Key Points
- The Wagering Advertising Opt-out Register, informally called “AdStop,” will be managed by ACMA and paid for by a levy on licensed wagering operators, not taxpayers.
- Australia’s five largest online wagering companies won A$5.4bn from punters in 2023-24 yet paid just 2% of that figure in company tax, according to a new Australia Institute report.
- The register is unlikely to be operational by 1 January 2027, when the broader advertising restrictions are due to begin.
Australia is giving its gamblers a single switch to turn off wagering ads across every online platform they use. Whether that switch arrives in time, or actually works, is the question nobody in Canberra wants to answer directly.
On 17 August, Communications Minister Anika Wells introduced the Interactive Gambling (Cost Recovery Levy) Bill 2026 in the House of Representatives. The legislation creates what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has since referred to as “AdStop,” a centralised national register where Australians can submit their email address or phone number and be shielded from wagering advertising across every online platform they use. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would build, manage, and enforce it. Licensed wagering companies would pay for it through a new industry levy.
That last detail matters more than most coverage has acknowledged, because the same week this bill landed in parliament, the Australia Institute released a report revealing exactly how much those operators have been contributing to the public purse.
The Numbers the Industry Would Rather You Missed
Australia’s five largest online wagering companies won A$5.4 billion from punters in 2023-24, but reported just A$0.4 billion in taxable income and paid A$0.1 billion in company tax, equivalent to 2% of their total winnings. Three of those five, Tabcorp, bet365 and Pointsbet, won A$1.3 billion combined and paid zero company tax that year. Those same five companies spent at least A$600 million on advertising and promotion during the same period, six times more than their entire company tax bill.
Rod Campbell, research director at the Australia Institute, said: “Online betting companies are very good at winning money and very good at convincing the Australian Tax Office that they don’t make any profit and shouldn’t pay any tax.”
Martin Thomas, CEO of the Alliance for Gambling Reform, called the findings “appalling,” adding that the federal government must ensure these companies “pay their fair share, rather than continuing to let our nation be a wild west for foreign-owned gambling companies.”
Against that backdrop, the government’s decision to fund the opt-out register through an industry levy rather than general taxation takes on a different weight. The wagering sector is not being asked to fund harm reduction out of goodwill. It is being asked to fund the administration of rules it has spent years lobbying against.
Why Was the Original Approach Never Going to Work?
Labour’s first attempt at online advertising reform relied on what it called a “triple lock,” requiring platforms to show gambling ads only to users who were logged in, verified as over 18, and offered an individual opt-out option. Critics across the Senate called it a burden placed on the wrong party.
They were proved right by the numbers. Among the 15 million SBS on-demand customers, only 130,000 chose to activate the service which blocked out gambling advertisements, something that Senator David Pocock revealed at the gambling advertising inquiry in the Senate. It proved that people are not willing to make use of opt-out services.
The centralised register is meant to fix that. Rather than navigating settings on Netflix, Meta, YouTube, and a dozen other platforms separately, users register once through ACMA and every platform covered by the legislation must check the register before serving wagering ads. The principle is similar to Australia’s existing Do Not Call register for telemarketing.
What the Political Deal Actually Produced?
This register has come into existence not through the initial proposal made by the government but through negotiations conducted between Albanese and the Opposition Leader, Angus Taylor. The Coalition had raised objections to the triple-lock arrangement, contending that it would be inconvenient for users to control their preferences on each of the different services they used. This was a compromise reached by the Coalition and was accepted by Labour to gain the necessary votes for passage of the bill.
The deal added several specific changes to the original legislation. The pre-game advertising blackout before live sport was extended from five minutes to 15 minutes. The three-per-hour cap on TV gambling ads now begins at 5 a.m. rather than 6 a.m. Streaming services face the same hourly cap as free-to-air broadcasters, closing a gap in the original draft that would have let them operate under lighter conditions.
On inducements, the amendments introduce a 14-day cooling period before new accounts receive any promotions, and a 90-day wait before people who have recently left the BetStop national self-exclusion register can be targeted by wagering marketing. Commissions linked to customer losses for wagering staff or third-party affiliates will be banned outright.
The push on inducements came directly from explosive Senate inquiry testimony. Former NRL player Luke Bateman told the committee that as a 23-year-old he was regularly invited to VIP events across the country and exposed to clearly harmful inducement tactics. A separate submission described a vulnerable 24-year-old being sent money to gamble in a message framed as emotional support.
The Register Won’t Be Ready – The Industry Said So First
Kai Cantwell, CEO of peak wagering body Responsible Wagering Australia, made the clearest statement on the implementation challenge: “BetStop, which is a simpler concept, took more than four years from inception to implementation.”
BetStop launched in August 2023 and had recorded 49,382 total registrations by September 2025, according to ACMA’s quarterly statistics, nearly two years after going live. AdStop covers advertising only, but across a far wider set of platforms, using data-matching that must work simultaneously across social media, streaming services, and general news websites. Government sources have confirmed the register will not be ready by 1 January 2027, when the broader advertising restrictions are scheduled to begin. That means the new rules start operating without the mechanism that was supposed to make them effective.
Privacy concerns also remain unresolved. The register would require users to submit identifiable account details, such as an email address, that must then be matched across platforms with different data structures and privacy obligations. Neither the bill’s explanatory memorandum nor Wells’ parliamentary speech explained how that matching process would actually work.
The Voices That Voted Against It Anyway
The bill passed the House of Representatives on Tuesday night, but not without notable defections. Liberal MP Andrew Wallace and Nationals MP Pat Conaghan crossed the floor against Coalition policy. Wallace said the parliament was “putting too much faith in the hands of the gambling companies” and that the reforms did “not go anywhere near enough.” At least two Liberal senators were reported to be weighing the same position ahead of the upper house vote.
Senator David Pocock condemned the deal as a “betrayal of all Australians,” telling the ABC the amendments amounted to “tinkering” that would not sever the link between sport and gambling. Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young called the Labor-Coalition arrangement “cowardly and careless,” pressing once again for a complete ban on all online wagering advertising.
Kate Seselja, co-chair of Gambling Harm Lived Experience Experts, described the register as “completely unworkable” as a substitute for a ban. From the industry’s other flank, Cantwell warned the restrictions would drive gamblers towards unregulated offshore operators with no consumer protections and no contribution to Australian sport or racing.
Expert Analysis: What Happens Next?
This constitutes a real structural change. The correct method to employ here would be the transition of compliance from the users to the platforms. This is true because behavioural science has always revealed that opt-out systems leave vulnerable individuals such as minors open to danger because they do not alter settings.
But the implementation gap is real and consequential. The broader advertising restrictions are expected to take effect from 1 January 2027, and the register clearly will not be operational by then. The legislation includes a mandatory review after three years. If AdStop is still non-functional by then, or proves ineffective once running, the political case for a full opt-in model or a complete advertising ban will be far harder to resist. The Murphy report recommended both in 2023. As of this week, 1,149 days after that report was handed down, neither recommendation has been adopted.
The levy imposed on wagering companies to fund this system is, at minimum, a recognition that the industry should pay for the consequences of its own conduct. Whether it also marks the start of a genuine shift in how Australia taxes and regulates its gambling sector is a question the three-year review will need to answer.
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