licence by licence
Frequently asked questions about Australia's first casinos
I get the same nine questions from readers working through the record — which state moved first, whether a national regulator exists, why the same advertisement is lawful in Melbourne and not in Sydney. Below are dated answers, not opinions.
Firsts
Adelaide Casino began operating on 12 December 1985, housed within the 1928 Adelaide Railway Station rather than a resort built for the purpose. Eighteen days on, on 30 December 1985, Burswood Island Casino opened in Perth as Australia's largest gaming floor — said at the time to rank third-largest worldwide.
Licences cluster in the mid-1980s because approval ran state by state, not through one federal process. Each state watched Tasmania, which had legalised casino gambling roughly a decade earlier, before committing its own statute and its own opening date.
Eighteen days separate Adelaide from Burswood — long enough for one state to claim the record, too short to change how either licence was written.
In a sense there were two openings apiece for The Star, in Sydney, and Crown, in Melbourne. Crown got going during 1994 from a fill-in venue while the Southbank building was still being finished. From 13 September 1995 The Star ran out of temporary quarters, its permanent home not opening until 27 November 1997 — a two-year gap dividing the stopgap floor from the finished one.
Regulation
No single body oversees casinos nationwide. Each state carries its own Casino Control Act on the books — so the same action at a gaming table might draw different treatment depending on which side of a state line it occurs.
The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 stands as the sole federal law touching this field, addressing online wagering rather than physical premises. It renders it an offence for a gambling website to provide particular services to Australian customers, while leaving the casino floor itself to state jurisdiction.
Confronted by the same problem — an operator of a casino under investigation — the responses from New South Wales and Victoria diverged. On the strength of the Bergin findings, NSW established a casino regulator that stood on its own, pulling casino oversight out of the broader liquor-and-gaming authority. Victoria opted instead for a Royal Commission, and in the closing days of February 2021 named Ray Finkelstein AO QC to it, his findings being delivered that October.
Same trigger, two different machines for oversight — one a standing regulator, the other a time-limited commission.
Terminology and tax
Pokies and slots are the same machine, described in two vocabularies. Australian statute and everyday speech use pokies; American and most international writing uses slots. The cabinet, the reel logic, the licence conditions attached to it do not change with the word.
If you want to see state lines really bite, look at what you're allowed to advertise. New South Wales, through its Gaming Machines Act 2001, prohibits publishing any ad for gaming machines. Victoria runs a separate ban of its own drafting — so the very same page, describing the very same machine, can be legal in one state and against the law in the other.
Whether a machine lands in a club, a pub or a casino owes far more to the tax rates each state sets than to anything players asked for. Across most states, a separate rate applies to machines in clubs, in hotels and in casinos, and operators built their floors around that maths — one licence at a time, one state at a time — well before any player demand came into it.