When shooting rampages occur in the United States, Australians look on with perplexity: can't Americans see the damage their obsession with guns is causing? Yet Australians suffer, and are equally blind to, a similar obsession of their own. It may not be as murderous or destructive, but for its many victims it can bring similar, lasting heartache. It is gambling.

As guns are in the United States, gambling in this country is woven into the culture. Australians, we are told with a wink of approval, will bet on two flies walking up a wall. Two-up, the game played by soldiers in the world wars, is a symbol of a kind of larrikinism with which Australians identify. Horse racing gives gambling a social quality, with a hint of the healthy outdoors. Most betting, however, is far less glamorous.

Gambling in this country is woven into the culture. Credit:Arsineh Houspian

It has been turned from a wager between two people, to an efficient process with machines and computers. As figures we published yesterday show, most of the money we gamble is spent on solitary activity like this. Lotteries and betting on sporting games involve transactions carried out by individuals in private. And the betting that extracts most of the money we wager – poker machines – is carried on in dank gaming caverns in hotels and clubs, dimly lit except for the pop and fizzle of the glowing screens. Slumped in front of these machines, Australians lost $12 billion in aggregate last year, half the national loss to all forms of gambling. This state, with 32 per cent of the population, turns over 55 per cent of all poker machine revenue. That turnover is colossal: $79 billion out of a NSW total for all forms of gambling of $86 billion. (Australia as a whole turns over $204 billion on all forms of gambling, of which $142 billion is on poker machines.)

No wonder our politicians, too, are addicted: poker machine taxes help fund government. In NSW, they contribute more than $1.5 billion a year, two-thirds of the taxation revenue from all forms of gambling. Clubs in particular justify their banks of poker machines on the grounds that they divert a percentage of the profits to community purposes. Clubs can avoid higher taxes by making grants, in approved categories, for sporting, welfare and other activities. The recipients of this largesse give clubs a strong power base in the community, which benefits from the revenue. That power base makes them, along with the hotels industry, formidable political players.

Gambling in Australia has thus become a form of voluntary taxation. The biggest volunteers in this cruel system are the problem gamblers whose addiction mostly props it up. They are largely forgotten. In 2010, the last time it reported on the subject, the Productivity Commission estimated there were up to 160,000 such gamblers in Australia, with between 230,000 and 350,000 more at moderate risk of gambling problems. Mostly they are poor, and kept that way by their habit. Poker machines, as a series of inquiries have found, tend to be concentrated in areas of socio-economic disadvantage. Despite recommendations from the commission and subsequent parliamentary inquiries, little has been done to help them – and our politics, and our society – to wean themselves off their corrosive gambling addiction. It is time to start.