KEY POINTS:
A new survey has found that frequent racegoers have a better quality of life than the rest of us - but those who play the pokies are a lot worse off than the average.
The massive survey of 7000 people across the country, conducted by Massey University for the Ministry of Health, also found negative effects on quality of life from gambling on poker or other card games at home.
But it found no significant differences in quality of life between the 54 per cent of the population who bought Lotto tickets in the past year and the 46 per cent who didn't.
Massey Professor Sally Casswell, who will report the survey's preliminary results to a gambling conference in Auckland tomorrow, said the contrasting findings pointed to varying effects of different kinds of gambling.
"Time at a race track is quite different from time spent at a pokie machine," she said. "At the race track you spend time doing other things, it's more of a social occasion. With the pokies you just sit at the machine."
The survey included extra sampling of Maori, Pacific, Chinese and Korean people, and used Chinese and Korean speakers, to get reliable numbers for every major ethnic group.
Contrary to the popular stereotype, it found that Chinese and Koreans were actually the least likely to have gambled at all in the past year - only 44 per cent, compared with 50 per cent of Pacific people, 65 per cent of Europeans and 71 per cent of Maori.
Europeans were more likely than any other group to have limited their gambling to Lotto (34 per cent), and to have gone to a race meeting (8 per cent).
Maori were the most likely to gamble on pokies at all venues - in pubs (15 per cent), casinos (10 per cent) and clubs (6 per cent).
Table gambling in casinos was the only area where Chinese and Koreans were more likely to gamble (6 per cent) than European, Maori or Pacific people (all 3 per cent).
Although not reported in the table, the survey also found that 8 per cent of the overall population gambled at the TAB, 4 per cent on poker or other card games at home, and others on housie, raffles and other forms of gambling. Fewer than 1 per cent gambled on the internet.
Overall, 38 per cent had not gambled at all in the past year, 32 per cent only took Lotto tickets, another 27 per cent spent fewer than three hours a week and lost less than 5 per cent of their income on gambling, and 3 per cent gambled more than three hours a week and lost more than 5 per cent of their income.
Everyone was asked to assess their own wellbeing on a list of measures on a five-point scale between "very good" and "very bad".
Those who spent more time on the pokies reported lower quality of life and life satisfaction, worse physical and mental health, worse relationships with family and friends, lower living standards, worse financial situations, worse work performance and poorer care of children than the average.
Those who spent a lot of time at the TAB also reported poorer mental health and relationships, and were less likely to be in paid work.
But those who spent more time at the races reported higher quality of life, higher life satisfaction and even a better financial situation than the average, even though they were also less likely to be in paid work.
