By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
A WOMAN whose husband’s gambling addiction ruined her family knows only too well that the odds are stacked against compulsive gamblers – and their families.
She fronted the launch of a Vietnamese community problem gambling help service in Springvale recently, telling how her and her family’s lives were skittled by her husband’s addiction.
“The chances of winning is very rare. You will lose everything,” she warned.
“You’ll destroy your family and your life by gambling.”
She advised people to seek help after Springvale Indo-Chinese Mutual Assistance Association helped her “get my life back” step-by-step.
The association was recently awarded $100,000 from the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation to provide culturally appropriate, in-language gambler help services.
Through an interpreter she told how she had worked long hours to support her family – including her sick son – while her husband was unable to land a job and lingered in pokies dens.
In his gambling haze, he’d forget to pick up his children from school and poured his entire Centrelink benefit into pokies.
As the family struggled to pay rent and bills, the husband stole his wife’s jewellery and bet and lost all the proceeds.
He even gambled funds that she had hid away to cover basic expenses.
She said she was hit several times by her husband, whose aggression and stress grew unabated.
Then, as she puts it, her husband had a stroke one day and became paraplegic.
She gave up work to care for him and their children.
Out of desperation, she went to SICMAA for relief.
SICMAA president Be Ha said the agency had sought to start a gamblers’ help initiative for years.
Problem gambling had been one of the Vietnamese community’s most serious issues since pokies were unleashed in the 1990s.
SICMAA will provide trained staff to support problem gamblers and their families, and spread a preventive message about gambling’s pitfalls.
Ms Ha hopes it will give “new hope” for many Vietnamese families and addicts.
Serge Sardo, chief executive of Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, said the foundation had funded several groups to reach out to Chinese, Arabic and Vietnamese communities.
More than 90 per cent of problem gamblers do not seek help, compounded by the reluctance of problem gamblers from CALD communities to seek help from “mainstream” services.
He hoped the services would help people to seek help early rather than wait until “crisis point” when lives were devastated.
