Quentin Beresford
Award Winning Author
Latest Release
Hooked (2025)
How did Big Gambling become too big to fail and too powerful to adequately regulate?
Australians lose around $32 billion on legal forms of gambling each year, the most of any country in the world, while the industry rakes in $244 billion through poker machines, lotteries, casinos and the exponential rise in sports betting.
In Hooked, Quentin Beresford explores how gambling expanded from a highly restricted recreational activity to a mega industry. He asks, what's the balance between entertainment and social harm?
What does the crisis reveal about the troubling intersection between business and politics? And, finally, how can the gambling industry be reined in?
With a cast of questionable characters, iconic corporate brands, eye-watering greed, political subterfuge and the many state.
Current Project
I am in the process of writing a book on Big Gambling and how it has taken over Australia. It explores the dark side of the industry: the normalisation of gambling through saturated advertising, the growth of problem gambling, the proliferation of poker machines, the criminality of casinos, the infiltration of sports and the capture of government.
I can be contacted on qberesf0@gmail.com
There ought to be more books in this vein: a full scale, well-assembled analysis of what caused a powerful and often feared business to collapse
Andrew Main
The Deal
Reviews
With sharp insights, Beresford’s rich documentation and exposition of events prosecute the extent to which Australia’s major political parties have become a revolving door between government and resource corporations.
Susan Reid
University of Sydney
Wounded Country is an evocative invocation of the need for Australia to examination with the environment
Jesssica Urwin
Australian National University
About Quentin
Author of more than a dozen books, Quentin is a multi-award winning non-fiction writer. Adopting a narrative style, he tells compelling stories about contentious, contemporary issues setting them in their historical, political and social context. He has written about environmental disasters, environmental campaigns, political corruption, Indigenous rights, corporate failures and biographies of notable public figures...
