With news breaking today that SkyCity will close its gambling operations for five days due to breaches of host responsibility, it’s important to remember that this has happened because someone gambling at the casino has been harmed.
That harm could be significant – not just financial. Harm can mean loss of employment, loss of relationships, loss of homes, loss of health and in some cases, loss of life.
This person gambled at SkyCity Casino from August 2017 to February 2021 – nearly four years during which time SkyCity failed to respond to incidents of continous play. We wish we could say this was an isolated incident. Unfortunately, we see this happening all too often – people’s lives turned upside down because of failures in host responsibility.
Let’s be very clear. The person who is gambling is not at fault – they are going to the casino to engage in a “legal form of entertainment”, often unaware of the risks associated with gambling. It’s the gambling products that are harmful and gambling operators have a duty of care to their patrons or customers and a legal requirement to ensure they are not harmed. It’s not up to the person who is gambling to “gamble responsibly” – it’s up to the operators to provide robust host responsibility measures to protect people from the harmful products they are providing.
While the gambling industry pride themselves on host responsibility measures including carded play and facial recognition technology, they are not silver bullets and never will be. This case has proved that, with SkyCity acknowledging that “detection of some incidents of continuous play by the customer was due to a design error in a technology system developed by SkyCity to monitor continuous play by carded customers (which has since been rectified).”
These technology measures need to work alongside trained human beings interacting with patrons on the gambling floor. And SkyCity, in its press release said as much:
These technological developments are important and significant, but they will never replace our people, who play a critical role in engaging with our customers and helping protect them from gambling harm.
Something else SkyCity needs to consider as a harm reduction measure is what continuous play without a break should look like. The casino host responsibility programmes currently impose continuous play obligations once a customer has been gambling continuously for five hours or more. The continuous gambling “clock” is reset after a customer has had a break from gambling of at least 30 minutes duration. This is despite calls from the Department of Internal Affairs, the Problem Gambling Foundation, Te Whatu Ora and other gambling harm experts to lower the threshold.
Mandatory carded play is also touted as a harm prevention measure by the gambling industry but evidence supporting the effectiveness is unclear. We don’t know for certain how this system will work in Aotearoa and if this will be truly effective in minimising harm for patrons.
In the meantime, it is great to see the gambling regulator sending a very clear signal to casinos and other gambling operators, that if they don’t uphold their host responsibly requirements under the Gambling Act, there are consequences. And for SkyCity, that’s five days closure with an anticipated financial hit of $5 million.
It’s a first voluntary closure for New Zealand and if gambling operators don’t up their game, let’s hope it won’t be the last.
