The bill to ban greyhound racing is entering the final stages of debate in Parliament this week. It should pass tomorrow with broad support once some of the contested details are ironed out.
The ban may be a good thing. But it is also a useful moment to look harder at the gambling and racing world behind it, because some very big questions about power, money and political influence have gone largely untouched in New Zealand.
I’m not a gambling specialist. But the more I’ve looked at this world over the last few weeks, and the more people I’ve spoken to, the less comfortable I’ve become. There is a lot going on here that has escaped serious political scrutiny. This is my first attempt to map some of it. And if readers know more, I’d genuinely like to hear from them.
The billion-dollar handover
The starting point is this: the Entain gambling company has promised about $1 billion to the New Zealand racing industry. Entain is a global gambling giant headquartered in the Isle of Man and listed on the London Stock Exchange. And in 2023 it was handed a 25-year monopoly over TAB NZ’s betting operations in exchange for the $1 billion.
The 2023 deal between the TAB and Entain was approved by Labour’s Racing Minister Kieran McAnulty (who had previously worked in the gambling industry before going into politics). It gave Entain day-to-day control of the entire TAB betting and broadcasting operation, with profits split 50-50.
There was also a sweetener: an extra $100 million, payable only if Parliament legislated to ban offshore competitors and hand Entain a true online monopoly on sports and racing betting. That legislation (“the Racing Industry Amendment Bill”) was duly passed in 2025, under the current government.
As Fox Meyer reported in Newsroom last week, Entain is now eyeing the next frontier. The company’s Australia and New Zealand chief executive, Andrew Vouris, has confirmed Entain intends to apply for three of the 15 new online casino licences being offered under Brooke van Velden’s Online Casino Gambling Bill. If successful, Entain would be the only operator in New Zealand able to offer bets on sports, racing, and casinos, and advertise across all three. Vouris called the opportunity “massive.”
So, a single foreign corporation could soon dominate virtually every legal form of online gambling in New Zealand. That is an astonishing amount of market power to hand over.
“Reinforcing loops of decay” in the racing industry
Today in the NBR, journalist Tim Hunter’s report on the racing industry adds an important new dimension. Hunter has obtained a TAB New Zealand Racing Advisory Committee report which reveals the racing industry is caught in what it calls “reinforcing loops of decay.”
The structural deficit is more than $50 million a year. Hunter reports that without reform, key racing codes face exhausting their reserves around the time Entain’s guaranteed funding ends.
That’s a remarkable admission. The very deal that was sold to the public as the industry’s salvation is, on the advisory committee’s own analysis, merely delaying the reckoning. Now Sir Peter Vela’s committee is back asking for tax breaks on horses, permission for TAB NZ to offer online casinos and in-race betting, and shifting the cost of the Racing Integrity Board to the government.
Having been given a monopoly, and having received more than a billion dollars in guaranteed support, the racing industry is back asking for more. The committee’s proposed solutions read like the usual corporate welfare script: tax breaks, and a plea for the public to pick up even more of the tab. A spokesperson for Racing Minister Winston Peters told NBR the minister had not requested the report. Meanwhile, TAB NZ reported net losses of $38.6 million in 2025 and $42.4 million in 2024.
Who actually benefits from this arrangement?
Racing’s special treatment
The academic case is pretty damning too. In February, Lisa Marriott and Max Rashbrooke laid it out bluntly in The Conversation, with an article titled “Racing enjoys special treatment under NZ gambling laws. Why?” Their findings are stark.
The racing industry is the only sector with a specific provision in the Gambling Act allowing it to return gambling proceeds to its own industry. Lotto must redistribute all profits to the community. Casinos and pokie trusts face their own levies and distribution requirements. But racing? Racing gets to keep the money.
The numbers bear this out. In 2024, total distributions of racing and sports betting profits were approximately $199 million, of which $195 million (98%) went to racing. Community sports organisations received $3.5 million – only 2%.
And the tax privileges are extraordinary. A 4% totalisator duty on betting was progressively removed, reaching zero in 2021. This saved the racing sector $11.5 million a year. That’s foregone government revenue, handed directly to an industry that causes measurable social harm. As Marriott and Rashbrooke argue, state support for racing tends to mean more gambling on racing, and more gambling means more harm.
None of this has received anything like the political attention it warrants.
The Entain problem
Then there is the matter of Entain’s own track record. Fox Meyer’s Newsroom piece last week spells it out clearly: the Australian financial crimes regulator AUSTRAC has commenced civil penalty proceedings against Entain. AUSTRAC, as Meyer reports, alleges “serious and systemic non-compliance” with anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws over six years.
AUSTRAC alleges Entain accepted over A$150 million worth of wagers from 17 individuals with “suspected criminal profiles and associations” whose identities were deliberately obscured. Entain has set aside A$100 million in preparation for penalties. A court date is tentatively set for November 2026.
That timing matters. As Meyer notes, the hearing would come just weeks after the NZ Government makes final decisions on whether Entain will receive online casino licences.
There are other examples of Entain’s integrity failures. In 2022 the UK Gambling Commission fined Entain £17 million for failures in safer gambling and anti-money laundering within its Ladbrokes brand. In 2023 an Australian state regulator fined the company after it solicited a heavy gambler who then opened an account under a false name.
And yet it was handed the monopoly. The Department of Internal Affairs flagged the risk in a memo to Peters. As reported by RNZ, officials warned that the arrangement could create a perception that a foreign corporation was being handed a monopoly at the expense of domestic returns.
The contract itself remains secret. TAB NZ has refused to release the full details under the Official Information Act. The Post has been trying to prise it out through the OIA since July 2023. Nearly three years later, the public still cannot see the deal that handed a foreign company control of New Zealand’s betting system for 25 years.
Winston Peters and the racing industry conflict question
You can’t write about racing industry politics without writing about Winston Peters. He has been Minister of Racing across three separate governments: 2005–2008, 2017–2020, and now the current term. The pattern is hard to miss. Racing figures back NZ First. Peters backs racing.
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