First came the phone calls, then the life-size posters. When Helen Dalton co-sponsored a forum on gambling reform at state parliament in November, she knew she’d receive a backlash from the clubs in her electorate of Murray, which spans from the regional city of Griffith to the Victorian border. What she didn’t expect, when she walked into a club in Griffith, was to come face to face with her own image next to the words: “Helen, your attack on local clubs is wrong.”

“They must be worried about me,” Dalton says. “And they are because poker machines, the amount of money that’s generated is huge.”

We’re chatting in the offices of the local newspaper in Echuca, on the Victorian side of the border from her electorate. The NSW state election is on the horizon, and sprawled out on the coffee table in front of her are pages of handwritten notes.

These notes tell a grim story. No other electorate has more poker machines per person than Murray. There is one machine for every 13 people living in the Murray local government area, and they made a combined $34 million profit in the first half of 2022 alone.

On the Victorian side of the border, the Campaspe Shire has three times the population but only lost $6 million on pokies in the same six months.

It is a pattern repeated in river communities all along the border. The NSW side of the Murray is dotted with what Dalton describes as “mini-casinos”, and they tell the story of how years of loose regulations turned NSW into the pokies capital of Australia.

Poker machines were legalised in NSW in 1956, and it wasn’t until the early 1990s that other states came on board.

This made towns in the border regions holiday hotspots for interstate tourists wanting to have a flutter on the pokies. The clubs were more than happy to welcome them, paying for tourist buses and advertising campaigns spruiking Moama as the Monte Carlo of the Murray.

Poker machines were legalised in Victoria and Queensland in 1991, but this four-decade head start turned humble sports clubs and RSLs into mini-casinos in the heart of the Australian bush. Today, they remain some of the most profitable businesses in the region, and their sponsorship dollars help keep grassroots sporting teams and community initiatives alive.

Carolyn Crawford’s gambling addiction would land her in prison, but before her life spiralled out of control, she was one of those curious punters catching a bus across the border to play the pokies in NSW. The bus trips were a social affair; she recalls one particularly colourful woman dancing up and down the aisle, fuelled by the all-inclusive food and drink.

“This was all supplied. We didn’t know the gambling venues were paying for it,” she says. “For us, it was just a bus trip away to play the pokies.”

The scale of the clubs they visited was unlike anything she’d ever seen.

“They were huge places, even back then,” she says. “It made you just feel special, it made you feel like you’re walking to this really wonderful place.

“It didn’t seem like anything … harming.”

That all changed for Crawford when her second marriage broke down and her sons left home, leaving her with an empty nest.

By this time, Victoria had legalised poker machines. She had just started a new job, and her new boss would often take her out to play the pokies. She mostly kept control of her spending, until her boss invited her to a weekend of golf and gambling on the border in Moama.

She didn’t have the money but, determined not to be left out, she used her access to the work accounts to withdraw $1000 from the company.

“I thought, being a big club, [I] should win something back. Even if I only won half back, I’ll pay half out of my wages,” she says. “But no, it didn’t work like that. I lost the lot.”

​​Back in Melbourne, Crawford kept stealing from her boss’s company, chasing the money she’d lost in Moama. Sometimes it was just $500, other times it was $2000. It depended on how desperate she was to play.

For seven years, Crawford stole from her employer to fund her gambling.

‘Apart from losing all that money, I lost seven years of my life – without realising it.’

Carolyn Crawford, gambling addict

When her boss’ daughter-in-law started paying closer attention to the accounts, Crawford knew that they would never find out so long as she stopped withdrawing money. But she couldn’t resist the pull of the pokies: “I had to beat those machines.”

When Crawford was charged, she believed she’d taken no more than $80,000 over 18 months. The real figure turned out to be $400,000 over seven years.

“Apart from losing all that money, I lost seven years of my life – without realising it.”

Crawford was released from prison in 2018 after 18 months. She paid back the $400,000 she owed with her super and a small inheritance she received when her father died.

“I’ve got nothing left for my children, which saddens me,” she says. “What it’s done to me is horrible. You don’t think that sitting in front of this little coloured machine that plays music and is supposed to be entertainment can damage you so badly.”

Crawford says that anywhere from half to two-thirds of the women she was in prison with were there because of gambling.

But it was another type of crime that forced the NSW government to do something about poker machines. Last year, a NSW Crime Commission report found that billions of dollars were laundered through pubs and clubs in NSW each year. That has led to the NSW Liberal government promising to make all poker machines cashless by 2028.

The industry’s lobby group Clubs NSW has said the reforms will take much-needed income from clubs in communities such as Moama.

The Herald asked four clubs and one pub in Moama for interviews, but they all either declined or did not respond.

Ron Browne is an industry consultant and former Clubs NSW executive who for years has been advising clubs on ways to move away from their reliance on poker machines. He says many are in the process of doing so, investing in assets like motels, shopping centres and caravan parks, but these are unlikely to fully replace the riches provided by the pokies.

“Gaming is without doubt the most profitable part of the business, so to replace it, if it is taken away, it will be a struggle for all venues. No question,” he says.

In February, Premier Dominic Perrottet announced a $340 million package to help clubs and pubs transition to a cashless gaming system, including buybacks of 2000 cash poker machines and one-off $50,000 grants.

Back on the border, Helen Dalton says the policy is overly generous and wants to see pubs and clubs fund the transition with their own gambling profits.

“Just remember that that is taxpayers’ money,” she says. “I think poker machines are a very lazy way of making money … I think we should be doing healthier things, grouping together and having other functions, and asking clubs and pubs to be a little bit more creative.”

And Carolyn Crawford says 2028 is way too late to crack down on the machines that ruined her life.

“If they can bring the machines in in a year, why can’t they take them out in a year? How many more people are going to be hurt over five years?” she says.

“They don’t listen to people like me. They don’t listen to people that have been hurt.”

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