Dr. Martin Young to visit ANU to Prepare Final Report of Study into the Prevalence of Gambling in the NT
Over the course of the next month, Dr. Martin Young, a human geographer at the School for Social and Policy Research, will be a visiting fellow at the Australian National University (ANU), where he will be preparing the final report for a study commissioned by the Community Benefit Fund of the NT Treasury into the prevalence of gambling in the Northern Territory.
Recent studies into gambling have identified a strong correlation between levels of player loss and the socio-economic status of the area where poker machines are located, but Dr. Young has discovered that such trends are not typical of the situation in the Northern Territory. On 21 March, Dr. Young will be presenting a paper titled “Pokies, Venues, and Regions”.
The paper will be presented at the Seminar for the ANU’s Regulatory Institutions Network, where Dr. Young will discuss some of the challenges and potential approaches to conducting gambling-related research in the NT. He will present on overview of the spread of poker machines into community venues in the NT and critically assess standard techniques used to explain the observed pattern of spatial distributions.
In early April, Dr. Young will also be attending the “Senses of Place” conference to be held at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Along with Dr. Julie Roberts of Monash University, he will be presenting a paper that seeks to question how high levels of population turnover in the Northern Territory affect the capacity of communities to construct their own sense of “place”.
The conference will provide Roberts and Young with an excellent medium to communicate the sociological ideas behind the investigation into the causes and consequences of population turnover in the NT, a project currently under investigation at the School for Social and Policy Research. The most recent data published by the ABS show that there is a net loss of nearly 3% of the NT’s non-indigenous population to other states each year, a situation that has led to a shortage of skilled labour in the area.
In their paper, Roberts and Young will suggest that the effects of a transient population must be analysed in terms of “social memory”, a concept that is defined in the SSPR project outline as “shared memories attached to memberships of particular social groups”. Focusing on the effects of the tourism industry on the social memory of the community in the NT, Roberts and Young criticise the image of the NT as an exciting and exotic location, as it constructs a sense of place that is defined for others, i.e. tourists. For a community to be sustainable, the local inhabitants must construct a sense of place for themselves.
