THE PRESS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1989. A game for children?

Press, 27 October 1989, Page 12

THE PRESS FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 1989. A game for children?

The Lotteries Commission has a runaway success on its hands in the Instant Kiwi lottery. The enthusiasm with which gambling New Zealanders have embraced the scratch-and-win (or lose) game has been staggering and has embarrassed the organisers. In less than five weeks the first shipment of 48 million tickets, which was expected to have lasted four months, has sold out. The popularity of the game has obliged the commission to place a rush order for 130 million more tickets and have them printed in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the Netherlands all at once, to supply the lottery outlets as quickly as possible. Embarrassment of another sort attends the kerfuffle that has arisen about children gambling on the tickets. Reports of buyers as young as seven spending up to $5O on Instant Kiwi tickets raise a number of questions, not least being where the children got the money in the first place. Quite properly, the commission avers that it does not seek to market the Instant Kiwi to children and does not want to have children playing the game; but playing it they undoubtedly are. Even if generous dollops of salt are applied to most stories doing the rounds, the Mental Health Foundation probably has a point when it says the game may be hooking gamblers at a tender age, adding to the population of problem and compulsive gamblers.

No legal barrier stands in the way of these young gamblers and the $1 price of a ticket scarcely strains a weekly allowance for many these days. The commission’s marketing manager, Mr Phil Prosser, says the Instant Kiwi advertising is aimed at people over 18, but he says: “How can you tell 16-year-olds that they’re not allowed to spend $1 on Instant Kiw?” The answer to that question, presumably, could be the same as telling them they cannot spend 50c at the

T.A.B. The law, if Parliament were so minded, could forbid it. Parliament has decided that New Zealanders under the age of 18 are too young to gamble on horse races. The rationale is that the young and impressionable must be protected from such hazards to their wellbeing. New Zealand is not alone in this; soccer fans in the United Kingdom, for instance, cannot play the football pools unless they are over 18. The anomaly is obvious. If risking 50c on a horse race is bad, risking $1 on Instant Kiwi must be twice as harmful; if Instant Kiwi is just fine for the primary school set, can a $1 mystery bet at the local T.A.B. be so wrong? The politicians have got themselves in a bind with conflicting bits of law. Any attempt to liberalise the betting age for horse racing is bound to run into flak; any attempt to impose an age limit on Instant Kiwi will bring immediate cries that it cannot be done. It is true that shopkeepers have difficulty weeding out — for the youngsters’ own good of course — prospective cigarette buyers who are under the lawful age. Some shopkeepers do not even try; but the law is there. If people who are alarmed about the attraction of Instant Kiwi to children can establish a case that too much harm is done, Parliament will have little option but to try to limit the harm to youngsters and an arbitrary age limit seems the only practicable way. This will still leave the fact that the parents of the same children will set wise or unwise examples, and will consume money from the same household’s resources on gambling. The final result in family welfare may be just the same. Perhaps, in spite of the fears about stimulating or entrenching a gambling impulse among youngsters, a little time should be allowed to determine whether the novelty of Instant Kiwi will be short-lived and subject to its own economic discipline.