Paper, not chips
Sources: what this site reads, and how to check it
Compilations, printed and stacked along one shelf. Transcripts in a folder underneath. Nothing here is offered as recommended reading. Call it an inventory of the desk instead: what lay open while a given line was being written, and what a reader would have to lift down to show that the line is wrong.
Standing note
Nothing on this list is a recommendation to gamble. No entry links to an operator. Where two states answer the same question differently, both documents are named rather than one picked.
First: the documents that settle things
Four kinds of paper. Everything else ranks below them.
- State legislation as published by each state's own legislation office — carrying a compilation date most readers scroll straight past.
- Each state's Casino Control Act, and in New South Wales the Gaming Machines Act 2001, which prohibits publishing gaming-machine advertising; Victoria runs its own parallel ban, so the same page can be lawful in one state and not in the other.
- The Commonwealth's Interactive Gambling Act 2001 — the one national layer over a licensing system otherwise built state by state.
- The inquiry record proper: terms of reference, daily transcripts, exhibits, final report. The Bergin inquiry in New South Wales, opened 21 January 2020, reported 1 February 2021, nineteen recommendations. The Victorian Royal Commission under Ray Finkelstein AO QC, appointed late February 2021, report delivered that October.
A summary of an Act is not the Act. An explanatory memorandum tells you what the drafters said they meant; it does not tell you what the section says now, after amendment.
Second-hand paper, and what it can carry
Hansard is good for what was meant and no use at all for what the words now say. A power in use shows up elsewhere — in what a regulator publishes each year, in the decisions it hands down, in how far a statute's permissions sit from anything ever done under them. Papers of the moment fix a date and rarely more. That is where Jupiters turns up: a soft opening, Gold Coast, November 1985, with the formal one still months off, February 1986.
A summary tells you what someone thought the section said, on the day they read it.
Journalism quoting a report is a pointer to the report. It is not the report.
How to check a sentence here
- Find the Act on that state's own legislation site. Not on ours, not on a mirror.
- Check the compilation currency date against the date printed on our page. If ours is older, assume ours is stale.
- Read the section itself. Marginal headings are navigation, not law, and they are not always updated with the text beneath them.
- Match any recommendation number back to the numbering used in the report itself — reports get renumbered in summaries far more often than in originals.
Law goes out of date quietly. An Act amended in March leaves a page written in February wrong without changing a word on it.
Walk it back to a primary document, or drop the sentence.
Never used
- Operator marketing.
- Affiliate 'review' sites.
- Odds, systems and strategy material.
- Any secondary source that cannot be walked back to a primary document.
Where the only available source is secondary — a transcript never published, an exhibit never released — the page says so in the sentence, and the claim is written as general knowledge rather than dressed in a reference it does not have.