Every day, Australians lose about $40 million on poker machines — devices deeply woven into the country's economic and political fabric.

The man who helped pioneer this industry, Len Ainsworth, has amassed a multi-billion-dollar fortune.

In recent decades, he's channelled much of this wealth into philanthropy, wielding quiet influence from behind the scenes.

Shifting power

Nelson Nghe was shocked when he heard the name: "The Ainsworth Family Gallery".

The artist, from Western Sydney, had travelled into the city to celebrate the opening of a new modern wing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The project, which only got off the ground thanks to multimillion-dollar philanthropic donations, had cost $344 million. 

When he arrived, Nghe had been floored by the building's grandeur.

"I was like, wow, there's so much light and glass here," he says.

"The ceilings just seemed so tall as well. They kept going on and on."

But his awe began to curdle when someone mentioned one of the exhibition halls in the new building had been named after billionaire businessman Len Ainsworth and his family, in thanks for a $10 million donation.

For Nghe, a gallery honouring the legacy of a man who'd built his fortune as Australia's most prolific manufacturer of poker machines "definitely does not compute".

This was personal for him — Nghe's art explores how poker machines shaped and scarred his childhood in Western Sydney.

"The name is a very loaded and complicated one for me," he says.  

"It symbolises almost my cage in that, that's been the name that has caged me and my loved ones."

Len Ainsworth's influence on the modern poker machine industry is so immense, he's often called the "pokies king".

The 101-year-old billionaire started not just one, but two of the world's biggest poker machine manufacturing companies — Aristocrat Leisure and Ainsworth Game Technology — amassing a $5.85 billion empire for him, and his family, along the way.

Aristocrat Leisure is today worth $40 billion, three times the value of Qantas.

Among other things, the company claims to have invented the world's first microprocessor poker machine — ushering in a new digital age for the technology that experts say supercharged its addictive risk.

But in recent decades, Len Ainsworth has restyled himself as a highly visible philanthropist, pledging to give away half of his fortune, including to medicine, science and cultural institutions like the Art Gallery of NSW.

Nghe says the esteem granted to Ainsworth by the gallery "just set something off in me".

"It gave me more of a mission," he says, "to want to find out more and to dig deeper."

Lobbying efforts revealed in unpublished book

For decades, Len Ainsworth was a larger-than-life character in the Australian media — feuding publicly with critics of poker machines, his business rivals and even politicians.

He made headlines for suing NSW police officers for defamation, and his own son for selling shares in the family poker machine business Aristocrat Leisure without giving his father his promised cut.

But amidst all of this drama, Ainsworth's ambition and strategy powered his company's ascent.

By the late 1970s, it controlled at least 75 per cent of the poker machine market in Australia. At this time though, the market was limited because poker machines in clubs were only legal in NSW and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT).

Historian Susan Marsden, who spent years interviewing Len Ainsworth and reviewing his archives, discovered that around this time, Ainsworth's expansion plans took a decisive turn towards politics — one that would have a lasting impact.

Marsden's biography of Ainsworth, The Patriarch of the Pokies, was commissioned by one of his sons, but the family decided not to publish it.

"From the '70s," she says, "[Len] was approached by licensed club associations of the other states, asking him for help to persuade their governments of the benefits of legalizing poker machines."

Marsden found that in 1979, Ainsworth started donating to an organisation called the Australian Club Development Association, committing to spend $100,000 a year on the group and $150,000 annually for a lobbyist to run a campaign.

"So, he was certainly very involved quite directly in a proactive way," she says.

By the early 1990s, those lobbying efforts paid off when Queensland, Victoria and South Australia legalized poker machines in clubs, massively expanding the local market.

The economic conditions at the time played a big part in these state's decisions; state banks in Victoria and South Australia failed after overextending themselves in the 1980s.

"The governments were really scrambling to find money," Marsden says.

And poker machine revenue, which could be taxed, could help fill the void.

As these new states came on board, the money lost in poker machines soared nationally, more than doubling between 1990 and 1995 to $3.8 billion, according to government figures — a trend that's continued.

Last year, the NSW government alone received $970 million in tax revenue from poker machines in registered clubs, an industry that's become a fierce defender of these machines against reform efforts.

'It's like watching a train crash'

Today, more than 70 years after Len Ainsworth first started making poker machines in his father's dental supply factory in Sydney's west, the country's biggest pokie losses are concentrated in Western Sydney.

Last year in Cumberland, the local government area where Nelson Nghe grew up, pubs and clubs made a net profit of about half a billion dollars from poker machines.

Nghe will sometimes visit these venues in his area, as research for his art.

"It's like watching a train crash," he says.

"When I walk around these floors, I see so many newly arrived migrants and young people, and then it hits home; this was the moment my own family stepped foot into these places.

"I'm seeing history repeat."

