Steven Ciobo (Moncrieff, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Labor member does not even understand what is going on. The Labor member is now claiming that as a member of this committee I am supporting this recommendation. I take this opportunity to highlight this page here: 'Coalition committee members additional comments', for the benefit of members opposite. They are clearly quite confused about the reality of what is taking place, which is why I am in Federation Chamber making clear areas of difference between the Labor Party's Big Brother heavy-handed approach and the coalition's approach.

Let us be clear on one particular aspect though. There are Australians who struggle with a pathological addiction to gambling. There are Australians that struggle with problem gambling in the same way that there are Australians who struggle with their eating, with alcohol abuse and with poppy seed abuse. We need to make sure that we equip those people that have the problem with the skills, access to counselling and the ability to control those urges, that they currently do not have.

That is why there are some recommendations that make sense. For example, we do not want to expose children to live odds and to sports betting during peak viewing times for children. But we do want to ensure that we do not take a completely over-the-top, knee-jerk reaction to these kinds of things by implementing some of the restrictions that have been outlined. That is precisely the reason why coalition members made additional comments, to highlight that when it came to each of these reforms we would be looking at it through a coalition process and forming our view subsequent to the coalition policy committee.

In the short time remaining, I would like to touch upon one other aspect. As I said, this was originally a coalition act, the Interactive Gambling Act. I find it passing strange that anybody who has spent longer than 30 seconds on the internet would know that you simply go to Google.com, for example, punch in 'poker' and hit return, and you will be offered and array of websites. You do not know where they are hosted, by and large, but you will be offered, if not thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of websites where you can gamble. We somehow think, because we in Australia have passed a particular piece of legislation—which has now been in existence for a decade—that Australians are going to go, 'Oh, no; I'm not going to go and gamble on Poker.com because I'm not allowed to under the Interactive Gambling Act.' The notion that we can in some way control the internet, that we can somehow pull the curtains down or lift up the drawbridges, so that Australians do not have access to internet gambling sites is utterly farcical. These sites exist now although they are prohibited, and they will continue to exist although they are prohibited under the IGA. They exist because we do not have extra jurisdictional reach. What is the point of having a completely useless bill in place?

What we would be much better off doing is working with industry in a constructive way to provide alternatives that are well-regulated and transparent to Australians. We would be better off working constructively with those that seek to address the concerns of problem gamblers by providing, for example, access to counselling services. With that, I conclude my comments.

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