Casinos have been lobbying governments to make card playing compulsory across the industry to level the playing field.
Volkert said that unless the entire gambling industry is forced to play by the same rules, people will simply play pokies at other venues.
“If it’s voluntary, we have to ask ourselves, do we really care about the safety of our players?”
Crown’s technology, which has more than 400,000 registered users, was removed from Victoria after an investigation found it facilitated money laundering and ignored legal and ethical obligations to people with gambling problems. The state government made this technology a condition of licensing.
A player’s personal account is linked to a central database, stating how much they are prepared to lose, and the only information passed to the casino to activate the card is whether the player can gamble according to the limit. is.
Mr Volkert said public sentiment towards poker machines was changing and the industry needed to consider players’ health if it wanted a sustainable future, comparing current concerns to the public health concerns over smoking in the 1990s. compared with its counterpart.
“At some point, we decided as a society that we weren’t going to allow smoking indoors…and now if you light a fire in a restaurant, people are going to freak out.”
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