A national scratch-and-win still needs a South Australian licence even when its pool sits well under the NSW threshold — because SA licenses the mechanic, not the money.
That’s the whole problem in one line. The permit map isn’t the hard part of national compliance — the winner-selection classification is, because one random element turns a “skill” competition into a game of chance across the permit states, and that decision gets made at the mechanic brief, not the permit desk. Work out which states you cross, lodge the applications, hold the authorities, and you’ve handled the admin. You haven’t necessarily handled the compliance, because the paperwork can be filed perfectly against the wrong classification.
Do You Need a Competition Permit in Australia?
You need a competition permit in Australia if your promotion is a game of chance open to residents of NSW, SA, the ACT or the NT above each state’s prize threshold. Games of skill — judged on merit — need no permit anywhere. A national game of chance almost always crosses at least one threshold, so the answer is usually yes.
Chance or skill is decided at the brief, not the permit desk
Here’s where the money leaks. A judged competition with a panel picking the best entry on merit is skill, and skill needs no permit anywhere in the country. A “random draw from all correct entries” is chance — even though every entrant had to answer a question first. The question was a filter; the winner was still picked at random. If there’s any random element in selecting the winner, the whole thing is treated as chance, and now you’re back to the permit states.
The failure worth watching isn’t the permit paperwork going wrong. It’s a mechanic brief that says “judged competition” while the mechanics document, three lines down, resolves ties with a random draw — or picks the winner from correct entries because judging thousands of entries was never realistic. The classification flipped and nobody re-checked the permits. That’s a promotion re-run or voided, not because the filing was sloppy but because it was the wrong filing. If you want the legal edge of this properly, our note on trade promotion compliance covers where a lawyer earns their fee.
Which states require a competition permit, and why the map misleads
Four jurisdictions require a permit or licence for a trade promotion that’s a game of chance: NSW, SA, the ACT and the NT. Victoria, Queensland, WA and Tasmania don’t. The trap is that each permit state sets its own threshold and — this is the part that catches people — its own trigger.
NSW requires an Authority to Conduct a Trade Promotion Lottery once the total prize pool crosses $10,000, now on a duration-based authority model through NSW Fair Trading — you hold the authority and run qualifying promotions within it rather than applying each time. The ACT sets the lowest bar: a permit is needed above $3,000 total prize value, and it has to be approved before the promotion is advertised, per the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission. The NT waives a separate permit if you already hold one for the same national promotion elsewhere, which the Northern Territory Government confirms — so once NSW, SA or ACT is sorted, the NT usually rides along.
South Australia is the one that breaks the money-based mental model entirely. A standard draw only needs a licence above $5,000, but any scratch, break-open or instant-win ticket mechanic needs an Instant Prize Trade Promotion licence regardless of prize value, per the South Australian Government. A modest scratch activation in a single SA store still needs it. SA licenses the mechanic. Read the map as a set of dollar thresholds and you’ll miss the one state where the dollar figure is irrelevant — which is exactly how a low-value scratch-and-win ends up non-compliant.
Doesn’t a promo lawyer or an agency just handle all this?
The fair version of the counter-argument: a competition permit is legal admin. Work out which states cross the threshold, lodge the applications, hold the authorities, and you’re covered — or hand it to a promo lawyer or agency and it’s off your desk. That’s true for the filing. It’s not true for the thing the filing is filed against.
Whoever lodges your applications is working from the brief you gave them. If that brief calls the mechanic a judged competition and the actual selection contains a random step, the applications will be lodged as a skill competition — correctly, against wrong inputs. The classification is a design decision that sits upstream of anyone at a permit desk. It’s the same reason free entry and the misleading-conduct rules apply federally across all eight jurisdictions whether or not a state permit is needed — some of your obligations were never a permit question in the first place.
This is why we push the mechanic decision to the front. In our campaign file, across 45 completed promotions, 40 required a receipt to enter and 19 capped daily entries — configuration choices made at the brief that interact directly with whether the promotion is chance or skill and which permits it triggers. Get that order wrong and even a clean compliant prize draw can be filed against the wrong category.
What this means for how you plan a national promotion
Decide the mechanic first, in writing, and pin the exact winner-selection step — not “judged” but “judged by panel, ties broken by re-judging, no random element.” Then classify. Then file. Do it in that order and the permit map becomes what it should be: a checklist. Do it in the reverse order, with legal filing after the creative is locked, and you’re one tie-breaker clause away from re-running the whole thing. The sibling agency Bamboo Marketing writes well on getting the brief itself right before any of this lands on a compliance desk.
The permit is a filing job; the classification is a design decision, and it’s the one that decides whether the filing was even the right one.
If you’re rethinking how you brief and classify a national promotion before it reaches the permit desk, we’d be happy to talk it through.
