In Glenorchy, on Hobart's northern fringe, the gaming-room lights are on for most of the day. Under rules the Tasmanian government tightened in January 2026, poker-machine rooms in the state's pubs and clubs must now close for at least seven hours in every twenty-four, up from four — so for seventeen hours a day the machines are live. Glenorchy is one of Tasmania's most disadvantaged municipalities, and since the March 2018 state election its eight licensed venues alone have taken more than $125 million (approx.) from the people who feed those machines, the largest loss recorded in any single council area in the state. A shift worker on the way home, a pensioner filling in a Tuesday, a tradesman waiting on a job: none of them are named, none of them are unusual. They are simply why a fight over who owns a poker machine, and who profits when it pays out less than it takes, has run through three Tasmanian election campaigns and is still not settled.
The 2018 pokies election
Federal Group has held Tasmania's casino licences since Wrest Point opened in Hobart in 1973 as Australia's first legal casino, and it went on to win the exclusive right to supply poker machines to every pub and club in the state, formalised in a deed with the government renewed in 2003. For a quarter of a century, one company controlled the entire legal poker-machine industry outside its own two casinos.
That arrangement became the defining issue of the March 2018 state election. Labor, led by Rebecca White, campaigned on removing poker machines from pubs and clubs altogether by 2023, confining them to the two casinos. Federal Group and the Tasmanian Hospitality Association responded with one of the most concentrated single-issue advertising campaigns in Tasmanian political history, running television, radio and print advertisements against Labor and the Greens in the weeks before the vote; the Hospitality Association is reported to have spent in the order of $900,000 (approx.) on the campaign. Electoral disclosure returns later showed at least $514,000 in donations from gambling-industry sources flowed to the Liberal Party around the same election. Will Hodgman's Liberal government was returned, poker machines stayed in pubs and clubs, and the following years saw the government begin negotiating what would replace the ageing Federal Group deed rather than end the industry altogether.
The 2018 campaign settled the question for both major parties. Ahead of the next state election, held on 1 May 2021, Labor formally abandoned its policy of removing poker machines from pubs and clubs, leaving Peter Gutwein's Liberals — who campaigned on handing individual venues their own gaming licences instead — with no major-party opponent left on the substance of the issue. By the time the Gaming Control Amendment (Future Gaming Market) Act reached Parliament later that year, the only question being debated was how the industry would be restructured, not whether poker machines belonged in Tasmanian pubs and clubs at all.
Ending Federal Group's monopoly
The government's answer was the Gaming Control Amendment (Future Gaming Market) Act 2021, passed by state Parliament in November 2021. It ended the Federal Group deed on 30 June 2023 and replaced the single-supplier system with an "individual venue operator model": each of Tasmania's roughly ninety-one licensed pubs and clubs can now hold its own gaming licence and own or lease its own machines, rather than renting them from Federal Group. In competition terms this was genuine reform — it dismantled a government-sanctioned monopoly that had stood, in one form or another, for a quarter of a century.
It came at a price the government did not advertise as heavily. As part of the same settlement, the tax rate on casino poker-machine profits was cut from 25.88 per cent of gross profit to 10.91 per cent (plus a 3 per cent community support levy), while the rate paid by hotel and club machines was raised to help offset it — a restructure analysts have costed at somewhere in the order of $11 million a year (approx.) in reduced casino tax alone, compounding to roughly $225 million (approx.) in forgone revenue over the life of the new licences, which run to 2043. And Federal Group's exit from the industry was only partial: through its two casinos and its Vantage Hotel Group subsidiary, which owns twelve pubs outright, the company still controls more than 40 per cent of Tasmania's poker machines under the "individual venue" model that was meant to end its dominance.
The strongest case
Breaking a monopoly, protecting jobs, respecting adult choice
Tasmania's hospitality sector is genuinely dependent on gaming revenue, and Federal Group is reported to be the state's largest private-sector employer, with a workforce in the vicinity of 1,900 people (approx.) across its casinos, hotels and gaming-logistics arm. Thousands more jobs sit in the ninety-odd independent pubs and clubs that now, for the first time, own their own machines rather than renting them — a structural change that gives local publicans and club committees, not a single conglomerate, the asset and the upside. Ending the deed was also unambiguously pro-competition: dismantling a legislated monopoly of that duration is the kind of market reform regulators elsewhere would applaud, whatever the tax settlement attached to it.
