Julia Jackson<\/strong>, Kiwibank’s head of purpose and sustainability, told Newshub: “When we look at our customers, what we see is there is about $30m a month that’s being spent on online gambling and 80 percent of that is offshore… what’s a really interesting trend that we’ve seen is from the first COVID lockdown in 2020, that number has massively increased and it hasn’t gone down.”<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 2021,\u00a0New Zealand’s gambling spending was up 17 per cent when compared to the previous financial year, with spending on slot machines (known as \u2018pokies\u2019) outside casinos up 23 per cent to NZ$987m \u2013 the highest level in five years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The DOI report doesn’t reveal how much Kiwis spend on online gambling, but the department estimates\u00a0at least $351m was spent on offshore gambling sites in the last financial year<\/strong>. Internal affairs minister\u00a0Jan Tinetti<\/strong>\u00a0has announced a government review to target and reduce harm suffered by people who use slot machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOffshore sites are located in places like Malta, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Estonia and Lithuania, where registered companies can benefit from low taxes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kiwibank uses a voluntary system that allows customers to choose to block payments. According to the company,\u00a0more than $7.1m has been saved by people using the block<\/strong>. However, the system is a Kiwibank initiative. The government is yet to introduce any form of regulation for online gambling.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\nDIA Audit: SkyCity Auckland failed to tackle gambling-related harm<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
An audit conducted by the New Zealand Department of Home Affairs (DIA)<\/strong> has concluded that SkyCity Auckland repeatedly failed to address gambling-related harm. The investigation, which was completed last year, found that operator underperformed in nine out of 10 areas of compliance despite warnings to address similar issues in previous audits.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSkyCity staff were arrogant about problem gaming issue and failed to identify banned players<\/strong>, the audit found. It also identified a high probability of underage customers entering the casino. Local media outlet Newshub shared the case of a banned gambler who played pokies for 28 hours<\/strong> straight before being discovered.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The bank says gambling spend increased “massively” during Covid-19 lockdowns and hasn’t gone down since.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":176,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"is_press_release":false,"is_interview":false,"is_opinion":false,"focusai_summary":"Kiwibank reports its customers spend $30m monthly on online gambling, with 80% directed to offshore sites, a trend that surged post-COVID-19 lockdowns. This highlights New Zealand's significant unregulated online gambling market, prompting a government review into harm reduction for land-based slot machines, while online regulation remains absent. Concurrently, an audit revealed SkyCity Auckland's repeated failures in responsible gambling compliance, including issues with identifying banned players and preventing underage entry.","focusai_entities":"Kiwibank, Department of Internal Affairs (DOI), Julia Jackson, Newshub, Jan Tinetti, SkyCity Auckland, New Zealand Department of Home Affairs (DIA)","focusai_location":"New Zealand, Auckland, Malta, Cyprus, Gibraltar, Estonia, Lithuania","focusai_target_profile":"ceo_executive (0.9), regulator (1.0), compliance_legal (1.0), operator_casino (0.9), affiliate_publisher (0.7), product_ux (0.7), tech_data (0.7), marketing_crm (0.7), payments_fraud_aml (0.9), investor_analyst (0.9), supplier_vendor (0.8), journalist_researcher (1.0)","focusai_suggestions":[{"label":"Offshore Gambling Regulation","query":"What specific legislative or policy frameworks is the New Zealand government considering to regulate the substantial offshore online gambling market and mitigate associated risks?"},{"label":"SkyCity Compliance Remediation","query":"What immediate and long-term governance and operational remediation actions is SkyCity Auckland implementing to address the systemic responsible gambling compliance failures identified by the DIA audit?"}],"footnotes":""},"categories":[16336,157],"tags":[229,23911,4138],"class_list":["post-28551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-australasia-news","category-business-news","tag-gambling","tag-gambling-regulation","tag-online-gambling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/176"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28551"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28551\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28558,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28551\/revisions\/28558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/focusgn.com\/asia-pacific\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}