Australia
NSW Scores with Extended Trading for FIFA World Cup
The Minns Labor Government is giving fans the chance to enjoy early-morning matches and provide a boost to local hospitality venues with extended trading hours for licensed venues statewide during the FIFA World Cup.
The biggest and most watched sporting event on the planet is being played in the US, Canada and Mexico from 11 June to 19 July, with 48 nations competing for the Cup.
Pubs, clubs and bars statewide can operate extended hours when they broadcast Australian group stage matches, all the knockout rounds (16 and 32) and the finals.
There are also two free public live sites operating, Tumbalong Park at Darling Harbour and Cathy Freeman Park at Sydney Olympic Park.
Both will host live broadcasts of every Socceroos match on giant screens, beginning with Australia vs Türkiye on 14 June at 2pm (AEST), USA vs Australia on 20 June at 5am, and Paraguay vs Australia on 26 June at 12pm.
Finals matches are also scheduled at Tumbalong Park from 10 July through to 20 July, including quarter-finals, semi-finals and the final.
Extended trading will also apply to licensed premises when the Darling Harbour live site screens afternoon games. This applies to the City of Sydney local government area, including Sydney, Pyrmont, Ultimo, Surry Hills, Darlinghurst, Haymarket, The Rocks, Barangaroo, Dawes Point, Millers Point, Elizabeth Bay, Potts Point, Rushcutters Bay and Woolloomooloo.
This is part of the NSW Government’s Special Event Extended Trading initiative, which allows venues to trade outside regular times during major cultural and sporting events. It is just one of several measures supporting the government’s broader Vibrancy Reforms aimed at enhancing the night-time economy in NSW, catering to industry and consumer needs.
The extended trading covers on-premises alcohol service only, not takeaway, and venues cannot operate gaming machines unless already authorised to do so.
Minister for Gaming and Racing David Harris said: “The FIFA World Cup is the biggest sporting event on the planet and expected to draw strong crowds to venues across NSW, supporting the NSW Government’s commitment to a safe, vibrant and responsible night-time economy during major global events.
“Extended trading hours mean fans can come together and enjoy ‘the beautiful game’ while supporting local venues.
“With many World Cup games screening in the early hours of the morning, this is a great opportunity for fans to get together at their local pub or club, get behind the Socceroos and hopefully celebrate some big wins.
“These extended hours also provide a vital boost to our hospitality industry, a key pillar of our night-time economy, by enabling venues to serve more patrons, create more jobs and increase business activity.
“Venues operating under extended hours must continue to meet responsible service of alcohol requirements and put the right measures in place to keep patrons safe.”
Australian Hotels Association NSW, Director of Policy Chris Gatfield said: “Sydney is a vibrant, international city. There are a lot of football fans here, both homegrown and visiting from overseas, and the extended hours mean they won’t miss a moment of the action.
“We’re particularly pleased hotels will also be able to apply to trade earlier or later for the group matches through an application process.
“Get out of the cold and into a venue – there’s no better place to watch the World Cup than down at the local with your mates.”
The post NSW Scores with Extended Trading for FIFA World Cup appeared first on Eastern European Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW
Liquor & Gaming NSW is seeking feedback from industry, stakeholders and the community on how public lotteries are run in NSW.
The Public Lotteries Regulation 2016 is due to expire on 1 September 2026 and Liquor & Gaming NSW intends to renew the regulation to support the legislative framework for lottery regulation, while ensuring it remains fit for purpose.
Public consultation is a key part of the process and the draft Public Lotteries Regulation 2026 and Regulatory Impact Statement will be open for consultation until Friday 10 July.
It is proposed that the regulation will retain most of the existing provisions with some minor amendments to modernise the regulatory framework, remove outdated provisions and improve clarity, consistency and effectiveness.
Before the draft regulation can be remade, legislation requires a formal process of review be undertaken, which includes consultation with the public, interest groups and industry or businesses likely to be affected by the draft regulation.
It’s important for public lotteries to be conducted properly and in line with community interests and expectations, with appropriate harm minimisation measures.
The regulation supports the legislation by setting the standards around the conduct of public lotteries and puts in place consumer protections for people who buy lottery tickets.
The post Feedback Sought on How Public Lotteries are Run in NSW appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Australia
Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties
The Australian Federal Court has disqualified former Star Entertainment Group Limited executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin from managing corporations for six and seven years respectively and ordered them to pay pecuniary penalties for breaching their duties by failing to properly manage serious risks at one of Australia’s major casinos.
The Court ordered:
Mr Bekier, the former Chief Executive Officer and Managing Director, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $700,000 and disqualified him from managing corporations for six years.
Ms Martin, the former General Counsel, Company Secretary, and Chief Legal and Risk Officer, to pay a pecuniary penalty of $400,000 and disqualified her from managing corporations for seven years.
