Tuesday 6 March 2007

"Gambling is a destitute public policy"


Adelaide's only Casino, located in our historic Railway Station building, provides some 70 gaming tables and 950 gaming machines. The Casino opened in 1985 and was owned by the South Australian government until June 2000, when it was sold to private operators.
In the first year of their introduction, South Australians lost a total of 185.4 million dollars to gaming machines. Of that figure the South Australian Government collected 62.5 million dollars in gaming machine taxation.
This was once a proud and busy railway station. Today, with 23,000 problem gamblers in this state, each problem gambler affects the lives of 7 others: 180,000 South Australians directly affected by the pokies bug.

7 comments:

Ame said...

Hey M-B! I'm affected by the "pokies" bug too but we'll just keep on moving right along! ;)

And of COURSE we have Moonies here...at the airports used to be...they've kind of disappeared tho...they must have grown hair! LOL!

Think Utsav has hair again now too?
Hmmmmmm...his name backwards (not an acro tho!) is Vastu! Think that means something? LOL!

Ok Clobber.......gonna put that whistling teapot on the stove and cook me up a mess of hot water!

Spend any time in that SkyCity station?

=)

PS: Can we cover ANY more topics here?

Cheltenhamdailyphoto said...

lol at clobber Ame...

Have you been here, M. Benaut? I went a few times in the eighties to the Ritz in Picadilly and it was great fun! Having said that, i think you need to be the sort of personality which can limit and stick to it! I was only betting in relative pennies whilst those with me i have to say were in the thousands. Frightening!

Utsav said...

It's interesting the building still says "Railway Station" very loudly.

There were these two friends of mine who were on a tour of India and short on cash. They'd gone to buy food in Calcutta on somebody else's 100 rupees, and had only stepped out of the railway station (note the connection) when they saw somebody rolling dice at a small table nearby. They watched in fascination for a while, then confident, bet a 50, and lost. Now scared that the girl they got the money from would be mad, they put in the other 50 too, in a desperate attempt to recover the first one. Guess what happened? They lost again, of course! The girl didn't speak to them for the rest of the journey, she was so mad at them. And that, my friends, is the evil of gambling.

And Ame- Vastu in Sanskrit means environment, or the physical entities in an environment. This is the source of the term Vastu Shastra- the "art of laying out the environment", a set of orientation principles similar to the Chinese concept of Feng Shui. All Hindus adhere to Vastu guidlines while building, because it supposedly incorporates spiritual elements and gravitational and magnetic elements for the canons of optimal layout of the surroundings. A house laid out according to Vastu guidlines is supposed to bring peace and prosperity, and the converse holds too.

And that is a long comment.

Ame said...

WOW! And here I was just talking gibberish U and you totally came back with something concrete!!!! WOW! ;)

Great info!

You're a fountain of knowledge...sigh~~~~~~all these smarty pants!

=)

Cheltenhamdailyphoto said...

Long but fabulous Utsav. Great anecdote and a lesson to us all. Glad you told us that. Now, i've just got to pop out and buy a lottery ticket, won't be long...

Sally said...

Yes, I remember arriving here on my first trip to Adelaide - about 1975 or 6. Casinos - pah.

David said...

Hi,

I have been in Adelaide couple of times but I never visited its casino. Which casino games are being played there?