Australia's Lottery Betting Ban Resistance Grows

The official federal ban on lottery betting in Australia that went into effect in March this year did not go over well with most of the general public in this country and now it appears that plenty of Australians are opposing this government act and are calling on the reinstatement of lottery in Oz. This is according to Lottoland Australia CEO, Luke Brill, who claims that nearly 16,000 people in Australia have signed a petition against this federal ban on the outcome of international lotteries. Lottoland has another 700,000 customers to further their cause, and with their petition growing in strength and size significantly further than “Lottoland's Gotta Go!” did, Brill assumes that the government will have to take action and listen.

“The public response to this petition has been staggering and sends a clear message to the Government that the community does not support a ban on overseas lottery betting. This petition only began at the end of April, and already more than 15,800 people have put their name on the record opposing legislation that will deny Australians the right to bet on overseas lotteries. To put this in perspective, it took three weeks less to receive a thousand more signatures than the ‘Lottoland’s Gotta Go!’ campaign, which was driven by a $5 million national smear campaign by Tabcorp-Tatts to con MPs into handing them an indefinite monopoly,” Brill said.

The Interactive Gambling Amendment Bill 2018 reads that it will come into force to "prohibit betting on the outcome, or a contingency that may or may not happen in the course of the conduct of a lottery, including a keno draw." This was preceded by an open campaign against Lottoland led by Australian Lottery and Newsagents Association (part of Tatts Group, who is Lottoland's rival) that even had quite an impactful and, one should say, hostile slogan of “Lottoland's Gotta Go!” which was motivated by more than 4000 newsagents supposedly losing up to 50% of revenue because of online lottery betting. However, this campaign is now under the investigation by the authorities under suspicion that the membership figures have been inflated and that the government and users was intentionally misled.

Showing their tokens of support to Lottoland thus far were Victorian Association for Newsagents and Newsagents Association of NSW and ACT.

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding some decisions by the Australian authorities concerning the latest trends in gambling that were frowned upon by this country's government. For instance, earlier this year, Bitcoin was about to be regulated and accepted as a means of payment in Australia's online casinos, but this was quickly halted by the regulatory forces banning bitcoin gambling. We will follow the development of the nation’s lottery scene and bring any new developments to our readers…

Source:

“Australian petition in support of lottery betting nears 16,000 signatures”, gamingintelligence.com, June 7, 2018.