I had an interesting conversation with a couple of friends this week. Steve was telling me about a holiday he and his wife had just spent in Hobart. I’d also been in Hobart recently and so we got talking about Mt Wellington, the Salamanca Markets and some of the other attractions of the city.

Then Steve said, ‘Hey, the casino there has the best all-you-can eat buffet too.’ Well, this got Andy, my other friend, into the discussion. His first response was this: ‘How can you eat at a casino restaurant and not be supporting gambling?’ Andy’s reasoning went like this: the restaurants are deliberately cheap to entice people to gamble and gambling ruins thousands of lives each year, so by eating there you’re in some way supporting (perhaps even subsidising) the system. But for Steve it was simply a cheap meal. He never went to gamble, and didn’t feel any temptation to do so.

Andy’s comments got Steve thinking. Perhaps he wasn’t doing the best thing. And that’s when he asked me if we’d explore it as our everyday dilemma.

How do you feel about the issue? If you eat at a casino’s bistro are you supporting gambling?