Our role is to help the industry be aware of any relevant requirements and to promote voluntary compliance. Our goal is not to catch people out, but to help them avoid non-compliance in the first place. However, where industry participants demonstrate more serious, repeat or sustained contraventions or other misconduct inconsistent with community expectations we will apply escalating enforcement action.
To achieve our vision, we aim to:
Hotels and clubs with gaming machines must make sure their premises comply with the law, including those that aim to protect people from serious problems associated with excessive gambling.
There are many ways to minimise the risk of harm gambling can cause. The FS3008 Gaming machine harm minimisation fact sheet PDF, 610.12 KB provides an overview of gambling harm minimisation laws for hotels and clubs in NSW.
The fact sheet includes information about:
If you have more than 10 gaming machines at your hotel, you must keep them in a gaming room that is separate from the rest of your hotel.
As a hotelier, if you have a gaming room, it must meet the following requirements:
1. Your gaming room must be located in a restricted area of the hotel. It can't be in a part of your hotel where you have an authorisation to admit people under 18.
2. Your gaming room must be physically separated from the general bar area by a permanent floor to ceiling wall.
3. You must not make people pass through your gaming room to enter or leave your hotel or to get to another part of your hotel.
4. Entry to your gaming room must be free of charge.
5. You must locate any approved gaming machine in your gaming room so no-one can see it from any place outside your hotel that people use or have access to.
6. You or an employee must supervise the gaming room at all times by electronic means or a physical presence.
7. Your gaming room must have a doorway or space that gives reasonable access to and from the room to at least one operating bar elsewhere in the hotel.
It must also have reasonable access to and from the room to at least one toilet for each gender elsewhere in your hotel.
When your patrons want to move between your gaming room and a bar or toilet, they should not have to go onto a public street, or to any other area that does not form part of your hotel.
8. If people can get to your gaming room directly from a public street, you must show people how each doorway or space in your gaming room gives them access to and from the rest of your hotel.
The requirement for you to separate a gaming room physically from the general bar area of your hotel does not:
Your hotel can have more than one gaming room.
