‘Even on my pension, I can still have a crack at the lotto’

What is it about some people — you know, the ones who seem to win something on the national lottery virtually every week when the rest of us (and Jacqui and me in particular!), never seem to get anything at all. Certainly not enough to cover our initial investments anyway.

We have a son like that. He lives a couple of hundred kilometers from us and he phones his mum and dad most days, either to let us know he’s still alive, or to check that we are, and there’s hardly a week that goes by without him casually mentioning the hundred or so dollars he won, or some other sum the night before that! Not only is he a frequent winner in the lottery, but he has been gloriously successful on more than one occasion too. The greatest win of all amounted to more $400,000 and landed in his pocket about 12 years ago. Mind you, he’s not one of these people who believe in investments, to safeguard his future, he really enjoyed the money while he had it, but there’s none of it left now, apart from the car he kindly bought us and which we still own, a lovely VW Passat — by far the best car we’ve ever owned.

Regarding our winnings on the lottery, well, we consider ourselves to be doing well if we win $10 in a year — there’s rarely more than that in our ‘winner’s enclosure’! Not that we invest a lot in it either, $20 a week is about the best we can afford out of our pension, and I don’t suppose we should even be spending that really, but you do need a little bit of excitement in your life don’t you, or you might as well be dead.

Of course, somebody has to win it, somewhere! Our son spends considerably more than us on his weekly flutter, and in the 12 years since he had his big win, I expect he’s paid most of it back to the lottery company by now, even taking into account the frequent smaller wins he has.

He’s not the only one either! Often, when I’m queuing, I see other pensioners looking very serious as they hand a couple of hundred dollars over the counter, but I rarely see any of them picking up some winnings to balance things out a bit. I sometimes wonder how they can possibly afford it, unless their husbands or wives left them well off in their will!

It’s a little horrifying to see these older people in the pokies too, some spending hours (and very likely most of their pensions), trying to beat machines that are very carefully designed not to be beaten. It stands to reason, no pub or club is going to install equipment that is as likely to show the customers a profit, as it is the house — they’d very soon be out of business if that was the case! The only thing, I suppose, from the pensioners’ point of view, is the fact that it gets them out of a lonely home, puts them in contact with other similar individuals, and provides them with hot beverages at no extra cost. To some, the loss of money must be worth all that.

Of course none of this is really new. I recall, in the days before pokies were made legal in Victoria, there were buses leaving our South Gippsland town every weekend, taking the long haul up to the New South Wales border, where they were legal; crammed with locals, pockets bulging with cash and happy smiles on their faces. I never saw any of those buses return, late at night, but I wonder how many of the passengers still had happy smiles on their faces then…

Have you ever bought a lotto ticket or played the pokies? Have you ever had a big win?

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