A reference manual, kept in Perth
How Australia licensed the casino
Every licence in this country was granted by a state. Never by the nation.
- Paper, not chips: no bets are taken here and no deposits held, no casino, bookmaker or gaming licence sits behind this masthead — only statutes, transcripts and the dates they carry.
Decided at a ballot box
A referendum, not a minister
14 December 1968. A Tasmanian state referendum, under the Reece Labor government. Fifty-three per cent yes — three points clear of the line, and no more than that.
That is how the first legal casino licence in Australia was settled. Not a cabinet minute. A public vote, in the smallest state, on a question the mainland had not yet asked.
Sandy Bay, Hobart, 10 February 1973 — Wrest Point comes next. No legal casino anywhere in the country before it, and the state that got there first held a sliver of the mainland's population.
Everything after that is a state deciding for itself, one Act at a time. The dates, the clustering, the decade the mainland spent watching Tasmania — those belong to the timeline, not to this page.
What sits on this shelf
Statutes. Inquiry transcripts. Findings, with their dates still attached. A licence file is a paper object before it is anything else, and this site is a reading of those papers — printed compilations, tabbed, marked up, held against each other state by state.
What is not here: game rules, odds, strategy, venue write-ups, anything that reads as advice a reader should act on. No page here is somewhere to gamble. No page here explains how.
- Advertising rules diverge sharply. New South Wales prohibits the publishing of gaming-machine advertising under the Gaming Machines Act 2001; Victoria carries its own parallel prohibition.
- Gambling taxes are levied at different rates on club machines, hotel machines and casino machines — and those differing rates, not player demand alone, shaped where the machines were installed.
- So the same page can be lawful in one state and unlawful in another. Where the states differ, or where a question is genuinely unsettled, this site says so rather than flattening it into one national rule.
I began with a photocopied schedule of licence conditions. Twenty-two pages, stapled at the corner, someone else's pencil in the margin. I had wanted a date and found a procedure instead. That is the whole reason for the shelf: in this country the interesting part of a casino is never the floor. It is the paper that permits the floor to exist.
Two states, two processes
The year the licences were tested
The Bergin Inquiry in New South Wales, presided over by the Hon. Patricia Bergin SC, began on 21 January 2020 and reported on 1 February 2021. It found the operator unsuitable to hold its licence and made 19 recommendations on the regulatory framework. New South Wales then created a dedicated casino regulator, lifting casino supervision out of the general liquor-and-gaming body.
Victoria appointed Ray Finkelstein AO QC in late February 2021 to run a Royal Commission into the casino operator and its licence. The report was delivered in October 2021.
Different states, different instruments, one recurring question — and the phrase this masthead is named for sits at the centre of it.
Working definition
Suitability, as this manual uses the term: not whether a company can run a floor, but whether its owners, its directors and its money can be identified, explained and supervised. A licence is a permission to be watched. It fails when the watching becomes impossible.
Corrections and sources
Write to the editor
One editor, one inbox. If a date here is wrong, if a section number has moved, or if you can point to the transcript page that settles something this site has left open — send it. A correction that changes a fact is noted on the page it changes.
No counter, no phone queue, no visiting hours. Email is the whole apparatus.