Linda White (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I love sport. Like many Australians, I love watching a good match of just about anything. But being a senator from Victoria I particularly like AFL. Perhaps a little-known fact is that in a previous life I served on the board of the MCG Trust for Australia's best sporting stadium. Unusually though for a Victorian I don't have an AFL team. I always just like supporting the winner!

Along with my interest in sport, I'm also a proud member of the group Parliamentary Friends of Gambling Harm Reduction. My love of sport and my conviction about reducing the harm that comes from gambling means I'm particularly interested in Senator's Henderson's private senator's bill and what it seeks to do or, perhaps more accurately, what it doesn't do. On the face of it, Senator Henderson's bill sounds like a pretty good thing from a gambling harm reduction point of view. The bill seeks to take a stand on all gambling advertisements during live sporting events from one hour before each sporting event to one hour after its conclusion. I'd wager that this sounds pretty good to the average punter. I think that is what Senator Henderson and the Liberal Party are trying to achieve with this bill—they are trying to look as though they are doing something on gambling harm reduction by introducing this bill. They are seeking to address the very rightly placed community concern about the impact of gambling advertising on young people, children and the vulnerable because they want to seem like they care, but the truth is that how this bill proposes to deal with the issue of gambling advertising in Australia is like looking at a tapestry through a drinking straw.

The broadcast of live sporting events does not represent other channels through which gambling advertising is proliferated, such as social media and through sponsorship and branding, including on sporting uniforms and merchandise and at outdoor advertising at sporting events and other public places. Senator Henderson's bill does very little to address the issues at hand because its remit is so small. That, in essence, is why the government does not support this bill.

As the communications minister has said publicly, the status quo on gambling advertising isn't good enough. Australians, particularly young Australians, are being bombarded by gambling advertising more frequently, particularly during sporting matches. Betting companies are seeking to make gambling synonymous with the Australian experience of live sport and are using Australia's proud sporting culture as a clever and manipulative way of justifying and minimising what is in fact a harmful and pervasive problem. The normalisation of the slogan 'Sportsbet's same-day multis', ringing in our ears every time live sport is playing, is the result of a near seamless integration of gambling with sport. I have to admit I don't know what a same-day multi even is!

As far as that integration of sport and gambling goes, this bill works to make a bit of a difference. But the fact is that a whole range of other channels exist to advertise gambling during sporting events and also when there are no events on. Gambling advertising on social media is pervasive. Online advertising, which casually frames gambling as if it were an exciting game and nothing more, is having the effect of putting casinos on our phones. There are concerning similarities between betting companies targeting children to set them up for developing gambling habits and the tobacco industry targeting young people to produce another generation of nicotine addicts. A similar case can be mounted for their targeting of the poor and the vulnerable. This cannot be a good thing, because the fact is that most people lose. Frankly, the terms and conditions of gambling apps are rigged against everyone really winning big and certainly are rigged against anyone winning consistently. As the well-known saying goes, the house always wins—eventually.

The research shows that this move from the opposition won't solve the problem of gambling. It will just push the advertising from one timeslot to another, when children are particularly targeted. In fact, when you look at the data you see that the last round of changes to the regulatory framework, which the now opposition in 2018 labelled as 'reforms', has actually increased the volume of gambling spots on TV and radio. The effect of the coalition's reforms has been to make gambling advertising more pervasive during times when children are more likely to be consuming media, when movies and comedy are scheduled.

The effect of this massive net increase in gambling advertising over the last few years has been revealed in some concerning research released from the Institute of Family Studies, which has already been referred to. It suggests that, when people were exposed to wagering advertising, 21 per cent were prompted to start betting for the first time, 28 per cent tried a new form of betting, 29 per cent said they placed bets on impulse and a third of people increased their betting. It also found that three in four Australians gambled at least once during the past 12 months and, of those, almost half were classified as being at some risk of harm from wagering. These are pretty devastating statistics in my view. Those numbers suggest to me that, whatever we have been doing and whatever it was the coalition did in 2018, have failed Australians in terms of their economic and social wellbeing. As gambling has become more accessible and more intensely advertised, the harms associated with gambling have also increased.

When Labor came to government we committed to address this problem and look at ways to better reduce gambling harm. A parliamentary committee chaired by the member for Dunkley, Peta Murphy, is underway and is due to report its findings soon. I have been following the committee with interest. The videos Peta Murphy has posted on Twitter of her relentless questioning of executives of large betting companies have been particularly informative and have contributed to exposing the disingenuous practices of those companies and exposing further the problems that surround gambling and gambling advertising in Australia.

That's why we need the committee process. It has looked not just at the small remit of this bill we are debating today but at the whole range of channels through which gambling advertising is consumed, both in a sporting context and elsewhere. It has also looked at other jurisdictions' actions to reduce harm in gambling advertising across physical platforms as well as in broadcasts and online. There are good models in Europe and other parts of the world that are worth looking at and which, of course, go a lot further and are a lot more thoughtful than what Senator Henderson has punted up here today.

Of course it's also worth pointing out that, after a decade of inaction and the coalition ignoring warnings of the harm being caused by the exploding online gambling industry, Labor has already begun to act. The Albanese government is strengthening classification of gambling-like features in video games, including loot boxes and simulated casino games, to help protect children from exposure to harmful gambling practices and developing concerning gambling habits.

The government has also committed to ban credit cards for online gambling. This is a sound policy that means people cannot spend money they don't have on online gambling platforms. It makes sense to me that, if you are gambling with credit, you likely shouldn't be gambling at all. I've heard some horror stories of Australians getting into serious trouble and serious debt by gambling with credit cards. This shouldn't be allowed to continue.

The government will also launch a national self-exclusion register known as BetStop. BetStop will allow Australians to actively exclude themselves from all online wagering and betting services in a single step for a minimum of three months and up to a lifetime. This is a huge reform which will allow Australians who recognise they have a problem with online gambling to take positive and tangible steps in protecting themselves from further gambling harm.

Ultimately this bill goes some of the way to reform the problems Australia faces with gambling advertising, but, given how pervasive and harmful the problems are which gambling advertising triggers, it doesn't do enough. Television and radio advertisements during sporting matches are only one element of a much larger issue of gambling advertising. The world has changed, and online advertising on social media and on our phones has to be seriously looked at, along with traditional advertising practices on TV and radio, and advertising on merchandising, in print and also in stadiums.

The government is committed to addressing this problem and the harm it causes. I know that the minister intends to move our own comprehensive reforms after the House inquiry into these issues reports back to parliament in a few weeks time. This strategy is formed by evidence, actually seeks to address the problem and will do more to protect Australians from gambling harm than Senator Henderson's piecemeal bill. The government wants to get gambling harm reduction right rather than support a knee-jerk reaction, which is why the government is not supporting the bill.