The bill now provides for oversight of the country’s gambling industry to be transferred from the National Gambling Board to a new body, provisionally named the National Gambling Regulator.
It also allows for changes to be made to the governance structure of the National Gambling Policy Council, and establishes a National Central Electronic Monitoring System to log gambling activity throughout the country.
Committee chair Joanmariae Fubbs explained that this had been done to ensure the bill could be passed by the end of the current legislative session, with the current parliament’s five-year term ending in 2019.
Fubbs said the committee decided to purge several “serious” issues from the final document – banning dog racing, regulating electronic bingo terminals and betting on lottery results, and cracking down on online gambling payments – because “the time available would not have allowed for an effective interrogation of these matters.”
He also said hat the issues that were purged from the revised Act would eventually resurface and that adoption of the revised Act “will pave the way for more comprehensive and holistic amendments to the gambling regulatory framework.”
South Africa’s government could indeed reap significant revenue from expanding its online gambling options but the state policy is that the “underlying objective of gambling regulation in SA is punter protection and not revenue collection.”
Source: GMB
