MEDIA ALERT
Monday 7 September 2026 @ 10.15am
“Reviews are not reforms”: Wesley Mission CEO blasts NSW government response to record pokie losses
📅 Monday 7 Sept 2026
🕛 10.15am
📍 Outside Angel Hotel, 125 Pitt St, Sydney
Wesley Mission CEO, Rev Stu Cameron, will deliver a strong response to NSW’s latest poker machine losses, saying the state Government cannot normalise record poker machine losses and continue to kick the can of real reform down the road.
Revealed in new analysis from Wesley Mission released today, NSW residents lost a record $4.75 billion on poker machines in the first six months of 2026 with losses remaining above $1 million an hour for the past two straight years and show no sign of diminishing.
Rev Cameron says the latest figures are an indictment of the pace of gambling reform in NSW, with losses escalating while real reforms remain bogged down in ‘reviews and pathways’, which are merely promises to do something later while people are being harmed now.
“The NSW Government needs to have the courage to flick the switch. It cannot hide behind arguments about protecting a vibrant night-time economy. There is nothing vibrant about someone sitting alone at a poker machine at three in the morning chasing thousands of dollars in losses. That is not entertainment. That is harm happening in real time.
“Flick off the pokies switch at midnight. Give people a circuit breaker and a chance to walk away. When the NSW community is haemorrhaging an average of almost $1.1 million an hour into poker machines, shutting them down overnight is not radical. What is radical is allowing this level of preventable harm to continue.”
Wesley Mission continues to call for mandatory account-based gambling with meaningful harm prevention measures and a mandatory midnight-to-10am shutdown of poker machines.
ENDS
Media contact: Anne Holt 0418 628 342 (preferred) [email protected]
