Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this bill be now read a second time.

The Prime Minister is 'annoyed.'

The opposition leader has 'had enough.'

That's all very well. How about doing something about it then?

The opposition did have nine years, but finally the major parties are listening after years of advocacy from crossbench members for Clark, Mayo, and more recently the member for Curtin and myself and others. Communities want gambling advertising around sport to STOP.

And I mean, stop dead.

A recent three-year study from La Trobe University for the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation found that 78 per cent of the 50,000 respondents felt they should be able to watch TV sport with no gambling ads, 87 per cent said teenagers are exposed to too much gambling advertising.

I have two of those teenagers, and it's for them, and others in our communities across Australia, that I speak today.

It is why I am introducing this bill. It is a direct reflection of community sentiment and I thank all of those from within my community of Goldstein and from around the country who have contacted me in support of this bill.

This bill would place an outright ban on gambling advertising on our screens; including broadcast television, pay TV and their respective streaming services, and on radio.

This bill will be followed by the findings of the House of Reps committee inquiry into online gambling.

I hope that this bill, together with the inquiry's forthcoming recommendations under the formidable leadership of the member for Dunkley, can put an end to gambling ads on TV, on radio and online.

The online space is a complex web of algorithms that targets people based on their age, demographic and browsing habits, with gambling ads specifically geared at teenaged boys and young men, but increasingly attempting to draw in young women as well.

Recent moves by platforms like TikTok to adopt subtle gambling promotions to target young people must be dealt with by the government after the inquiry reports.

When it comes to broadcast, like big tobacco, the gambling industry, making millions off the young, the poor and the desperate in our communities, will resist.

But with gambling ads at saturation levels and invading the minds of our young people in ever more insidious ways, to the extent that multis are now of more interest than the games themselves, we must act.

The gambling ad spend in Australia rose from $89.7 million annually in 2011 to $287.2 million in 2021—a 320 per cent increase and grew further to $310 million by last year. TV ads accounted for more than half of the spend, with about 346,000 television ads on free to air alone; that's an average of 948 per day or 39.5 per hour.

Aware of the latest crossbench push on this, the opposition has recently suggested banning gambling ads during sporting events and one hour either side. The evidence shows that this will not fix the problem. In fact, recent policy interventions to restrict the timing and proximity of gambling ads around broadcast sport has only pushed gambling into other programming—including programming that appeals to children like comedy shows and Marvel movies.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority has itself concluded that an effect of restricting gambling ads during live sport after rule changes came into effect in 2018-19 was simply an increase in gambling ads during non-sport programs—especially between six and 10.30 pm when children and teenagers are watching.

Not only that; the total volume of gambling spots increased by no less than 50 per cent between 2016-17, before the rule changes, and 2018-19 once the new regulations came into effect.

Research from Deakin University in 2018 found that young people are highly aware of gambling marketing. 'When we have dinner,' one said, 'the TV is usually on and usually between the news and stuff they do have ads like Sportsbet.'

When asked what should be done about gambling, young people across multiple studies have called on governments and sporting organisations to take greater responsibility for protecting young people from gambling marketing.

In one study, three quarters of young people agreed that sporting codes should do more to prevent young people from being exposed to advertising for gambling on sport.

We are failing these children if we do not act. I have had youth football officials in my electorate of Goldstein tell me directly that they know the boys in their junior teams are actively betting on gambling apps on their phones.

I also know this is happening because I hear my teenaged son and his friends talking about it.

We cannot say we didn't know. And we cannot hide from the community concern about this. I have had an avalanche of positive reaction from across the country to this bill.

The conclusion is obvious: nothing short of a complete ban on gambling advertising will work and meet the increasing concerns of parents and sports fans alike.

This bill seeks to replicate the approach taken to banning tobacco advertising in 1976.

After all, gambling is also a public health issue.

The social cost of gambling in Victoria alone has been estimated at $7 billion a year. Family and relationship problems were the highest cost, followed by emotional and psychological issues, including distress, depression, suicide and violence. Financial harms were only the third-highest cost.

We can change this—after all it hasn't always been this way.

Amazingly, considering how pervasive it is now, sports betting (other than horse racing) wasn't legal in Australia until 1983, via the TAB, and non-government sports betting—such as Sportsbet—wasn't legal until 1993.

Now, just 30 years later, Australians are the biggest gambling losers worldwide.

All of this has happened well inside my own lifetime.

In 1983 I was a schoolgirl living in Perth where my father—a former 100-gamer for Essendon in the VFL—was coaching Subiaco in the WAFL.

I had grown up around football in Tasmania, where my father coached North Launceston to eight straight grand finals, winning five.

Many of my weeknights as a kid were spent eating curried sausages made by the female volunteers, including the legendary Yvonne Morton, in the clubrooms while Dad was training, my weekends sitting on the bonnet of the car on the boundary at what was then York Park, now UTAS Stadium, jumping off to toot the horn when the red and black kicked a goal.

It was a different time to be sure. And we can't turn back the clock to the days when football was about community, not business and money.

But we can remind ourselves that sport is about fun, health, participation and people and its net benefit to society should be positive. That's why we must end gambling ads, and properly tax the gambling industry's betting profits to offset potential revenue loss to sport.

I understand the argument that gambling ads underpin modern sport's economics in Australia—but that's an addiction that as a society we must break.

Because the price we are paying is a generation of young sport lovers who think they aren't part of the gang if they don't bet, who know more about the intricacies of 'multis' than they do about the finer points of the game they are watching.

The price we are paying is in the evidence—that 18-to-24-year-old men are the fastest-growing cohort of problem gamblers; the first cohort to have been exposed to saturation gambling ads as kids.

It's no longer time to hold 'em. It's time to fold 'em.

I commend this bill to the House, and I strongly urge the government to listen to the community concern and to recognise the concern across this chamber and to allow this bill to be debated.

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