Pokies and Slot Machine Information

If you think getting a drivers licence is expensive…

February 11, 2006 on 5:19 pm | In Slot machine overviews | No Comments

The government of Queensland, Australia has been kind enough to publish on its Treasury website the various fees and charges associated with running, selling and monitoring gaming machines in the state.

If you thought getting or renewing a drivers licence was expensive, have a look at some of these fees:

General Fees:
Grant of gaming machine licence: $2,064 (minimum).
Grant of major dealer licence: $137,633, + $11,470 application fee.
Grant of Licenced Monitoring Operator licence: $275,263 per ten years, + $11,470 application fee.
Grant of Gaming Employee Licence: $172 per five years. We don’t know whether this is paid by the venue or an individual employee – if you work for a casino and would like to share the info, please add a comment.

Fees associated with owning gaming machines:
Acquire a gaming machine: $25.
Destroy a gaming machine: $25 – you even get charged to blow up a pokie.
Change the percentage return: $25 – another fee for doing very little.

All fees are shown on the following website:

Qld Government Site

Obviously there is a cost to the Government to regulate and control gaming. Regulation is necessary to ensure probity in the running of the machines. Without it, operators would be free to alter machine payout percentages so as to drain your bank account in record time (though that happens pretty quickly already in some venues).

Weigh against that the fact that the Government already takes a very hefty profit from each gaming machine – heading for $14,000 per machine in the next few years.

Pokies Article

Charging the extra fees as shown on the Treasury website seems a little excessive. Venues must recover these fees somewhere. If you wonder why you lose so much on slot machines – these fees and turnover based taxation are a good part of the reason.