Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of Senator Pocock's motion. I think that this is a fantastic motion. Gambling is a cancer in this country. Australia has the highest gambling losses of any country in the world. While I've got nothing against going to the race track on the odd Saturday and having a bit of a flutter, when you've got people who are addicted to poker machines, sports betting or the track that is not healthy.

If I could make one amendment to Senator Pocock's motion, it's that lobbyists should also disclose not only who their clients are but how much they're being paid. I would love to know the sort of coin these lobbyists are on. I've heard some pretty big figures being thrown around. I can't verify it because it's all smoke and mirrors. They talk about the banality of evil. The fact is that we actually let these lobbyists in.

When I say 'these lobbyists', I want to be careful. I know the isolated children's fund come down here. They're volunteers. They're good people. When I'm referring to 'lobbyists', I'm referring to paid lobbyists who basically have vested interests or are rent seekers seeking to milk the taxpayer and seeking to take advantage of vulnerable people when they milk the taxpayer. So I say to those good people who come here and fight for good causes that I'm not talking about you. I know that most of you guys are volunteers and are trying to get funding for cancer projects and things like that. That's all good. I'm talking about the big companies and things like that where they actually have an entire government relations department and they're constantly trying to manipulate laws or whatever to suit their agenda.

I think that this is a fantastic motion. I notice Senator Allman-Payne across the chamber. She's also from Queensland. We're both from small towns: Chinchilla and Cardwell. We're old enough to remember that when we grew up in our in our home state we didn't have poker machines, but we had maternity wards and we had very good and much better essential services than we do today. When Wayne Goss brought in poker machines in 1990, that was the start of the rot. To his credit, the former Labor Premier admitted that it was the biggest mistake he made. Ironically enough, it was the unions and Labor who actually wanted those poker machines brought in. But I can tell you that there is nothing good about those filthy, stinking one-armed bandits, and the sooner that they are taken out of clubs and pubs the better. I'm not against having a few of them in a casino. If you want to bring in some high-roller foreigners and milk them dry, go for it. But don't destroy the lives of families. That's what gambling does. I've always been outspoken on this, even when I was in the Liberal Party. I've crossed the floor on this before. I've crossed the floor with the Greens on this issue. Gambling destroys lives and it destroys families. Families have lost everything because one particular person has been addicted to poker machines or some form of gambling.

I can only think that online gambling is even more insidious, because you don't even have to leave your home to go to the pokies or whatever. It is the same for sports betting. Seriously, can we just not sit down and watch sport without having Sportsbet coming on at half time giving us these odds for who is going to score the first try or a 10-point head start or whatever? I just look at this and think, 'Is there no morality left in anything anymore?' I remember Alan Kohler on the ABC used to do the economics report. It must have been around the early 2000s when there was a sudden jump one quarter in the GDP and it was effectively because online gambling had been allowed to come on. Of course, economists being the economists that they are, don't actually distinguish between good spending and bad spending. They just add everything up and say, 'We've got a growing economy.' But that is how insidious gambling is in this country.

We need to make it as hard as possible for people who are addicted to gambling to gamble. We do not need to be advertising it online for sport. A lot of us want to sit down with our children and watch the game on a Friday night. We don't want to see that on our televisions. And believe you me, it doesn't matter how you start—whether you start on sport or you start on a cockroach—some people get their losses and think that they can make it up. I can't tell you the percentage, but it might be one per cent or two per cent, but it makes a big difference to their lives. There are plenty other things to do. Go out and ride the pushbike or go for a swim or go for a run or go for a bushwalk. There are plenty of other things to do than get addicted to gambling.

I commend Senator Pocock for pushing this issue and I commend him for the fact that he's calling out the lobbyists, the rent-seeking lobbyists—I'll define them from the good guys—who are basically pushing this. Shame on the Labor Party, who should actually pretend to care about the workers and the people on lower incomes. If Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, was serious about actually fighting for the workers and fighting for people on the margins, he would kill online gambling and advertising for gambling stone cold dead.