New South Wales pushes broad slot machine restrictions as Labor makes gambling reform a campaign issue

The New South Wales government is moving toward a tougher stance on poker machines after local Labor delegates backed “decisive measures” at their annual conference. For PSPs, acquirers, and gambling operators, the useful part is not the politics but the mechanics: new license moratoriums, machine reductions, higher club taxes, and facial recognition requirements all point to a tighter operating environment.

1. New South Wales has almost 88,000 authorised poker machines, about half of all machines installed across Australia. Most of them operate in pubs and social clubs, while The Star Sydney runs only 1,500 units and Crown Sydney has none, due to an exclusivity agreement with the state government signed years ago.
2. The Labor plan would impose a moratorium on new poker machine licenses and require the removal of 50% of the machines that are currently moved between venues. It would also raise taxes for clubs making more than 20 million Australian dollars, equal to 13.9 million US dollars, from machine revenue.
3. Labor is also aiming to significantly reduce the total number of machines operating over the next decade. On the tech side, the government wants facial recognition systems in all gaming rooms across the state, with the technology used to support the state self-exclusion register, which lets people block themselves from these venues.
4. Darcy Byrne, mayor of Inner West in New South Wales, told conference delegates that the state has treated poker machines as a problem everyone recognized but nobody wanted to fix. He argued that private machine interests had long outweighed the public interest in preventing addiction and its consequences.
5. The state plan lands alongside a broader federal push. Last week, the federal Labor government introduced a bill with new gambling advertising rules, including a cap of three ads per hour on television between 6:00 and 20:30, plus a full ban on such advertising during live sports broadcasts inside e