Australians still mourn Sizzler’s cheese toast and Smorgy’s chocolate fountain as if the great Aussie buffet died with them. It didn’t. It just moved into the RSL club buffets, where the roast, the salad bar and the $24.90 seniors special survive as a loss leader. The buffet operators pay no rent, the club absorbs the food costs, and the food keeps you in the building long enough to feed the poker machines. The money flowing back to veterans from all that turnover is far smaller than the public assumes: only about 1.5% of RSL gambling revenue goes to veteran support.

1 What Veterans Get from the Government

The deal for veterans is clear and, in theory, guaranteed. Men and women are sent to war on behalf of the country. In return, the Commonwealth owes them a duty of care: repatriation, medical treatment, compensation for injury, pensions, rehabilitation, and support for their families. That obligation is enshrined in law through the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (DVA), and it is not optional. It is a debt of honour that survives regardless of budgets or boardroom decisions.

But government support has its limits. Veterans transitioning to civilian life often describe the DVA system as slow, adversarial, and exhausting to navigate, a bureaucracy that can require veterans to prove, repeatedly, that their service broke them. That gap between legal obligation and lived experience is exactly the gap the welfare side of the RSL was founded to fill.

2 What RSL Clubs Actually Are

Here is the part most Australians do not realise: RSL clubs are not the RSL. The Returned & Services League, the veterans’ charity, is a membership organisation founded after World War I to advocate for and care for returned service people. RSL clubs, by contrast, are privately run businesses. They pay for the right to use the RSL name, but apart from that branding, and perhaps hosting a small veterans’ meeting room, they have little real connection to the charity or its mission.

RSL Queensland’s own state president, Stephen Day, has been blunt about it: most RSL clubs are commercial entities with “limited connection with the RSL and its charitable activities.” Of roughly 230 sub-branches in Queensland, only about 40 have any relationship with an RSL club, and only 19 actually own and operate one. RSL NSW goes further, explicitly stating on its website that it “does not own or operate clubs or poker machines, and RSL sub-Branches are separate entities from RSL Clubs”.

What these clubs do operate, in large numbers, is poker machines. And the revenue is enormous.

3 Smorgy’s Is Gone, Sizzler Is Gone, The Buffet Lives On At The RSL Club Buffet

Sizzler closed its last Australian stores in November 2020. Smorgy’s, once sprawling across the suburbs with its all-you-can-eat steam tables, shrank to a handful of holdouts. For a generation raised on salad-bar runs and soft-serve machines, it felt like the end of the great Aussie buffet. In truth the buffet never died in people’s hearts, it was swallowed whole by the RSL club buffets.

Walk into almost any large RSL club buffet in NSW or Queensland on a Friday night and you will find it: the carvery, the salad bar, the pasta bake, the $15 to $25 roast special, kids eat free on Tuesdays. The operators behind those bain-maries are usually not paying commercial rent. The club gives them the kitchen and the floor space rent-free, or close to it, because food is not the business, dwell time is the business. A cheap feed gets the pensioner couple, the family, the shift worker through the door at 6pm and keeps them in the building until 9pm. Between the main and dessert sits a wall of flashing poker machines.

Hospitality managers say it openly in industry circles: the bistro runs as a deliberate loss leader. The club wears the loss on a $24.90 seniors rump and makes it back many times over on the gaming floor, where players can lose life savings one $1, $2 and $100 note at a time. The buffet did not survive because Australians love a salad bar, though they do. It survived because a full stomach gambles longer than an empty one.

4 The Numbers That Don’t Add Up

The figures are stark. A ten-year academic review of Victorian RSL venues operating pokies, published in early 2025, found that the clubs took around $2.1 billion in gambling losses, and directed just 1.5% of that money to veteran support. For every $100 fed into a machine at an RSL club buffet, roughly $1.50 found its way to veterans. On average, business expenses outstripped veteran support contributions by a ratio of 12 to 1. Contributions to addressing gambling-related harm, the very harm the machines produce, were less than 0.002% of claims.

The older Victorian figures tell the same story. In 2017, the 52 gaming RSL sub-branches took in almost $260 million in total revenue and turned a profit of just $8 million. Of all that money, less than 4%, $9.8 million, went into welfare programs shared between veterans and the wider community, including donations to sporting clubs and subsidised meals for pensioners.

5 No Obligation to Hire Veterans

Layered on top of all this is the employment question. RSL clubs are frequently described as providing jobs for veterans, and some do commendable work. But there is no binding obligation. A club can hold the RSL name, occupy prime community land at peppercorn rates, enjoy not-for-profit tax concessions, and fill its boardrooms and payrolls entirely with people who have never worn a uniform. Nothing in the arrangement compels preference for veterans, their families, or even sub-branch members.

This matters because employment is one of the most acute problems veterans face. Ex-service personnel transitioning to civilian work struggle with skills translation, employer stereotypes, and invisible wounds like PTSD that do not fit neatly into a recruitment process. The organisation carrying the veterans’ brand could, in principle, be a major solution to that problem. In practice, it is a hospitality and gaming business that answers to its own board, not to the veteran community.

6 The Uncomfortable Irony

The deepest irony cuts both ways. Consider who feeds the machines: in many club suburbs, a significant share of regular pokie players are pensioners, including older veterans themselves, some of them battling gambling addiction seeded or worsened by their service. One young veteran interviewed by the ABC estimated he had lost up to $100,000 on pokies after discharge, including time spent in RSL venues.

Petersen, who works in veteran suicide prevention, notes that gambling and alcohol addiction feature heavily in the histories of veterans presenting with suicidal behaviour, and argues the RSL should not be “running a venue that preys” on exactly that vulnerability.

The institution founded to protect veterans has, in its commercial arm, become an industry that profits, modestly, even ineffectively, from their vulnerabilities, while returning a sliver of the takings to the people whose name is on the door.