Report: Australians Love to Gamble

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Wednesday, October 9th, 2013 | Written by Charles Washington

In a study of gambling habits across the Asia-Pacific region, Australians were found to spend the biggest slice of their income on gambling, followed in second place by residents of Singapore, reports the web site pokerfuse.com.

Wealthy nation leads to more disposable income

The reason that Australians spend a relatively high percentage of their income placing wagers both online and off – the number, provided to pokerfuse.com by Sindex, is 1.84 percent of earnings – is that they make good wages and therefore have more income to spend on playing online poker, real-money casino games, and placing other types of wagers as well.

Australians on average earn about 40 percent more than do Americans, and much more than the number two biggest market in the studied region, Singapore.

According to the report, those who live in the Asian nation known for order and cleanliness also love to gamble recreationally, however since the per capita income is quite a bit more modest in that nation than in Australia, the seventh wealthiest world economy, the average works out to be a slightly higher 2.3 percent of annual earnings.

Cultural connection in both locales to gambling

Another explanation for why gambling constitutes such a large portion of consumer spending in both Singapore and Australia could be cultural factors. Asian cultures are well-known to be highly superstitious and to be big fans of gambling. One of the premiere gambling destinations in the world is, of course, Macau, the Pacific’s answer to Las Vegas.

As the Macau market is tightening due to a lack of available land to develop large-scale new projects, gaming interests are looking to expand to other markets in Asia, such as China, and as we have noted, Japan. Japan is proving to be especially appealing to developers from Asia as well as from large casino companies based in the United States as it will play host to the 2020 Olympics, to be held in Tokyo.

Likewise, in Australia, the country that enjoys the illustrious history of once having served as a penal colony for Great Britain, there are strong cultural ties to gambling. Australians have proven to be as enthusiastic about betting as their forebears in the UK. Online poker in Australia is thriving, with Australians able to enjoy access to a wide variety of games.

In terms of the the European gambling market, which is one of the most permissive in the world, particularly when it comes to online poker and casino gambling, UK gamblers are notably fervent.

It is sometimes said that, when it comes to gambling in the UK, Britons will place bets on just about anything, a point that seemed to be proven this past summer when bettors jumped all over the birth of the royal baby, with wagers being accepted on nearly anything having to do with the nativity, from the gender of the baby to its weight to its birthday and everything in between.