Australians ranked as the world's biggest gamblers

Australians are the world's biggest gamblers per capita, spending the equivalent of $1,208.75 each last year according to the latest edition of UK business magazine The Economist.
According to Joel Keeble of H2 Gambling Capital, which provided the publication's data, "Australia has led for the past decade, since we started doing this, and has always been well ahead of the other nations."
Ignoring the statistical anomaly of Singapore, whose two new casinos have nearly matched the entire Las Vegas strip in terms of the gambling spend since their opening, the next closest competition for Australia is Ireland, which spent less than half as much on gambling.
Electronic gaming machines, the catch-all term that includes poker machines, account for most of this outsized lead on other developed nations, H2 said, but it noted Australians' propensity to engage in a range of forms of gambling.
At the core of this is Australians' love affair with poker machines which accounts for the big gap with the rest of the developed world when it comes to gambling expenditure.
A recent report by the Productivity Commission said $19 billion was spent on gambling in 2008-09, $12 billion of it on poker machines.
The commission said up to 40% of the money spent on the pokies comes from problem gamblers, representing a $5 billion drain on an estimated 90,000 people.
The Federal Government is planning to implement a national mandatory precommitment scheme to curb problem gambling.