Being renowned for regulatory excellence means:
- protecting people from gambling harm
- ensuring a fairer gambling industry and better-informed consumers
- keeping the industry free from criminal influence and exploitation
- enabling and holding accountable those we regulate to deliver on both their legal and social licences
- continuously improving gambling regulation
- decision making that is grounded in independence from those we regulate and a deep understanding of the gambling industry.
Since our inception, we have been redesigning our Regulatory Approach. Our new Regulatory Approach is risk-based and intelligence-led and comprises a series of frameworks, methodologies and processes across 4 types of regulatory activity:
- licensing and other approvals
- monitoring
- enforcement
- education and engagement.
Creating a comprehensive industry obligations register was key to designing our new Regulatory Approach. The register brings together in one place the vast and complex array of legislation, regulations, standards, Ministerial Directions, Commission Directions, licence conditions, deeds, contracts, and other agreements and documents with which the industry must comply. It supports us in making risk-based assessments of where to focus our regulatory efforts and is therefore an important tool in ensuring Victoria’s gambling industry complies with all its regulatory obligations and operates safely, fairly and free from criminal influence.
We’ve been working with licensees to strengthen their harm minimisation capabilities. We required the wagering, lotteries and Keno licensees to develop new Responsible Service of Gambling Codes to better protect customers and to support them to gamble more safely. We worked directly with Tabcorp – the wagering and betting licensee – to enhance its systems for more effective harm minimisation. This included changes to self-service betting terminals to ensure they could not be accessed by minors. When venues applied for new or updated licences, we applied conditions to those licenses to require them to meet more robust harm minimisation standards.
We’ve continued to reshape our own decision-making processes for gambling products and services to prioritise harm prevention. For example, we applied our Harm Minimisation Assessment Tool when evaluating applications for changes to casino blackjack and roulette table game rules, wagering and betting rules, Keno rules, and new poker machines and games proposed by manufacturers.
We built our new strategic inquiries function to support the Commission in conducting inquiries into areas of high importance and emerging risk. This will allow us to gain data and insights from the industry and the community. The first inquiry, ‘Keeping Bingo social, safe and fair’, was launched in June 2024.
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