Australia's Parliament passed a package of amendments to the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 on 19 August. Coverage led with the broadcast advertising limits, but the clause with the widest commercial reach sits further down the text: licensed operators will not be allowed to pay commissions — to affiliates or to their own staff — for acquiring, retaining or reactivating players. The advertising rules take effect on 1 January 2027, and enforcement sits with the regulator ACMA.
What the package actually covers
- Between 5:00 and 20:30, betting advertising is barred during live sports broadcasts on TV, radio and online platforms — including streaming services, social networks and sites carrying broadcasts — plus 15 minutes before and five minutes after an event; outside those hours the ban applies during the broadcast itself.
- No branding on the kit of athletes or officials, or at sports venues, and no promotion through current or former athletes, celebrities or influencers.
- ACMA will run a national advertising opt-out register; online platforms must check it at least once every 14 days and withhold betting ads from registered users, as well as from minors and users without a registered account.
- Bonus offers may not be pushed by mailing, phone or social targeting to players who have left self-exclusion (for at least 90 days), to accounts opened less than 14 days ago, or to players showing signs of harm.
- Banks and payment services must block transfers to offshore operators, including crypto, and ACMA can require illegal advertising, search listings and apps to be removed within 24 hours.
- Reported penalties run up to roughly $1.94m for deliberate circumvention of the law and about $258,000 as the base fine for most advertising breaches.
The commission clause
The prohibition covers rewards for acquisition, retention and reactivation, including revenue share where the payment is tied to registrations, deposits, turnover or the lifting of limits. As drafted, that reaches both CPA and RevShare in their usual form, and it applies to internal sales incentives as well as external partners. The amendments, as summarised by the iGaming News editorial team, do not set out an approved alternative model, so the practical question for anyone with Australian exposure is what a partner contract looks like when payment cannot track player value. Attribution stops being a billing input and becomes an internal planning input — a shift worth working through with the same discipline applied to media buy measurement.
Sequencing
The dates are not uniform. The advertising rules start on 1 January 2027, while commencement of the bonus restrictions and the opt-out register is to be set by separate instruments. Three years on, the minister must initiate a review of the advertising and bonus rules with public consultation and a report to Parliament. The bonus carve-outs also depend on exclusion data being accurate at the moment of send, which is a systems question rather than a marketing one — see self-exclusion implementation.
What this means for operators
- Model the downside: if performance-based partner pay disappears in a core market, what is left of the acquisition plan and its unit economics?
- Read partner contracts for terms priced on registrations, deposits, turnover or limit changes, and check whether internal incentive schemes are drafted the same way.
- Treat register check cadence, ad suppression and bonus eligibility as platform requirements with audit trails, not campaign settings.
- Watch whether other Tier-1 regulators borrow the drafting; the commission language is the part most easily copied.