Online Betting in Australia is Easy!
Find out everything about sports betting in Australia. Legal bookmakers, independent ratings, and sets of bookmakers based on various criteria. Information about tournaments, matches, and odds. Expert and objective view on online betting — only on Match.Center.
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General information on betting in Australia
It's difficult to find Australians who have never bet on sports in their life. The gambling problem has been so severe that the government has tried to restrict it through legislation. The approach has not been very successful and the Australians still lead the lists of the most gambling nations in the world.
On this page, we will take a closer look at the current state of the Australian betting markets, highlight the legal bookmakers, and describe the special process of live betting in Australia.
Online sports betting in Australia
The modern history of sports betting Australia started in 2001 when a bill was passed that introduced strict business rules for large and small Australian bookmakers, raised taxes on gambling activities and imposed heavy fines for various offences.
The reason
The new law was a response to shocking figures released by the government in the early 2000s. It turned out that the average annual gambling spending in Victoria was about $1500 per capita and in New South Wales it was about $1800. These facts made Australia the most gambling state in the world. The problem of gambling addiction acquired a national dimension. To bring the situation under control, the Interactive Gambling Act was passed in 2001.
real per capita gambling expenditure NSW
real per capita gambling expenditure Victoria
Consequences
Under the new law, a bettor could only place bets on legal betting sites in Australia. Private gambling sites were banned and the penalty for such practices was shockingly high: up to $220 000 for every day of violation! But otherwise the bettors were not under much pressure: the government believed that excessive freedom of action of bookmakers mainly led to gambling addiction. And so they were taken seriously.
Here is what bookmakers were forbidden to do after 2001:
In case of a breach, the organisation was subject to an insanely high fine - up to $1.1 million for each day of the offence.
But of course, the bill could not consist only of bans. There were also obligations that the bookmaker had to fulfil. For example:
This was the beginning of the usual confrontation between bookmakers and lawmakers: betting companies started coming up with ways to avoid the bans by advertising bonuses and registering customers from other countries...The authorities responded by periodically amending the Interactive Gambling Act, as we will explain below.