Much of Nghe's recent work takes the form of pictures of himself as a child, collaged into images that illustrate just how much poker machines shaped his life. At first glance, he wants the images to seem sweet — almost nostalgic — until the darker side of the photo dawns on the viewer.

When Background Briefing visits Nghe in his home studio, he picks one out of a huge pile on his dining table.

"In this piece, I've got a work where it's Len Ainsworth and me," he says, holding up a collage image of the pair standing together in front of a bank of poker machines.

In it, Nghe is a child, leaning against a poker machine, and Len Ainsworth is smiling at the camera. It's an unsettling imagined scene: the older man whose machine so profoundly influenced the young boy's life, standing beside each other.

"We're in a photo together because our lives have really been linked and have been a part of each other," Nghe says.

For his family, Nghe says, the impact of poker machines was profound.

"Growing up, money became another part of the family because you realise it has such a power over everyone… it controls your life because you see so much of it being lost," he says.

Memories of childhood come back to him in flashes: constant conflict and stress because of gambling, finding a hidden stash of credit cards in the house, interventions by desperate family members.

"It's almost like you grow up on quicksand. The ground underneath you is so unstable," he says.

Coming from a refugee background, he says there was an added level of shame and stigma around gambling. It was everywhere, but no one spoke about it, beyond the gossip about whose parents' car was spotted outside the local pokies clubs or which school friends who lost their homes to gambling.

But as an artist just starting out in his career, Nghe knows there are risks to criticising this powerful industry and a man like Len Ainsworth, whose influence extends even into the art world.

"Part of me is wondering what am I getting myself into? I don't think any other artist would be doing this in their right mind," Nghe says.

"No one wants to be that first person. Because people are afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. But maybe sometimes we've got a nibble at that hand, you know?"

He says he wants others to understand the impact of gambling not just on the gambler, but on the people who love them — their family, their community, their kids.

"I'm trusting that what I went through as a child of a gambler was not for nothing," Nghe says.

"I think that's why I want to reach out to Len… wouldn't he want to know the end result of what he created?"

The 'pokies king' becomes a 'visionary' donor

In recent decades, Len Ainsworth has directed his attention and wealth towards building a lasting legacy. 

Once etched on the flashing faces of slot machines across the nation, Ainsworth's name now graces the grand facades of Sydney's most prestigious buildings. All in thanks for donations made by Len Ainsworth.

The Children's Medical Research Institute has Ainsworth Tower. The University of New South Wales, Western Sydney University, Macquarie University and Sydney Children's Hospital each have a building named after Ainsworth.

There's is also an Ainsworth Family Conservation Laboratory at the State Library of New South Wales where Len Ainsworth is listed as a "visionary" donor, having given more than $5 million to the institution. And, of course, the Ainsworth Family Gallery at the Art Gallery of NSW.

His pivot to philanthropy began in the 1990s after a cancer scare, which prompted the pokies tycoon to make succession plans — including for Aristocrat, the company he'd spent 40 years building.

"I thought the best thing to do was to divide the value of my estate up, which included the whole of Aristocrat at that time and give it to my wife, my ex-wife and my seven children," he told the ABC in 2017.

But Ainsworth survived, and in 1996 he made his first major philanthropic donation: $1.5 million to Sydney Children's Hospital. And with a new lease on life, he even started a second poker machine manufacturing giant — Ainsworth Game Technology.

This put him in direct competition with Aristocrat, where many of his sons were still working — readying the company to be floated on the stock market.

When Aristocrat went public in 1996, the shares Ainsworth had handed his family made them incredibly wealthy. And when his sons stepped back from managing Aristocrat, many of them also turned to philanthropy, like their father.

Len Ainsworth's sons rarely speak publicly about their father and the origins of their fortunes. Over the past decade, most have sold down their shares in Aristocrat and Ainsworth Game Technology.

Instead, the family has forged an identity as some of the biggest philanthropic donors in Australia across medicine, culture, environmental causes and the arts.

"As a private person, I prefer to minimise publicity of my philanthropic activities but at the same time realise that setting a positive example is the best way to encourage others to give back," Ainsworth said when he signed up to Bill Gates' Giving Pledge to give away half his fortune.

"I have a large family of sons and am doing my best to encourage them to follow my example and embark on their own philanthropic endeavours."

'What do you do about fools?'

Len Ainsworth has often said he's never gambled, such as telling Four Corners back in 2000, "I'm far too busy creating things for other people to gamble on."

But he has been questioned directly, at times, about the impact of his machines on others.

Most recently, in a piece celebrating his 100th birthday two years ago, he told The Australian newspaper he believed gamblers need to exercise personal responsibility.

"The person who goes and, shall we say, plays a poker machine and he has no money left to buy food or whatever is a fool. What do you do about fools?" Ainsworth said.

"The answer is: there's nothing much you can do about them."

But privately, it seems, he has shown some interest in learning more about harm reduction.

Rowan Cameron, former head of harm minimisation efforts at ClubsNSW and Crown Casino, says a few years ago he received an invitation out of the blue from Ainsworth to have lunch.

