Fascinating facts abound about life in Australia, but when you chase some of them down, they don’t quite stand up to scrutiny. Everything there wants to kill you? The last death from a spider bite was in 1979, and you are far more likely to get killed by a horse than a creepy crawly. Tanned surfers with beach bods all around? 29 percent of Australians are obese and only 10 percent know how to surf. Betting on flies crawling up a wall? Now you are onto something. The Aussie love for a wager is everything you’ve heard rumored and more besides, as the following facts illustrate.
$1000 per person per year on gambling
Australians gamble around $30 billion per year – and the population of the entire country is less than 25 million people. That’s well over $1,000 per person per year spent on casino games, sports betting, and lottery tickets. It’s not just the highest per capita spend in the world, it’s almost double the second-placed Republic of Ireland, where they spend just over $600 per person per year.
Pokies galore
You could be forgiven for wondering if Australia has its own language sometimes, there are so many unique terms. Most of them end the same way, such as enjoying a couple of tinnies around the barbie. Pokies are what we call slot games in the rest of the world, and they are everywhere in Australia. You’ll see them in bars, cafes, truck stops, and just about anywhere else people congregate. More than half of the $30 billion Australians gamble each year is fed into pokies.
No online casinos, but a lot of online gambling
Australia had some of the toughest restrictions in the world during the difficult times of 2020 and 2021. With casinos closed, the number of Australians visiting online casinos escalated by more than 50 percent between 2020 and 2021. Yet online casinos are prohibited in Australia. The explanation for this apparent paradox is that while Australian regulators can legislate against operating an online casino, they can do little to prevent Australians from gambling online at sites based elsewhere. The result? Dozens of offshore providers welcoming Australian dollars. Take a look at www.gambleonlineaustralia.com/casino/real-money/ to see a few examples of online casinos that accept real Australian money.
Attitudes are changing
Across the globe, laws are being reformed to accommodate a combination of changes in attitude towards gambling and the new online technology that delivers it. We have seen it in USA, Canada, Netherlands and Germany over the past year, to name just a few. But in Australia, attitudes are shifting in the opposite direction. Politicians are campaigning to ban all pokies except for the ones in casinos, land based casinos are having their licenses suspended one after another and regulators are trying to block offshore gambling websites through the nation’s ISPs.
The latter move, in particular, has an air of futility as new platforms appear almost every day. Time will tell whether these actions will dampen the Australian love for a wager. For now, it seems as strong as ever.
