Matt Keogh (Burt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker, you may have seen the ads on TV for Lottoland, touting itself as the latest market disruptor, advertising jackpots in the hundreds of millions of dollars. It offers the US Powerball prize of over a billion dollars; the EuroMillions, prizes of hundreds of millions of dollars; as well as our local Lotto. However it operates more like a bookmaker than a lottery, taking bets on the outcome of numbers drawn.

While large prizes can be won in lotteries, the chance of winning can be extremely slim. While you have a one-in-76-million chance of winning division 1 in the Australian Powerball, and you are much more likely to die from a venomous snake bite—that's one in one million—even smaller prizes can be won. There is one chance in 110 for division 8 in the Australian Powerball.

The chances of a winning the jackpot prize on an overseas lottery, though, are minuscule. The odds are usually less than one in 250 million, but, worse, these lotteries rob local small businesses, Lotto retailers, of valuable income. They put their businesses at risk and the jobs of their employees at risk. Even worse, though, in Western Australia they rob income from Lotterywest. Lotterywest distributes, every year, millions of dollars to Western Australian charities. It could be even said that buying a Lotto ticket through the proper means in Western Australia is a non-tax-deductible way to make a donation to charity. We need to protect that as well as the jobs of our local lottery retailers. That's why I seek to table the petition of my local lottery retailers against these Lottoland schemes and internet schemes.

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