"I was curious about the man because, as a billionaire pokey baron and manufacturer, it wasn't necessary on his part really to spend any time with the likes of me," Cameron says.

He says Ainsworth was a "product of his era" who believed strongly in personal responsibility.

 "But I did get a sense that his curiosity around what could be done to minimise harm was genuine."

Publicly, though, when the Productivity Commission recommended $1 maximum bets on poker machines and a mandatory pre-commitment card to help people struggling with gambling addiction, in 2010, Ainsworth was dismissive.

"Why interfere with things?" he told ABC's 7.30 Report. 

"I mean, are we trying to run a nanny state where the government is going to tell us how we spend our own money?"

'They like the money'

Tim Costello, a longtime campaigner for poker machine reform, says there are moral and ethical issues with major institutions taking donations from Len Ainsworth, because of the poker machine connection.

"I think it's very problematic," he says. "Pokies are legal, like tobacco is legal but those places would not take donations from tobacco companies."

The Art Gallery of NSW declined multiple interview requests from Background Briefing. The institutions that have named buildings after Ainsworth all said they have processes in place to weigh up taking donations and were happy to accept Ainsworth's funding.

Costello says that when it comes to gambling, by now, "We know the social costs".

"People don't want to talk about it because they do know that, but they like the money," he says.

But, he adds, views on gambling are shifting — even, it seems, within the Ainsworth family.

"I would say that there is a member of the Ainsworth family who has been very generous to the Alliance for Gambling Reform," Costello says.

"I do know that there are some family members who actually have a conscience [on this issue] and I think that's very significant."

That family member did not want to be named.

Len Ainsworth didn't respond to Background Briefing's requests for an interview, nor did he respond to questions. None of his sons wished to speak on the record.

Still, Costello remains hopeful that a member of the Ainsworth family will publicly throw their support behind long-awaited poker machines reforms in NSW, which he believes have stalled.

"I think an Ainsworth family member … speaking out might break through some of the impasses," he says, pointing to industry bodies ClubsNSW and the Australian Hotels Association (AHA) as the main blockers of reform.

Both ClubsNSW and the AHA have rejected calls for the introduction of a new system for poker machines in NSW, which would require all gamblers to sign up for an account.

This system was recommended by the executive committee of the Independent Panel on Gaming Reform, a body convened after revelations that huge amounts of money were being laundered by criminals through poker machines in NSW.

The panel was made up of reform advocates, experts, industry members and one person with lived experience. For 18 months it debated how best to stop money laundering and help people experiencing gambling harm, and reviewed results of a six-month trial cashless gaming technology.

Aristocrat withdrew from the trial early on, saying it wanted to focus on developing its own cashless technology. But along with it, about half of the 28 venues that were slated to participate also pulled out, because Aristocrat was providing their cashless technology.

The panel's industry members refused to endorse the account-based system, all citing the paucity of data yielded by the six-month trial of the cashless gaming card.

The Minns Government has still not responded to the report. A spokesperson for the NSW gaming minister David Harris said the government was "considering" the panel's report and weighing community feedback on the proposed reforms.

"The government has asked the department to conduct detailed economic modelling on proposals," the spokesperson said.

Completing the picture one frame at a time

On a rainy Friday evening in April, dozens of people packed into a room at the Sydney gallery Firstdraft for Nelson Nghe's first solo exhibition.

The harbour views of the Art Gallery of NSW only five minutes away, here the view was of an old concrete basketball court, encircled by a chain-link fence. The gallery goers drank wine from plastic tumblers.

Inside, the crowd moved slowly around the room, peering at Nghe's 150 artworks, all presented in childlike frames Nghe had found in op shops.

Among them is the collage of him, as a kid, standing beside Len Ainsworth.

Nghe says he's glad people have found his work confronting. His aim is to shake people out of their complacency, to ask whether having hundreds of poker machines at your local club — or a dozen stuffed into the back room of every pub — is normal.

And he says he wants to turn the focus back onto those who've profited from gambling harm — the clubs, the pubs, politicians and manufacturers, like Len Ainsworth.

"As a child, you blame the people who you thought were supposed to look after you. It's only as an adult that you realise actually that anger is misplaced," he says, reflecting on how his own thinking has shifted in recent years.

"You've been told to judge the gambler, the person experiencing the gambling harm. So, your focus is there until you realise … here's another party at play here, and how come they don't get any of your focus?"

On the question of whether any of the Ainsworths might see his exhibition, he's optimistic.

 "I would definitely love them to see it and would love to know what they think," he says.

While Nghe seeks to understand the roots of his family and community's struggle with poker machines, he holds onto hope that one day, they'll want to understand his story too.

"It's how we complete the picture."

Credits:

• Reporting: Maddison Connaughton 
• Edit and production: Rachel Clayton
• Video production: Sebastian Dixon
• Photography: Jack Fisher