry into the future of the ACT club industry. Shannon believes this move would allow “proper bi-partisan transparency on the economic and social role of the club industry in the ACT”.
“It will help the community and the government establish a map for the sustainability of the club industry in the long term and hopefully free from a lot of these emotive debates that surround us,” he said.