How the gambling industry reaches government

Why the gambling industry is worth tracing across registers

Start with the scale, because it is the reason this industry is worth tracing at all. Australians lose more money per head to gambling than the population of any other country. Figures compiled by H2 Gambling Capital, reported in a summary of Australian gambling statistics, put per capita losses at roughly US$958 a year, well ahead of second placed Hong Kong and more than double the United States. In the 2022 to 2023 financial year Australians wagered $244.3 billion and lost $31.5 billion of it, according to the Queensland Government Statistician's Office, which publishes the standard Australian series. Spread across the adult population, that is roughly $1,500 each.

Most of that money is lost in ordinary suburban venues rather than casinos. Around 3% of the world's poker machines sit in Australian pubs and clubs, in a country holding under 1% of the world's population. Those machines are the single largest source of losses, and they are licensed, taxed and capped by state governments, which is why almost everything on this page happens at state level rather than in Canberra.

The industry that takes that money has also been under sustained regulatory scrutiny in recent years. New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia each ran a public inquiry into a major casino operator between 2021 and 2024, and all three found the operator unfit to hold its licence at the time. Crown Resorts in Victoria was found to have engaged in conduct the inquiry chair called, in a word, "disgraceful". Crown in Western Australia was found "not suitable" to hold its licence. The Star Entertainment Group was found unfit to hold its Sydney casino licence in 2022, a finding published by the NSW Independent Casino Commission, and on review in 2024 it was reported still unfit. None of that is about lobbying or donations directly, but it is the regulatory backdrop against which the same operators' meetings with ministers and payments to parties, tracked further down this page, take place.

That backdrop is also why this page exists in the form it does. Each of the relevant public registers shows only a slice. An electoral commission return shows a donation but not a meeting. A lobbyist register shows who is registered to act but not whether they were seen. A ministerial diary shows a meeting but not any money. Influence Tracker holds all three, so the same operator can be followed across them at once, which is what the rest of this page does.

Who this page is about

The entities on this page split into two different kinds, and it matters which one a connection is with. Operators, Tabcorp, The Lottery Corporation, Sportsbet, Crown Resorts, The Star Entertainment Group and Ladbrokes among them, hold the wagering, casino and lottery licences and take the bets. Peak bodies, including the Australian Hotels Association, ClubsNSW and Leagues Clubs Australia, represent venues, many of them community clubs and pubs that are not themselves large corporations, and lobby on the industry's behalf. Both kinds are counted together throughout this page; the operators tab in the data explorer breaks out which is which.

The distinction matters for reading everything below. A donation from a wagering company and a donation from a body representing several hundred community clubs are both declared the same way and counted the same way here, but they are not the same act, and the peak bodies are the more consistent presence in these records.

Those peak bodies are substantial. ClubsNSW speaks for most of the roughly 1,200 licensed clubs in New South Wales and the Australian Hotels Association speaks for the pubs, and both have been described as among the most powerful lobby groups in the country. Since 2010 ClubsNSW has signed memorandums of understanding with incoming New South Wales governments to protect its members' interests. An industry whose peak bodies negotiate written agreements with incoming governments is not reaching government occasionally or opportunistically. The registers on this page capture the parts of that relationship somebody was obliged to write down: the money, the meetings and the registrations. They do not capture the agreements themselves.

Records held against each named operator and peak body follow below. An organisation appearing often reflects both its activity and how much the registers it deals with disclose.

Who in public office is connected to the gambling industry

This section lists every politician and government body with a recorded connection to one of the gambling operators or peak bodies on this page, and what that connection is.

Meetings and money: how the industry reaches government

The rest of this page uses those records to trace how the industry reaches government: the meetings that appear in released ministerial diaries, and the donations declared to the parties. None of it shows wrongdoing. It shows the shape of a relationship between a regulated industry and the governments that regulate it.

Meetings that are on the record

Released diaries record 531 meetings between these organisations and ministers or their offices, between 2014 and 2026. These are meetings with the ministers whose portfolios cover the industry that requested them. A meeting is worth counting even though a diary entry says so little, because it is the one channel open to everybody: an operator need not donate, need not register a lobbyist and need not hold a licence in order to sit down with the minister who writes the rules. The entry records that the access happened; it is silent on what was asked for or given.

Registered lobbying and recorded ministerial meetings, the two non-financial channels, are shown together below, and it is worth comparing that picture with the donations further down this page, because the organisations that show up most in each are not the same.

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Showing the 120 most recent of 531. The full set is in the CSV download.

Meetings about the rules that govern the industry

28 of those 531 meetings name the regulation itself in the diary's own subject line, rather than a generic label like "meeting" or "portfolio matters". That is worth pausing on, because a subject line is the only part of a diary entry that says what a meeting was for. Read together, they track a specific period of NSW gambling reform, and the industry's response to it. That period starts with the machines themselves.

Poker machines, not casinos, are the heart of it. New South Wales alone has 86,640 of them sitting in pubs and clubs, and in the first six months of 2022 players lost about $4 billion into them in that state. That is the machine at the end of the bar in an ordinary suburb, not a high roller room. In 2022 the New South Wales Crime Commission reported that billions of dollars in the proceeds of crime were being moved through those same machines. The method is simple enough to state in a sentence: load dirty cash into a machine, play a little, then cash out and claim the money as winnings. The Commission recommended mandatory cashless gaming across the state, with a daily cash limit per player, and the government of the day endorsed all eight of its recommendations in February 2023.

Cashless gaming is the single most consequential thing that could happen to this industry, because it would make every dollar traceable and, on the industry's own account, reduce what people spend. That is the reform these 28 meetings keep circling, which is why the diary entries naming it by subject are worth separating from the rest.