His Honour also ordered that Mr Bekier and Ms Martin pay 45% of ASIC’s costs of the proceeding.
The Court previously found that both Mr Bekier and Ms Martin breached their duties owed to Star Entertainment in relation to their handling of the risks associated with money laundering and criminal activity.
ASIC Chair Sarah Court said: “senior executives have a critical responsibility to identify, escalate and properly manage serious risks within their organisations.
“These failures occurred in a highly regulated environment and contributed to significant governance breakdowns at Star.
“Penalties of this scale reflect the seriousness of their conduct and send a strong message to other senior executives of listed companies that failures of this type are unacceptable.”
ASIC has an enduring enforcement priority focused on governance and directors’ duties failures.
In relation to Mr Bekier, His Honour Justice Lee said:
“Senior executives of casino operators, and public companies conducting enterprises pregnant with risks more broadly, must understand that failures of the kind established by the contraventions may attract substantial personal consequences.”
Further, in respect of Ms Martin he found that “the community is entitled to expect that a solicitor occupying such positions and having such responsibilities, within one of Australia’s largest casino operators, will display professional independence, accuracy and judgment of a high order. The conduct established … represented a very serious departure from those standards” and that
“Ms Martin knew of a miscellany of alarming information pertaining to [an overseas gambling junket] … She was required to report such matters to the Board but failed to do so. This is all the more concerning when considered against the backdrop of Ms Martin being the most senior solicitor employed by Star”; and that
“The more pervasive the failures of governance and culture become, the greater the obligation upon those entrusted with legal and risk responsibilities to insist upon compliance with legal obligations and proper standards of corporate conduct.”
The post Former Star Entertainment Executives Mathias Bekier and Paula Martin Disqualified and Ordered to Pay Penalties appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
Anthony Woods
PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, announced that PointsBet, one of Australia’s fastest-growing digital wagering operators, has selected Grafana Cloud as its unified observability platform. PointsBet is using Grafana Cloud to consolidate telemetry across its proprietary betting platform, accelerate incident resolution with AI-powered insights and give engineering teams the visibility they need to own and operate their services with confidence.
“Our platform is our product. Grafana Cloud gives us one place to see everything — and the AI tools to act on it fast,” Daniel Lucas, CTO at PointsBet.
Grafana Cloud was selected for its ability to deliver:
• Unified Observability Across Every Data Source: PointsBet’s proprietary platform spans real-time odds calculation, player account management, front-end apps and a custom-built betting engine, all generating high-volume telemetry from multiple sources. With Grafana Cloud, PointsBet can ingest and correlate metrics, logs, traces and profiles in a single open platform, ending the fragmentation that slows incident response. Built on OpenTelemetry and open source foundations including Grafana Loki, Grafana Tempo and Prometheus, there’s no vendor lock-in — just a unified view of the stack. This flexibility is what enables PointsBet’s shift towards a true service ownership model: engineering teams can now observe, understand and act on what they build.
• AI That’s Actually Useful: Grafana Assistant gives PointsBet engineers a context-aware AI co-pilot for investigation and troubleshooting, letting them query telemetry in natural language, navigate dashboards and trace issues to root cause without deep expertise in PromQL, LogQL or TraceQL. Now generally available in Grafana Cloud, Grafana Assistant can run multi-step incident investigations, generate and refine queries on the fly, and surface the right data at the right moment — keeping every action inside the tools teams already use. For a business where live betting windows close in seconds, reducing time-to-resolution isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a competitive edge.
• Application Observability That Empowers Developers: Grafana Cloud Application Observability provides PointsBet’s teams with end-to-end visibility into how their services perform — surfacing service dependency maps, latency hotspots and the customer impact of every change. By connecting distributed traces, metrics and logs in a unified view, Application Observability helps teams understand not just that something broke, but why and who is affected.
“Observability used to mean drowning in dashboards, alert noise and waiting for someone else to tell you what’s on fire. We chose Grafana Cloud because it brings technology and commercial teams together on the single view building autonomous value streams — and Grafana Assistant means our engineers spend less time asking ‘what’s wrong’ and more time fixing it. It enables the shift from reactive firefighting to teams that genuinely own their services end to end and that helps us build a platform our customers can reliably bet on,” said Saurabh Vyas, Head of SRE, PointsBet.
“Real-time platforms at scale are some of the hardest systems to operate — every component has to perform under pressure, and every signal matters when something goes wrong. PointsBet’s engineering team has built a sophisticated platform, and we’re proud to give their engineers the observability foundation they need to operate it. Open, AI-powered, and built to cut through complexity — that’s exactly what Grafana Cloud is for,” said Anthony Woods, co-founder of Grafana Labs.
The post PointsBet Goes All In on Grafana Cloud to Power AI-Driven Observability at Scale appeared first on EE Gaming | Global iGaming & Tech Intelligence Hub.
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