Online Casino

While the online gambling world seems to focus most of its attention on the online gambling ban in the United States that has been in force since 2006 with the UIGEA, in Australia, a smaller yet equally vibrant potential market has been kept under the jackboot of their own version with its Interactive Gambling Act since 2001. This act rendered it unlawful for any online casino or gambling company to allow players to use real money to place bets online.

As with the US laws, it is not against the law for Australians to place real money bets online, just for Internet sites to offer them. In similar fashion to the US, it has become clear that this ban is ineffective. This is because foreign owned and registered sites still provide the means for Australians to gamble online without any form of regulation and more importantly for the government, no means of levying taxation on the profits.

This realisation has prompted the Australian Productivity Commission to release a report that recommends online gambling be legalised so that it can be regulated and liable to taxation. This is an update to their inquiry into the online gaming industry in 1999, following a government request into the issue.

The report contains many recommendations, many of which are focused on video poker machines and the dangers involved in playing them. These physical gambling machines that are prominent in bars, clubs, hotels and almost anywhere else people congregate account for around 80% of all the problem gambling that exists in Australia.

On the flip side, online gambling only accounts for a mere 4% of the total gambling undertaken nationally. With the IGA's ineffectiveness and an industry that is carrying on unregulated and untaxed, the Productivity Commission now argues that changes need to be made to bring the industry into line with all other regulated industries that operate within Australia. In fact, these arguments follow along similar lines to those being heard in the United States with Senator Barney Frank's proposals to overturn their UIGEA.

At present, the Productivity Commission's report is in draft form only, with the completed paper expected to be released in February 2010. Long before the report reaches its conclusions however, the Productivity Commission will turn to the online gambling industry in order to collect their feedback regarding any suggestions that are made. Also, the government is not under any obligation to accept the Productivity Commission's recommendations, but there is every reason to believe it will take its comments and observations very seriously.