Australian pensioners have been caught out by relatively new anti-money laundering laws. The new laws, introduced in 2006, have been gradually phased in, and allow casinos to hand over information on any ‘suspicious transactions’ to the federal authorities.
Many customers using Sydney’s Star City Casino have had their pensions docked, because the casinos were collecting all their information and sending it to Centrelink under the new anti-money laundering laws.
Maree O’Halloran of the Welfare Rights Centre in New South Wales said that the new laws were unfair. “You walk in with $100 and you walk out with $100, you might have gone up and down through the whole day but each time you go up, that’s what Centrelink counts as the income.”
O’Halloran pointed out that other non-casino gambling venues do not give information about their clients to Centrelink. “If you went down to the TAB and bet on the races, that information is not going through Centrelink. At the moment it’s only the people who go to the Star City Casino, and they’re not all high rollers,” she said.
The Human Services Minister, Joe Ludwig, says that Centrelink is justified in targeting the people in question. “We’re talking about people who have unexplained gambling turnover of $100,000 over the course of a year,” he said, “so it has to be unexplained and a significant amount of dollars.”
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