- Title
- An examination of the New South Wales electronic gaming machine industry 1995 to 2005 and its historical, regulatory, political and economic contexts
- Creator
- Sargent, Mark
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2012
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This thesis examines historical, political, regulatory and economic aspects of gambling policy in New South Wales (NSW), with specific emphasis on the evolution of electronic gaming machine (EGM) gambling as a key element of the State’s fiscal policy. This includes analysis of major regulatory initiatives, including a review of contemporary parliamentary and press material surpassing any identified comparable research on gambling and EGM policy in NSW. It was established that although policy has generally been made on isolated, ad hoc bases, precedents and contexts for subsequent legislation have resulted. It is demonstrated that although these events are prima facie unrelated, they collectively form part of an expansionary progression, largely impelled by governments’ pursuits of taxation revenue. In order to investigate outcomes of this progression, empirical research on EGM gambling over the three terms of the Carr Labor Governments (1995 to 2005) was also undertaken. Access to the restricted, comprehensive NSW EGM gambling database for this period permitted a comparatively more detailed and definitive analysis of EGM gambling than has previously been possible. The empirical research adopts two alternative measures of EGM distribution. These are a conventional ‘EGM density’ measure (the ratio of population to EGMs) and the introduction of a concentration measure, the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (Herfindahl Index). This results in a novel comparative approach to assessing EGM distribution. In addition, regulatory practice and previous studies in the field have customarily relied on the use of one measure of socioeconomic status (SES), ordinarily being the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ Socioeconomic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA), to assess impacts. This study extends its comparative approach by also adopting a second SEIFA index. The application of Repeated Measures Analysis of Variance (RM ANOVA) testing to the data resulted in identification of statistically significant distributional differences among groups of LGAs on the basis of SES.The findings have implications for policy development, regulatory practice and further research on how these differences affect tax impacts. The thesis establishes that assessment of EGM policy and impacts is to some extent contingent on the measures used in the assessment process. This is particularly relevant to the measure of SES adopted, in which distinct differences were detected, based on the SES characteristics employed. Regarding the distributional findings, EGM gambling measures based on the Herfindahl Index approach were also found to behave differently to orthodox metrics. The importance of these methodologies lies in their applicability to the practical regulation of gambling. The thesis is a contribution to the further understanding of how public policy formulation and implementation in a policy field that is central to government fiscal planning has evolved. The findings indicate that alternative policy determinations may have resulted had different, and perhaps more comprehensive, approaches been employed. These are methodological initiatives that may be prospectively applied in the future development of gambling research and policy.
- Subject
- gambling taxation; electronic gaming machines; gambling policy; NSW gambling history; gambling in Australia
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/936130
- Identifier
- uon:12222
- Rights
- Copyright 2012 Mark Sargent
- Language
- eng
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