Limit may have saved addict

Limit may have saved addict
Geesche Jacobsen


A JUDGE has urged clubs to take greater moral responsibility to reduce problem gambling and supported daily gambling limits, which she said might have saved a woman from her addiction to poker machines.

The judge's remarks came during the sentencing of an illiterate Vietnamese woman who had become a drug courier after having been threatened by loan sharks to whom she owed $40,000.

Toai Thi Nguyen, 55, a mildly retarded mother-of-four from Canley Heights, was caught at Sydney Airport with more than 10 kilograms of pseudoephedrine, enough to produce methylamphetamine or ''ice'' with a street value of more than $1.25 million.


District Court Judge Robyn Tupman said Nguyen had suffered from depression and endured ''hardship, poverty and some abuse'' from her husband. Nevertheless she had provided ''excellent care'' for her children.

In 2003 her older children became aware of her visits to Star City casino and of her gambling addiction, and repaid her debts of $28,000. Nguyen promised never to gamble again and put herself on the casino's voluntary exclusion list.

But she relapsed in 2008 and regularly went to St John's Park Bowling Club in Cabramatta, the judge said. She accrued a new debt of $25,000 plus $15,000 in interest that she had no way of repaying.

Judge Tupman said: ''It must have been clear to those licensed premises that this offender … would not have been in a position to put $25,000 through poker machines. That this was allowed to occur by an organisation trusted by the community of NSW with a licence is a matter of concern.

''It is one of those cases where upper limits on daily gambling amounts might well have saved this woman from the situation in which she found herself. In the absence of safeguards like that, however, it seems to me that clubs such as this one owe a greater responsibility to those who they allow to play their poker machines … in order to discharge their general moral duty to the community.''

The jury had rejected Nguyen's defence that she had acted under duress and had no alternative, but the threats and the woman's life provided mitigating factors, Judge Tupman said.

The court heard Nguyen had never been to school and had come to Australia after fleeing Vietnam in the 1980s. Her IQ of 61 puts her in the bottom 1 per cent of the population, the court heard.

Judge Tupman jailed her for 2½ years.