‘Tsunami’ of adverts coming for online casinos if Parliament lifts ban

Monday, 8 September 2025

The Government would raise money from auctioning licences to online casinos, but community groups and gambling addicts would be the losers, MPs have been told.

Kiwis can expect to be bombarded with aggressive adverts encouraging them to gamble at online casinos if the Government succeeds in lifting the current advertising ban, MPs have been warned.

People could expect to get “push alerts, ‘free money’ incentives; you know ‘$100 free credit, get started’”, Martin Cheer, the managing director of pokie-money distributor Pub Charity, told a select committee today.

“There's going to be a tsunami of promotion. People will be sick of it. If you are sick of Entain and the TAB advertising on TV, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden has suggested the Government’s Online Casino Bill would make online gambling safer while also raising money for the Government.

The bill would allow the Government to auction licences to up to 15 online casinos that would be taxed and subject to some controls, while giving it new powers to try to prevent all others from reaching the public by “geo-blocking” their webites.

Geo-blocking would mean people would need to use a VPN (virtual private network) disguising their computer’s location in order to access the unlicensed sites.

Cheer was among several submitters who blasted the proposed legislation during the first day of oral hearings by Parliament’s Governance and Administration select committee, labelling it “a disaster”.

Preventing people accessing unlicensed online casinos run from abroad would not be possible, he said.

“You cannot stop the ‘worst of the worst’ in that environment.”

But given the “horrors” they created, the best option would simply be to make it as difficult as possible for Kiwis to access them, he said in a submission that appeared to win the ears of some MPs on the committee.

“That’s as good as it’s going to get.”

The “average person” who currently played the pokies would not bother using a VPN to get around geo-blocking, he said.

‘Pandora’s Box’

Offering licences to some sites and allowing them to advertise would open a Pandora’s Box, he said, noting that some people had called for a ban on physical gaming machines.

“Now you're going to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them ‘in people's homes’, on their night stand at night, in their lunch breaks, at the weekends.”

Problem Gambling Foundation spokesperson Andree Froude said it was particularly concerning the Online Casino Bill would not ban licensed operators from promoting “inducements” to prospective gamblers.

“That scares us the most,” she said. “Inducements aren't harmless offers. They exploit impulsivity in young people and lure those already struggling back in.”

Froude cited the example of a woman who decided to visit an online casino after being emailed a “$1000 welcome bonus with no deposit required”.

“She won often enough to feel hooked and soon her balance climbed to $2500. But when she tried to withdraw, she discovered she couldn't, because the bonus required her to gamble that money 40 times before cashing it out.”

Cricketer Martin Snedden says there is a “complete failure to recognise the importance of community benefit” in the current bill.

As well as banning all gambling advertising, New Zealand should follow the UK and Australia in preventing the use of credit cards to gamble, she said.

Cheer, along with several community organisations that also gave evidence to the committee, warned that if online casinos were given licences allowing them to advertise, that would divert gambling revenues away from pokies, reducing the funding they provided for community organisations.

“It's just a bad deal. This is not a plan for economic growth, it’s a plan for economic degradation,” Cheer said.

Funding decline

Martin Snedden, spokesperson for the Community Sport Collective, agreed the funding pokies provided for the community would inevitably decline if the Online Casino Bill was passed in its current form.

“There is no other replacement. That’s unless you guys decide you want to give it to us out of the tax take, and I'm sure you don't because you're not in the greatest financial position at the moment,” he told MPs.

The committee also heard from some organisations that hoped to secure online casino licences

TAB told MPs it wanted to get into the market, and would probably want to hand over the job of running a licensed online casino to its outsourcing partner, British gambling giant Entain.

“The online casino market could and potentially will take away from our betting market and reduce our returns to community sport and racing, so we need to get into this new form of gambling,” board member David Bennett said.

Online casino giant SGHC welcomed the legislation, but wanted the proposed cap of 15 licensed operators lifted.

SGHC applied “effective harm minimisation tools and supported local communities and disadvantaged groups”, senior vice president Antony Gevisser said.

“When it comes to operators like us, this bill places you in control,” he told the MPs on the committee. “You regulate us, you tax us, you set the standards.”

SGHC is based in the British Channel Island of Guernsey, commonly regarded as a tax haven.