Whatever level of deterrence pokies venue staff had as a middleman in eftpos cash transactions has now "evaporated", the co-author of a new report on gambling codes of conduct says.
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The ACT government is looking to ban eftpos cash outs in clubs to stop problem gamblers from feeding unlimited amounts of money through poker machines.
Opponents of the ban have said the need for staff to process the eftpos cash out acts as a deterrent for problem gamblers.
However Angela Rintoul, a research fellow at the Australian Gambling Research Centre and the Australian institute of Family Studies in Melbourne, says staff are hamstrung by an expectation from management to please paying customers.
In the paper she co-wrote, based on interactions in Melbourne pubs and clubs and published in the Addiction Research and Theory journal, researchers found the deterrent effect of staff contact on problem gambling had in fact subsided.
They found retaining eftpos without a daily limit had done little to curb access to cash for at-risk gamblers and may have caused more harm to some.
Dr Rintoul welcomed the ACT government's bid to ban eftpos cash outs in clubs but said there was scope for more legislative action, particularly around how staff should respond to signs of problem gambling.
"We spoke to a staff member from a gambling venue [in Melbourne] who said he was quite excited after having done his responsible service of gambling training and starting a new job at a venue and when he tried to implement what he'd been taught in that training his manager stopped him," Dr Rintoul said.
"This was an instance where a staff member had a gambler repeatedly returning to withdraw cash from an eftpos machine and the staff member had said to his manager 'this is the third time this gambler has come up, should I refuse him another cash withdrawal from the eftpos machine' and his manager effectively said 'don't do that, keep giving him the money'.
"This is coming from someone who's trying to do the right thing in the venue but not getting the support from management to actually implement some of the training he'd received around the responsible service of gambling."
Clubs ACT chief Gwyn Rees said the scenario could be true in for-profit pubs in other states but unlikely to happen in not-for-profit clubs in the ACT.
He pointed out clubs affiliated with ClubsACT have already implemented a $250 cap on eftpos cash outs.
But Dr Rintoul said staff's customer service roles conflicted with venue' gaming codes of conduct and their harm minimisation responsibilities were playing second fiddle to the need to keep the customer happy.
While the Productivity Commission and the Victorian Commission for Gaming and Liquor Regulation previously found staff contact in eftpos cash outs could be a circuit breaker for problem gamblers, Dr Rintoul said her research indicated that effect dissipated once they overcame that "initial awkwardness".
"Certainly now everyone we spoke to agreed that it was no longer awkward," she said.
"When the 'secret' was out for the gambler at a particular venue then they might have felt uncomfortable initially to return multiple times but certainly once they've overcome that initial awkwardness it just becomes normalised interaction in a way so to the extent there was some deterrent effect initially that's certainly evaporated now.
"[For] most gamblers it's a normalised feature of many venues that gamblers will return repeatedly to the eftpos machine to get more cash and often staff are happy to confuse that with their customer service role."
