Australia’s productivity commission releases report on gambling

In our General casino news feature this week we put the focus on Australia where online casinos are still illegal and Australian gamblers are theoretically prevented from using offshore registered sites however by their own admission the laws are poorly defined and difficult to enforce. There is an online poker and sports betting industry in Australia but it only two companies are licensed to provide the services and they conveniently each have licenses for different states providing an effective monopoly for each of them. However onlinecasino.ie has learned that the Productivity Commission Report recently released suggests that these exclusive rights should be abandoned but the report in the news for casinos also suggests that there is a large problem with addiction and quotes the electronic poker machine or “pokie” which are very popular in Australian premises as a major cause. It is estimated that about 4% of Australians use pokies and about 15% of those have a gambling problem but this is not an online casino issue; the report in the news goes on to say that reducing the amount of money that can be fed into a machine should be drastically reduced and that ATMs sited close to the machines should be removed and a low daily limit imposed. Interestingly enough also in the casino news is a report from the University of Melbourne that suggests that excessive Internet use and gambling are both addictive and could be attributable to the same psychological factors but there appears to be no link between the two so we must assume from this casino news that there will be no radical changes in legislation for the time being and that Australians will continue to do pretty much what they want.