CasinoIntel

Last reviewed: 12 September 2026. As of this date, Australia's two largest casino operators, Crown Resorts and The Star Entertainment Group, have each been found unsuitable to hold a casino licence by at least one state regulator within the past five years, and Star's Sydney licence remains under active suspension and special-manager oversight. Neither company lost a licence outright following these findings; both were instead given a supervised reform period, a pattern that has now played out three times for Crown and twice for Star across four states. This article sets out what each inquiry found, what "unsuitable" actually triggers under state casino law, and where each licence stands today. Federal: Why This Is a State Story, Not a Federal One Federal law, principally the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) covered in this site's earlier analysis of section 15, governs whether an online gambling product can lawfully be offered to an Australian customer. It ...

Last reviewed: 11 September 2026. As of this date, online casino games, including pokies, blackjack and roulette, remain prohibited under federal law from being offered to a person in Australia, regardless of who is offering them or from where. That prohibition has not changed since the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 came into force, and no current federal proposal would change it. What has changed, repeatedly, is how aggressively the prohibition gets enforced against operators who ignore it. Federal: Section 15 and What Counts as Prohibited The Interactive Gambling Act 2001 (Cth) creates its core offence at section 15: a person commits an offence if they intentionally provide a prohibited interactive gambling service with an Australian customer link, carrying maximum penalties in the order of $220,000 per day for an individual and $1.1 million per day for a corporation, following the 2017 penalty increase. Section 5 defines a prohibited interactive gambling service broadly enough to...