My stance on gambling is mixed, so let me lay down how the gambling landscape in the Australian state of Queensland where I live in looks like.
Poker machines (known to you seppos and poms as 'slots' or 'fruit machines') are in almost every licenced pub, tavern and sporting club in the state and not just casinos. Pokies are so widespread and lucrative not just in Queensland but New South Wales that the likes of Konami expanded their casino gaming operations down under a long time ago and you'll see them as a major sponsor of quite a few lawn bowls clubs (which also happen to have a stockpile of Konami pokies.)
These same premises also have bookmaking facilities to place bets mainly on horse racing, greyhound racing and rugby league, as well as televised Keno games which you can play from your table.
Online betting has become very popular the last few years since the beginning of online betting advertising in televised sport coverage and came to the point where these online bookmaking companies would have a selected staff member integrated into the sport commentary coverage, which created a lot of controversy and there is currently momentum to have online betting companies banned from all sports advertising, which the major footy codes began to rely upon as a major source of funding a few years ago and are trying to fight such moves.
Lotto is popular and highly regulated, which along with scratch-it cards are only allowed to be sold at licenced newsagents.
To where I stand on gambling, while I think a wholesale ban across not just the entire state but the entire country is a bit extreme given that placing bets on sports is an Australian past-time and long part of the culture, it's gone way too far since the end of the Cold War. Pokies in my state only began to be widespread in 1991 and local sporting clubs have over time become too over-reliant on the revenue generated from them, on-top of funding handed out by the state government derived from taxes and other fees on gambling activities.
Pokies are designed to stimulate the same reward receptors in the brain as drugs like cocaine, and thus have the ability to wreak havoc in people's lives, and gambling addiction via pokies is a major social problem here, especially in the state of Tasmania where there is grassroots momentum to remove all pokies from clubs and pubs across that state the problem is so bad.
I'd like to see pokies removed entirely from all licenced premises across my state given the damage they cause, whether to replace them with less addictive forms of gambling or have none at all I'm not sure of just yet. I'd also shut down the casinos in Townsville, Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Greyhound racing should be banned entirely. There was a major national controversy a couple of years ago where the national state-owned broadcaster aired an investigative piece that uncovered racing greyhounds being locked up in very small cages for extended periods of time and treated horribly by their owners, then trained on private racing tracks using live bait (piglets and rabbits mainly), and when they're unable to race any longer they were killed and buried in mass graves. The problem was so systemic across the industry that entire regulatory boards across the states and territories were fired and trainers banned for life, on top of facing criminal charges.
Horse racing should remain along with lotto and scratch-it cards, however all sport betting advertising of any kind should be banned and online betting facing further regulation and an ISP level website filtering scheme blocking access to all foreign online betting websites, and use of a VPN or TOR to engage in such activities on foreign websites deemed a criminal offence.
Loot boxes should be prohibited as well, every government should crack down on them. It'a merely a case of video game publishers being greedy pricks.