The government's harm-minimisation package, unveiled in January 2026 in place of the mandatory card, is not nothing: mandatory facial-recognition enforcement of self-exclusion, immediate rather than delayed exclusion processing, and a near-doubling of the enforced daily closure period are real, verifiable changes. There is also a genuine liberal argument underneath the caution. As Treasurer Eric Abetz put it when announcing the package, "we also must accept that people have a right to their own agency… our focus is to reduce red tape and regulation, not personal freedoms" — a position consistent with Tasmania's own data showing it has the lowest total per-adult gambling expenditure of any state, at roughly $733 a year against a national average of about $1,277 (2021 figures, approx.). For most Tasmanians who play the pokies, this is a legal, moderate, occasional pursuit, not a crisis.
The evidence
The state's own data shows the scale of what is being weighed against those arguments. The Tasmanian Liquor and Gaming Commission's expenditure series, drawn from every gaming machine in the state, recorded player losses of almost $194 million (approx.) in 2024-25 alone, and analysis of the same Commission data by the Tasmanian Inquirer found more than $1.1 billion (approx.) had been lost on poker machines between the March 2018 election and the end of 2024. Losses are not evenly spread: Glenorchy's eight venues accounted for about $125 million (approx.) of that total, Launceston around $105 million (approx.) and Devonport about $67 million (approx.) — three of the state's lower-income municipalities carrying a disproportionate share of a statewide industry. The Commission's own Fifth Social and Economic Impact Study (2021) found electronic gaming machines account for roughly 35 per cent (approx.) of all Tasmanian gambling losses, the single largest category ahead of casino table games, lotteries and wagering combined.
Tasmania operates under a statewide cap of 3,680 poker machines; recent counts put roughly 3,530 (approx.) actually in service — about 2,300 in pubs and clubs, 1,185 in the two casinos and a further three dozen aboard the Bass Strait ferries. Set against a population of around 575,000 (approx.), that is a dense concentration of machines for a small state to carry.
The critique
Put together, the record does not describe a government moving cautiously on a hard problem so much as one moving at the industry's pace.
Every stage of Tasmania's pokies reform has been announced as a breakthrough and delivered as a delay.
The pattern is consistent. In September 2022 the government committed to a statewide mandatory carded-play system — a card players would need before playing, carrying a pre-set loss limit reported at up to $100 a day or $5,000 a year (approx.) — after the Commission's Fifth Social and Economic Impact Study recommended it. The card was to be running by the end of 2024. That date slipped to the end of 2025. In November 2024 the government said it was deferring the policy indefinitely to pursue a national approach with other states instead. It then had Deloitte Access Economics review the case, and in January 2026 Deloitte reported back that a mandatory card would cut gaming-machine losses by somewhere between roughly 23 and 46 per cent (approx.) under its modelled scenarios, lift gross state product by up to $230 million (approx.) and add a net 200 or so jobs (approx.), with the largest harm reduction concentrated among moderate-to-high-risk gamblers — precisely the group the policy was designed to protect. Five months later, in June 2026, the government formally repealed the ministerial direction that had committed it to building the card at all, in favour of the January package of longer closures and facial recognition instead.
The government's own commissioned advice, in other words, told it the reform would work, and it shelved the reform anyway. That is a harder position to defend as caution than as capture: gambling-industry money helped elect the government that has now made this call, first in 2018 and again through the years the card was delayed and finally dropped. The jobs argument also cuts less cleanly than it first appears — Tasmanian academic analysis has found employment in the pubs and clubs sector fell in the years after poker machines were introduced even as the machines generated substantial profit for operators, suggesting gaming revenue substituted for, rather than created, hospitality jobs. And the state's genuinely low overall per-capita gambling figure, cited by the Treasurer to justify caution, blends in lotteries and racing; within gaming machines specifically, harm remains concentrated in a handful of low-income postcodes that the statewide average conceals rather than reveals.
The risk to the future
A card that isn't coming, and a bill someone else pays
Tasmania was, briefly, on track to be the first state in the country with a mandatory pre-commitment system for poker machines — an evidence-backed harm-reduction reform other jurisdictions were reportedly watching. That position has now been surrendered for a package that gambling-reform advocates in the Legislative Council have called cosmetic by comparison. Every year the mandatory card is not built is another year of losses running near $200 million (approx.), concentrated in Glenorchy, Launceston and Devonport, and another year the state budget collects gaming-machine tax revenue from the same harm rather than legislating it down. The government's own commissioned modelling put a number on the cost of further delay — up to $230 million (approx.) in forgone economic benefit and roughly 200 jobs (approx.) — and chose to forgo it. Unless a future Tasmanian government revives the card, or interstate momentum forces the issue, the state's most vulnerable poker-machine players will keep carrying a cost the government's own evidence says need not be theirs to carry.