What we provide
To raise awareness of gambling harm within our communities, we have a dedicated health promotion team who go out into our communities and educate and inform.
Our team provide:
- Education and training on identifying and screening from gambling harm
- Advocacy work, aiming to achieve effective and caring policies that minimise the harm from gambling in New Zealand
- Support for gambling venues to provide a safe environment
- Stalls at community events
- Presentations to workplaces, community groups, and other organisations
- Assistance with workplace gambling policies
- Updated Knowledge Hub on our website full of resources and fact sheets you can easily print or save.
Communities are a key area of focus for us, in particular those in greatest need. Communities provide a platform where we can make the biggest impact through advocating for change through engagement, collaboration and shared goals.
Gambling policy in our communities
A large part of our public health work is working alongside Territorial Local Authorities (TLAs) or councils while they consult with communities on their gambling policies.
Under the gambling act (2003) councils have to review their class 4 gambling (pokies in pubs, clubs and TABs) and TAB policies every three years. This allows us to engage with councils, community members and champions (people in the community who help us advocate for better policies) to foster discussions about minimising the harm caused by gambling.
We want councils to introduce strong ‘sinking lid’ policies for pokie machines in their communities. By “sinking lid” we mean that when a venue closes, their pokie machines cannot be transferred to new venue and no new licences can be issued. Imagine a jar of cookies, once a cookie is removed, no new cookies can be put back in so eventually there will be no new cookies in the jar. We also want councils to prohibit venue relocations and the merging of clubs with pokie machines.
We make written and verbal submissions to councils to advocate for strong and effective policies that will reduce the harm fir gambling in our communities. The reason we do this is because there are five times as many pokies in our poorer communities than there are in our more affluent communities meaning that much of the money lost to pokies is from communities that can’t afford to be losing it.
Currently, a sinking lid policy with no venue relocations is the strongest policy we have available to us.
What can I do?
Keep an eye out for when your local council is reviewing its gambling policy and have your say!
