Allegra Spender (Wentworth, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Problem gambling costs Australia more than $5 billion a year, but the true cost is the human cost—the impact on families, relationships, mental health and wellbeing. The Australian Gambling Research Centre has shown that gambling is dangerous for family life, is making people sick and is damaging their most precious relationships. Despite these harms, gambling advertising has tripled in the past decade. Almost 1,000 gambling ads are broadcast daily. Amongst 12- to 17-year-olds, 73 per cent remember seeing a gambling ad and almost a third have admitted to gambling themselves, despite being underage. A clear majority of the community believes that gambling should be discouraged and it is past time for action. So I welcome this bill, because I think it will help make a difference and protect some people from ruining their lives with gambling. The bill will prevent Australians from being able to use their credit cards for online gambling, in the same way they cannot use their credit cards for offline gambling. I simply cannot understand why anyone would support people gambling on credit.

This kind of action is long overdue, and I commend the government for taking this step, but it is just one step. Credit cards are not as large a share of payments in Australia as they once were, and I understand credit protection laws mean that credit cards are held primarily by older, higher income Australians rather than by younger and more vulnerable members of the community. Younger people are a particular concern to me. One of my constituents approached me recently and told me that their seven-year-old had asked them what a 'same-game multi' was. There is absolutely no reason why a seven-year-old in Australia should hear those terms, let alone know them and let alone understand them. The fact that they do shows our regulatory regime is absolutely failing us. Those are the people who are most at risk of ruining their lives from the predation and exploitation of gambling businesses. These vulnerable people are the people we should be seeking to protect with policy interventions.

We should be looking at banning gambling advertising, particularly during news and sports broadcasts, so that children are not exposed to them. We should be banning gambling businesses from making donations to political parties, and we should rework the GST distribution so jurisdictions are not penalised for restricting pokies and gambling. Most importantly, I believe we should establish a federal regulator for the gambling industry which ensures that we have a national approach, that Australians across the country enjoy the same protections and that no gambling businesses are able to evade sensible regulation by locating in a particular jurisdiction. These are the changes we need, and I hope the government recognises this bill is not the destination; it is just one step of a larger journey.

It has now been four months since the House of Representatives inquiry into online gambling reported, and we are yet to see a formal response from the government. The minister has welcomed the report and publicly stated she is working through recommendations with state and territory governments. I am glad of this work and very glad that this report is not going to be yet another report gathering dust and the government is actually dealing with it. But, from my community's point of view, the community does feel that it's time to understand whether the government supports all of the report's recommendations and whether it intends to act on them. I know the government has committed to doing more to protect Australians from gambling harm. The community expects them to follow through on their promises and to do so urgently. There's no justification for delay.

Before I finish, I'd also like to acknowledge that this reform is the result of almost a decade of work done by the House and Senate crossbench, particularly former senators Nick Xenophon, Stirling Griff and Skye Kakoschke-Moore and the current members for Clark, Mayo, Goldstein and Curtin. Getting policy change from the crossbench is a low, slow grind, and those of us here today are building on the foundations they have laid. I thank them.

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