Opera House Lottery kidnappingGamblers help fund Opera House birthday 
The federal government will consider introducing a national lottery - similar to the Opera House lotteries of the past - to fund the preservation of Australia's most precious places.
It will explore the feasibility of adapting  Britain's Heritage Lottery fund. Since it was launched in 1994, this  lottery has raised more than $71 billion and funded more than 39,000 projects, that it says "make a lasting difference for heritage, people and communities." 
An Australian national heritage lottery is one of a range of funding initiatives that are outlined in the new Australian Heritage Strategy, a five-year plan that will be released at the Opera House on Wednesday by the Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt. It also includes plans to generate more publicity for nationally listed heritages sites by a more creative use of online storytelling. 
Mr Hunt said the strategy would explore the potential for a national lottery that would benefit Australia's "magnificent heritage".
Heritage management should be a "shared responsibility between national, state and local governments, private owners, businesses and the local community" , he said.
And protection of Australia's 100 world and national heritage-listed places was a pillar of the strategy, he said.
As well as national parks, these sites include: the Opera House; Hyde Park Barracks; and Bondi Beach in NSW; Port Arthur in Tasmania; Uluru in the Northern Territory; the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland; Flemington Racecourse in Victoria; and Canberra's Old Parliament House.
A study of 15 sites estimated that they generated $15.4 billion in annual turnover, and employed around 79,000 people directly and indirectly.
The strategy paper acknowledges that "budget pressures" on the heritage sector have forced it to move towards more innovative funding measures, including crowd funding, partnerships with the private sector and targeted lotteries.
The Opera House, for example, has seen government funding drop and is investigating ways to raise more funds from the public.
A range of public lotteries in Australia has encouraged gambling for "good causes". The Opera House Lottery ran from late 1957, starting with tickets of &pound;5 each, until it ended in   September,1986. It sold 86.7 million tickets over the course of 867 draws, raising more than $105 million. In 2013, its 40th birthday celebrations were funded by special scratchies.
The Opera House Lottery became an institution in NSW, generating headlines about its power to transform lives - and not always for the better.
When Sydney actor Robert Levis won the Opera House jackpot of $200,000 in 1965, he said it set him up for life. He was "the richest man he knew," he told the Herald.
In 1960 an eight-year-old Bondi boy Graeme Thorne was the first Australian to be kidnapped for ransom, and later murdered, when his parents won &pound;100,000 in the 10th Opera House Lottery.
The odds of winning the Opera House Lottery were very long, and copped criticism from the church and others for encouraging gambling. The odds of winning the British jackpot recently got even longer.
Dr Mark Griffiths, the director of the International Gaming Research Unit and Professor of Gambling Studies, Nottingham Trent University, estimates the chances of winning the British lottery fund are one in 45 million after recent changes reduced a punter's chance of winning.
"Does that make playing it a tribute to public innumeracy and totally irrational? Not necessarily. Lotto still offers a low-cost chance of winning a very large, life-changing amount of money ... given the small cost involved; it's a small price to pay for a big hope," he wrote in The Conversation. 
Frank Howarth, the national president of Museums Australia, welcomed the idea of a lottery. He said the lack of funding at federal, state and local level for cultural and heritage institutions was very concerning.
In particular, organisations that relied on local government funding were really "feeling the pinch".
The British lottery had been "immensely successful" in building a large number of cultural facilities that would otherwise not have been built, said Mr Howarth who was previously director of the National Museum of Australia.
He warned that it was important that there was a strategy so that organisations that received lottery money for capital works also had funding to cover ongoing operational costs. Several projects funded by lottery money in Britain had closed because they didn't have funding for operational costs.
When the Opera House Lottery ended, the then manager of the NSW Lotteries Bryne Smith told the Herald that the primary motivation to buy lottery tickets was to win money. "But a secondary reason is often the knowledge that the money spent on the ticket is going to a good cause," he said.
Yet opposition to government lotteries like Britain's heritage fund is usually more muted than the usual criticism of gambling.
"There seems to be a moral objection to the notion that people should be able to make bets at extremely long odds unless the proceeds are for a good cause," said the Fundraising Institute in a submission to government many years ago.