Tasmania To Introduce Mandatory Facial Recognition Among Other Gambling Reforms

Under the new reforms package, facial recognition will become mandatory across all pokie venues for self-exclusion enforcement. Cameras will match excluded users against a database and notify venue operators when a player who has opted for self-exclusion has entered the pub, club, or gaming area. The technology will also be added to ATMs inside venues, alongside withdrawal limits within a 24-hour window (for self-excluded users only).

Supporters of the measure argue that self-exclusion is already voluntary, and improved ways to stop self-excluded players from playing will be beneficial to them. The measure hasn’t gone by without any scrutiny, however.

Critics have raised concerns about surveillance and data handling standards, questioning who owns the biometric data, how long it is stored, and what it can be used for. They have also raised their concerns about whether the measures will be enforced in practice.

Venues where gambling is taking place will also introduce a mandatory cashless ticket system. Instead of inserting money directly into a pokie machine, players will need to load credit onto a ticket and insert it into a pokie. The maximum load per ticket will be A$200. When the credit runs out, players can load again, without any daily or weekly spending limits.

Unlike the earlier cashless card proposal, the new ticket system does not require registration, identity verification, or tracking. There is no record of player history, spending, or losses. The original card policy would have included daily loss limits of A$100 and yearly loss caps up to A$5,000, which would have made Tasmania the first Australian state to implement full pre-commitment in pubs and clubs.

The newly proposed system is seen as a much ‘milder’ alternative that increases the per-ticket sum and doesn’t impose any daily, weekly, or monthly restrictions.

Premier Jeremy Rockliff confirmed that the statewide cashless card plan has been discarded unless Australia adopts a national model. He added that the government will not proceed alone without coordination from other jurisdictions.

The decision follows months of industry lobbying and uncertainty about implementation costs. A government-commissioned Deloitte report later concluded that a cashless card could have delivered net economic benefits and increased household disposable income by reducing pokie losses, but the government still opted for a much softer reform path.

Tasmanian players lost roughly A$200 million on pokie machines last financial year, which indicates that pokie machines remain a popular activity in the island state. Critics argue that the state missed an opportunity to introduce mandatory pre-commitment, a tool long discussed as a way to cap losses before players start losing money they can’t afford to lose.

However, the hospitality industry has disputed the data, claiming that mandatory caps would damage regional hospitality venues.

The new reform set has been welcomed by the hospitality sector and pokie venue operators, who argued that the initial card system would have been expensive to implement and difficult to integrate with existing machine hardware. Several MPs and community groups have accused the government of ‘softening’ the policy under industry pressure after showing ambition with the original proposal.

Tasmania’s political environment around pokies has been changing for years. The state previously considered removing pokies from pubs and clubs entirely, but abandoned the idea. However, the latest reforms suggest that Tasmania is choosing a more lenient path that’s more in line with other states, rather than implementing innovative solutions.