That response is on the record elsewhere too, and it explains why so many of these meetings cluster around September 2021. The minister who met Crown Resorts and Leagues Clubs Australia that month, recorded below under Customer Service and Digital, was Victor Dominello, and cashless gaming was his portfolio's most contested issue at the time. Three months later, Dominello was stripped of the gaming brief in a cabinet reshuffle that he and multiple outlets attributed to a campaign against him by ClubsNSW. Dominello later told the ABC's Four Corners that the lobby group was "as powerful as the gun lobby in the US" and called for an inquiry into its influence on government. Then premier Dominic Perrottet denied the reshuffle had anything to do with ClubsNSW pressure.

What followed the reshuffle is also on the public record. The NSW Crime Commission had recommended mandatory cashless gaming across the state; what NSW got instead, after the March 2023 election, was a voluntary trial of 14 venues that ran for six months in 2024 and reported findings in December that year, three years after the meetings recorded here. The incoming Minns government did legislate one of the industry's most consequential asks quickly: a ban on political donations from clubs that hold gaming machines, in effect from 1 July 2023. That ban does not extend to the peak bodies, ClubsNSW and the Australian Hotels Association, that represent those clubs, which are structured as not-for-profits and can continue to donate.

All 28 of those meetings link to the government diary they were taken from, and the whole set is in the CSV download.

Money to both sides

The declared donations do not favour one side. Counted at the federal party level only, and not counting any state branch, the records run 399 to the Australian Labor Party, 269 to the Liberal Party and 197 to the Nationals. The gap between them is small enough that the pattern looks structural rather than partisan: this is an industry that gives to whoever is in a position to regulate it, rather than one backing a political project. Peer-reviewed work on two decades of Australian Electoral Commission returns, covering 1998 to 2018, reached the same broad conclusion independently of this dataset, describing gambling interests as consistent and substantial donors to both major parties. Counting every state and territory branch as well as the federal organisations, the same pattern holds: roughly 1,500 donation records name a Labor branch and roughly 1,750 name a Coalition party (the Liberals, the Nationals and Queensland's merged Liberal National Party).

Hover a dot for what is held on that entity, hover a line for the relationship it records, and click a dot to pull in that entity’s other connections from the database.

Declared donations from these organisations to party organisations. Node size is how many records name that entity; an edge is a declared donation, not a dollar total.

The timing broadly follows the electoral cycle. A federal election year carries a median of 165 declared donation records, against 82 in other years. The pattern is a tendency rather than a rule, and the heaviest years are not only federal ones: the busiest years on record are 288 in 2018, 280 in 2019, 246 in 2010 and 224 in 2022. State elections run on their own timetables, and a single large donor filing one annual return can move a year on its own.

One more caveat matters more than any other, because it sets the ceiling on everything above. Australia's donation disclosure regime is weak by international standards. Federally, an individual donation is only itemised once it crosses roughly $17,300 in a financial year, disclosure is annual rather than real time, and no cap limits what a party can spend campaigning, as the Centre for Public Integrity sets out in its analysis of undue influence in Australian politics. The Australia Institute reaches the same conclusion in its explainer on campaign finance. So this page shows only what crossed that threshold and was reported: a floor on disclosed giving, never a ceiling on what the industry actually spent. Those settings change from 1 January 2027, when a $5,000 disclosure threshold, caps on donations and electoral spending, and faster reporting take effect, as the AEC sets out in its introduction to the reforms.

What this case study shows

Three things stand out once the registers are read together. The first is who does the reaching. The organisations that appear most often are not the casino and wagering companies but the peak bodies that represent pubs and clubs. The Australian Hotels Association alone accounts for 1,970 of the 4,871 records, including 1,783 declared donations and 119 recorded ministerial meetings, and ClubsNSW is the next most recorded name. Those bodies speak for thousands of small venues, which is also why their giving survived New South Wales' 2023 ban on political donations from clubs that hold gaming machines: the ban covers the clubs, not the associations that lobby for them.

The second is that the money is structural rather than partisan. Counted at the federal level, the declared donation records run 399 to the Australian Labor Party, 269 to the Liberal Party and 197 to the Nationals, and counted across every state branch roughly 1,500 name a Labor branch and roughly 1,750 a Coalition party. Giving rises in election years, with a median of 165 declared donation records in a federal election year against 82 in other years. An industry that gives to both sides, in every state, in step with the electoral cycle, is not backing a political project. It is maintaining access to whoever will regulate it next.

The third is that access concentrates where the rules are actually written. Gambling is regulated by the states, and the 531 recorded ministerial meetings sit overwhelmingly in state diaries, running to 2026. Twenty-eight of them name the regulation itself in the diary's own subject line, and read together they track one reform: cashless gaming in New South Wales, recommended as mandatory by the state's Crime Commission in 2022, contested through the meetings recorded here, and delivered in 2024 as a voluntary trial of 14 venues. The minister who championed it was moved out of the portfolio in December 2021, in a reshuffle he and several outlets attributed to a campaign against him by ClubsNSW and the premier of the day denied. None of this is unlawful, and a diary entry does not say what was asked for. What the records settle is the shape of the relationship: sustained, well resourced access to the people who write the rules, at the moments the rules are being written, from an industry that costs Australians more per head than it costs anyone else in the world, and whose two largest casino operators were each found unfit to hold a licence by state inquiries between 2021 and 2024. Every figure above links to the register it came from, and because disclosure thresholds hide smaller payments, all of it is a floor rather than a ceiling.