This article is an instalment in a new series, Punted, on the government’s failure to reform gambling advertising.

At a 1996 meeting of gaming industry executives in Las Vegas, Frank Fahrenkopf, a former Republican National Party chairman who had recently become president of the American Gaming Association (AGA), set out the defence the industry would use against growing threats to its social license, and thus its expansion.

“Our industry cannot afford to make the mistake made by the tobacco industry,” he said. Rather than deny that gambling addiction existed, as tobacco industry figures had with nicotine, he told his colleagues that the gaming industry must not only concede there was such a thing as problem gambling, but that it must lead the discussion around it.

To that end, the AGA set up the National Center for Responsible Gambling (renamed the International Centre for Responsible Gambling, or ICRG, in 2020), which has dominated gambling research in the US ever since.

Just like the tobacco and fossil fuel industries, the gambling industry finances research that just so happens to support its position. But in terms of informing the largely unquestioned terms of the debate, the gambling industry might have had the greatest success of all.

The Reno Model

The ICRG website has a page called “research milestones“, providing a “sample of some of the most innovative studies” that have been funded by the organisation. Among them is a paper called “A Science-Based Framework for Responsible Gambling: The Reno Model”. Produced in 2004, it listed six “fundamental assumptions” under which this model would operate. They were:

(1) safe levels of gambling participation are possible;

(2) gambling provides a level of recreational, social and economic benefits to individuals and the community;

(3) a proportion of participants, family members and others can suffer significant harm as a consequence of excessive gambling;

(4) the total social benefits of gambling must exceed the total social costs;

(5) abstinence is a viable and important, but not necessarily essential, goal for individuals with gambling-related harm; and

(6) for some gamblers who have developed gambling-related harm, controlled participation and a return to safe levels of play represents an achievable goal.

The paper described its goal as shaping “the direction for developing responsible gambling initiatives … and [stimulating] a rich and enduring dialogue about responsible gambling concepts and related initiatives”.

To that extent, it has been a great success. The language of “responsible gambling” and of the “problem gambler” have been widely adopted by regulators and embodied in legislation and regulatory texts.

The true extent of industry influence on setting this agenda in its early days are opaque, as for many years gambling research rarely disclosed its sources of funding. The Reno paper contains no disclosure about how it was funded, though a paper from 2015, “Extending the Reno model” (by the same authors) thanked the following organisations for their “support” of the project:

La Loterie Romande (Switzerland), ClubNSW (Australia), Camelot (United Kingdom), La Française des Jeux (France), Loto-Québec (Québec, Canada), and the National Lottery (Belgium).

The primacy of individual responsibility

Associate Professor in the School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine at Monash University Charles Livingstone told Crikey the responsible gambling paradigm shifted the emphasis from the industry onto the individual gambler.

“It proposes that the reason people get addicted is because of individual attributes or weaknesses, rather than the harmful product,” he said. “It purports to demonstrate concern and offer the prospect of rehabilitation, but simply ignores the high risk associated with common products.”

“What we’re talking about is a product which has enormous potential to addict.”

Two of the Reno model architects, returning to and defending the model in 2021, argued: “When individual responsibility is minimised and the social setting exaggerated, we have established a formula for social chaos. To avoid this circumstance, we must … establish a balanced view of gambling and its host, agent, and environment influences.” 

‘Partnership’ with industry

As the parliamentary inquiry chaired by the late Peta Murphy — whose recommendations the government appears committed to watering down — concluded:

There is too much potential for the gambling industry to be involved in the development of gambling regulation and policy in Australia. Australia’s licenced [wagering providers] have been successful in framing the issue of gambling harm around personal responsibility while diminishing industry and government responsibility. This has been to the detriment of Australians experiencing gambling harm.

Indeed, one of the tenets of the responsible gaming framework is the necessity of “partnership” between the industry, regulators and researchers. In 2014 Professor Alex Blaszczynski, one of the architects of the original Reno model, defended his decision to accept more than a million dollars from ClubsNSW for research by saying “Because of the nature of gambling, you do have to start looking at gaining access to data held by the industry, by patrons who are in industry venues and start looking at real life research that provides sensible, evidence-based information”.

Further, Blaszczynski has insisted there are safeguards in place to prevent industry from meddling in or suppressing the outcomes of his research and told the Nine papers in 2022 that nobody had ever found inaccuracies in his work or argued with his findings.

The major organisations

In Australia the peak body for gambling research is the National Association of Gambling Studies (NAGS), an organisation whose conferences are frequently held in casinos and are sponsored by gambling organisations. It has several industry figures on its committee.

The situation is even more pronounced overseas. Along with the tens of millions of dollars pumped into research by the ICRG, US universities frequently enter into partnerships with individual casino companies: In 2023, Michigan State, Louisiana State University, the University of Maryland, the University of Denver, and the University of Colorado, all announced multiyear partnerships with sports betting companies that included “placing ads at [college sport] games, along with promises to, for example, focus on responsible gaming and education”.

Meanwhile, the UK’s biggest gambling addiction charity GambleAware received £46,565,912 (more than $90 million) from gambling operators in the 2022-23 financial year.

But in the smaller market of Australia, gambling money still goes a long way. Last year, the Centre for Excellence in Gambling Research was established at Sydney University, described as a “multi-disciplinary centre dedicated to advancing research on gambling behaviour and minimising harm”. It was paid for by a $600,000 funding commitment from the International Centre for Responsible Gaming.

Anyone affected by problem gambling can get immediate assistance by calling the National Gambling Helpline on 1800 858 858 for free, professional and confidential support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.