Robyn’s pokie habit took her to the edge. Now she wants her story to inspire others.

 

Robyn Hayward realised her addiction to playing pokie machines was deadly serious when she found herself sitting in her car contemplating suicide.

‘It was a real moment of crisis,’ Robyn says of her drive to a lonely spot on the Port Hills in Christchurch.

‘I knew I was facing some serious problems. I sat there wondering whether I wanted to keep living.’

After almost 12 years of watching her money disappear into pokies, Robyn knew she had come to the final crunch.

The road to recovery
‘I was about to lose my house. That was something I just could not face,’ the former bank officer and hairdresser tells New Idea.

‘If I lost my house I would lose everything. It is my baby.’

As the 46-year-old sat in her car thinking about suicide, she reflected on what she had done and what her future could be.

‘A friend had said to me a little while earlier that crime would be my next thing. That was something I could not contemplate,’ she says.

She decided she wanted to live and she wanted to save her house. From that lonely hillside she rang a gambling help line and set herself on the road to recovery.

Robyn believes her story is typical of many pokie addicts and she wants to share it so that others will be inspired to break free from addiction.

Along with the consumer group Focus on Gambling, Robyn is leading a campaign against pokie machines. She says the gambling machines are just as destructive to society as the drug ‘P’.

Robyn believes the machines are too seductive. To start with they are fun, but then they become a habit, followed by an obsession and finally an addiction.

Consumed with winning
‘Anyone who sits in front of a pokie machine has a chance to become an addict,’ Robyn says, although her background gave no indication that she would soon develop a problem with gambling.

‘I was raised in a Christian family. I was well educated and a good saver. By the time I was 22 I had saved $30,000 for an overseas trip. I gave up smoking without any problems,’ she recalls.

‘Clearly I am not a down and outer and I don’t have a problem with other addictions – but there is just something about these machines. They lure you in to a false world and you become powerless against them.’

Robyn says she had no idea of the ease with which she could become addicted when she first started playing the machines for a bit of harmless fun.

‘When I started I would go in and just spend $20 and then go home,’ Robyn recalls. ‘But then I noticed I was starting to visit the EFTPOS at the pokies.’

For a few years Robyn says her life carried on pretty much as usual, but slowly ‘the pokies overtook my mind’ and she fell in to a ‘false world where you lose reality that it is money you are spending’.

Robyn says she became consumed with winning. She would sit ‘zoned out’ for hours at a pokie machine just waiting for the jackpot, believing the next win would fix all her problems.

‘When that jackpot is at $950 you know it has to come up sometime,’ she says. ‘You tell yourself it is not about luck, it is about odds, and the odds are on your side, so you sit there and play and play.’

On one particular day Robyn spent $1500 on a single pokie machine.

‘That’s when your mind gets taken over,’ she says. ‘You know that it has to pay sometime. So the next day I was back there when the pub opened to play my machine again.’

Robyn says her addiction got to the stage that her health suffered and she started borrowing money. ‘If you have a house and job you can get money anywhere. It is just too easy,’ Robyn says.

Her debt skyrocketed. The mortgage on her three-bedroom house had soon doubled. Her Mazda car that she paid $11,000 for was financed, and although its value dropped as it aged, Robyn soon owed $16,000 on it.

Hitting rock bottom
Even Robyn’s food money was soon being spent on the pokies.

‘I would go to the shop and instead of buying a good piece of meat I would buy something cheap just so I had more money to spend,’ she recalls.

Finally Robyn’s father, who had helped her with mortgage payments, took a stand.

‘He said it was up to me to stop, that he would not help me any more,’ she says. ‘He had realised what he was doing was feeding my addiction, because I was continuing to gamble knowing he would bail me out each month. I had to hit rock bottom to wake myself up.’

Robyn says that rock bottom came on that dark day when she sat on the Port Hills contemplating suicide. She was able to turn her life around and now feels she is fully in control, having not touched a pokie machine in 18 months.

Robyn now wants pokies removed from hotels and bars so fewer people get to that point. The social cost of the machines, she says, is too great.

Pokie facts

• Pokie machines are big business in New Zealand, but they are also responsible for a big social toll.
• $5.5 million is spent on gambling each day. Almost half of this is from gaming machines outside casinos.
• 50,000 people are estimated to be gambling addicts. It may be surprising to learn that half that number are women.
• Nearly 75 per cent of people who seek help in dealing with a gambling addiction are hooked on pokies.
• 23,000 pokie machines are licensed in New Zealand – that’s one for every 175 people.
• Pub charities bring in $385 million a year from pokie machine profits.
• Tax on pokie machines nets the government $330 million a year.

Tell New Idea
Have you battled to overcome an addiction, or turned your life around after being driven to despair? Tell us about it. Write to New Idea, PO Box 1467, Auckland or email newidea@pacificmags.co.nz.