Roll the credits on a New Zealand short film and the thanks list runs long: the film commission, a local council, a crowdfunding page, the cast’s relatives. One funder rarely gets a mention, even though it sits behind a surprising share of community arts and sport in the country. That funder is the humble pub pokie machine.
New Zealand is about to redraw that picture. The Online Casino Gambling Act is moving play from unlicensed websites toward a regulated market, and anyone comparing best pokies sites in future will be looking at a very different landscape from the one Kiwis have used for two decades. The money story behind that shift matters well beyond gambling, because it touches every community group that lives on grants, festivals included.
How the festival circuit really works
Any filmmaker who has submitted to a festival knows the arithmetic. Entry fees, travel, subtitles, posters and a publicist all come out of a budget that was thin to begin with. Film Threat’s own look at what it takes to get noticed on the festival circuit stresses strategy, persistence and picking the right festivals, which is sound advice, but it says little about who pays for the festivals themselves.
Show Me Shorts, the Auckland-based festival, is a useful example. It runs as a registered charitable trust, founded in 2006, and has built an Academy Awards-accredited programme that tours community cinemas around the country. Its own guide to financing a short notes that fewer than half of the New Zealand shorts it selects each year were funded through public or charitable grants, so the rest are self-funded, crowdfunded or a mix. In 2026 it also announced two $40,000 production grants through a Short Film Lab backed by the New Zealand Film Commission. Small organizations like this stitch together money from many pockets, and local grants are one of them. An older Auckland Council application shows the trust asking for under $2,000 toward print, advertising and programming for a single regional screening.
Pub pokies, trusts and grants
Most pub and club pokies in New Zealand fall under Class 4 gambling, run by licensed gaming societies, often called trusts. Under the Gambling Act, these societies must return at least 40 percent of net proceeds to the community as grants, according to the Department of Internal Affairs. Societies must also publish who received what.
The scale is large. An analysis commissioned by the Gaming Machine Association of New Zealand, Sport New Zealand and the DIA found roughly $290 million in Class 4 grants approved in 2019 across more than 26,000 grants. Sport took 54 percent and community services 19 percent. Arts groups share the remainder with plenty of other applicants, so a film festival is competing against rugby clubs and school fundraisers for the same pot.
That is why any change to gambling habits sets off alarms. If players move from a pub machine to a website, the trusts have less to hand out.
Online pokies and the community-returns fight
The Online Casino Gambling Bill originally said nothing about community funding. The Government’s own figures show what happened next: of the more than 5,000 submissions the select committee received, 3,966 raised concerns about community returns, as Minister of Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden’s release on community funding guaranteed as the bill moves forward set out.
Cabinet responded by raising the online gambling duty from 12 to 16 percent of gross gambling revenue from 1 January 2027, with the extra 4 percentage points ring-fenced for community returns and distributed by the Lottery Grants Board. RNZ reported the minister’s framing: this is new money on top of existing funding from pokies, Lotto and the TAB. A review is planned two years after the policy starts, specifically to check whether pokie revenue and the grants that depend on it are holding up. Industry coverage from iGaming Business has put the first-year figure somewhere between $10 million and $20 million, depending on how big the licensed market turns out to be.
What changes for players
For people playing online, the practical change is the line between licensed and unlicensed. Under the new regime, up to 15 operators can hold a licence, and the duty paid by those operators is what feeds the new community stream. Money spent with an unlicensed site contributes nothing to it. Anyone weighing up which of the best pokies sites is operating legitimately will increasingly find that a licence is the first thing worth checking, ahead of the games list or the welcome screen. Licensed operators also come with harm-minimization rules that unlicensed sites never had to follow, and advertising rules are tightening alongside them.
For the arts sector, the honest answer is that nobody yet knows whether the new stream will make up for any slide in pokie grants. The two-year review exists because the Government admits it cannot predict the effect.
Back to the credits
The next time a New Zealand short ends and the logos scroll past, it is worth reading them. Somewhere in that blur of trust names and funding bodies is the quiet machinery that gets small films onto screens, and how that machinery is funded is changing.
