Free-to-air TV shows more than a million gambling ads a year – and this is not to mention the online torrent.
If 85 per cent of 12-17 year olds have seen a gambling ad on TV in the past month, is it any wonder that young people talk about betting odds like they once did player stats?
The $244.3 billion in bets made by Australians in in 2022-23 makes us the world’s biggest gamblers, and the saturation level of advertising is probably one reason that since 2019, average gambling losses have increased to almost $2500 a year – that’s more than the average home pays for a year’s worth of electricity.
As a nation we lost a collective $31.5 billion, which is comparable to the size of the entire Northern Territory economy ($33.1 billion), and greater than the $21 billion lost to gambling in all of Las Vegas.
As if the harm gambling causes to adults isn’t bad enough, analysis by the Australia Institute shows that large numbers of Australians start gambling well before they reach the legal minimum age of 18.
Almost one in three (30 per cent) 12-17-year-olds gamble, and this increases to almost half (46 per cent) when young people turn 18. More than 900,000 teenagers (aged 12-19) gambled in the past year.
