Comment on Honest Government Ad | Social Media Ban
Zagorath@aussie.zone 5 days agoAustralia’s gambling problem is huge. We have 0.3% of the world’s population, but 18% of its poker machines. And 75% of the pokies outside of casinos. Nearly every pub, bowls club, RSL club, etc. has a room full of pokies. That’s allowed in every state except Western Australia, though it was banned in my home state until the '90s. I don’t know much about Canada, but I’ve heard there’s been a relatively recent surge in the problem of gambling over in America over the last few years. I believe it is the case that Australia led the world in allowing gambling to totally overrun professional sport, setting a template that America could follow, for the worse.
MyMindIsLikeAnOcean@piefed.world 4 days ago
That’s horrible. We have a couple provinces that do that.
The city near where I live was hit bad by outsourcing…it was a manufacturing town back in the 80s. A few years back they brought in a giant Casino with promises of making it a tourist destination. Predictably, nobody wants to come to a town that’s an armpit…so most of the gamblers are locals.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 4 days ago
Yeah, unless you can succeed in turning your city into the next Vegas or Macau, gambling is pretty much all negatives. We’re at a point here where I honestly wish the giant casino was the only problem we have with gambling. And the casino itself is a big enough problem even aside from app-based sports betting and ads for that. Our huge new casino opened up a year or two ago. It has its own bridge that funnels people directly from the extremely popular pedestrianised tourist/cultural area on one side of the river (if you happen to be a parent of a child who’s watched a lot of Bluey, you’d recognise Southbank from its appearances in that show, though I don’t know if they call it by that name) into the casino’s landing area. And they’ve been allowed to degrade the major riverside bike path, the city’s busiest commuter route for cyclists, into a shared path and plaza, with even further degradations regularly when they use (sorry “activate”) the area to run commercial events. So the casino is allowed to significantly degrade the entire area even for people who never have anything to do with them.