Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the explanation given by Senator Wong on the request in relation to interactions and discussions that the Prime Minister may or may not have had with the big corporate sporting codes in relation to gambling. And I concur with my Senate colleague Senator Pocock: it is not good enough.

The reason why this information is not being given to the Senate and, therefore, made available to the Australian people is that the government doesn't want you, as members of the public, to know just how cosy the Prime Minister and the government have become with those who want to keep gambling ads in place—despite the fact that the majority of Australians, over and over again, whenever they are asked, say they do want a proper restriction on gambling ads. Australians say yes, they're sick of them. They're sick of gambling ads infiltrating their homes through the television. They're sick of gambling ads infiltrating their phones and their devices. They're sick of wondering, when they sit their kids down in front of the television to watch Bluey on YouTube, whether they're going to be bombarded with gambling ads. They're sick of having to explain to their children what 'odds' and 'bets' mean when they're watching their favourite football team on a Saturday afternoon.

This government promised to act on the recommendations of the Peta Murphy report to stop the harmful advertising of the harmful product of gambling, and the government continues to fail. This week we've heard explanations from the minister and from the government that they're still consulting. Yet, when we ask for the information about conversations and what form of interaction that consultation may be taking, we get told, 'Nothing to see here; we're not showing you.' In fact, what we do know about the consultations that this government has run in relation to gambling reform is that they made the people they met with, in the official consultations, sign NDAs. That's how desperate this government is at keeping all of this secret. So it doesn't matter whether we're talking about the Prime Minister or the Prime Minister's staff and their diaries or whether we're talking about the official consultation process run by the minister and her department, it is secret, secret, secret. It's kept out of the view of the public. And we're being asked, as a parliament, to just accept that and say that it's okay. Well, it's not.

The Australian community deserve to know what is being planned, why the government has gone weak and when the government will be upfront about their plans to fix this insidious business model that the gambling lobby has, where they push these ads into our homes and onto our kids' phones and devices, grooming our children to be problem gamblers. If you can't stand up to the groomers in the gambling industry, who are you going to stand up to? It might have something to do with taking those hundreds of thousands of dollars of donations from the gambling lobby—the people making money from grooming our kids. It's disgusting, and you want to keep it secret.