MATTERS OF PUBLIC IMPORTANCE
Ms BOELE (Bradfield) (16:03): We all know the statistics, but they bear repeating. Australians, per capita, lose more money to gambling than any other country on Earth—$31.5 billion a year—and as many as 20 per cent of suicides in Australia are caused by gambling. A 2023 study found that nearly three-quarters of Australian adults had gambled in the last 12 months, and, of those, almost half were classified as being at some risk of gambling harm.
Australia, we have a gambling problem. But the good news is that we know a simple, practical step to tackle that, and that is banning gambling advertising. Why do I say that it's simple and practical?
It's straightforward to implement, we've done it before with tobacco advertising, and it works; it's been effective in Spain, and the bans have now also been put in place in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany. It's politically easy and would sail through parliament, because the Australian public overwhelmingly, at a rate of 76 per cent, support a total ban on gambling advertising.
Yet here we are. Well over two years after Peta Murphy achieved the near-impossible, a multipartisan consensus on a total ban on gambling advertising, and nearly six months since the Albanese government's landslide 94-seat victory in this federal election, it has still not occurred. It's confounding.
The usual approach, which is to tell the most harrowing, damaging, tragic tales of gambling harm, is not working. Those stories have been told. The government has been begged by grief stricken families repeatedly, but nothing changes, so today I thought I'd reorient the discourse.
A few weeks ago, as mentioned by the member for Calare, we were lucky enough to hear, in this place, from one of Australia's most beloved cricketers, Usman Khawaja. Along with families of people who had lost loved ones to the damaging impacts of gambling and survivors who had managed to escape its clutches, Usman told us about two other impacts which aren't usually discussed as frequently, although constituents in Bradfield have written to me about the first of these.
The first is about the impact gambling has on our children's experience of sport. Everyone knows that gambling ads saturate television and online coverage of games. Kids these days are as likely to know the odds of their favourite player scoring the first try in a rugby league match as they are to know how many tries he's scored in that season or how many premierships her team has won.
Sport and gambling have become inextricably linked. Is this how we want children and families to experience sport in this country? Sport has been a core part of Australian identity for all our lifetimes, and it's such a positive part of our identity, teaching, as it does, lessons of hard work, perseverance, teamwork, health, fitness, achievement and much more.
Do we now want something so positive and so wholesome to be correlated with something as negative and destructive as gambling? Anyone who's watched a football game on commercial television, caught up with the basketball highlights on YouTube or gone to the pub with friends to watch the T20 cricket match is all too familiar with the pervasiveness of gambling advertising.
Sport should be for sport's sake, not to make a quick buck or get a quick added thrill by placing a cheeky bet. The second, less discussed aspect of harm created by gambling is that experienced indirectly by our athletes. Usman explained that athletes can be targeted by punters who have lost money on matches the punters have gambled on.
In some instances, athletes are targeted and even doxxed when large gambling losses are suffered and the punters blame the athlete. Clearly this impacts the wellbeing of athletes and is an unnecessary condition to the scrutiny that they are already under and the stress that they already experience. I raise these issues that Usman raised for an important reason.
The horrific stories that we're used to hearing about the impacts of gambling—family breakdowns, ruined careers, suicide and bankruptcy—are, apparently, not cutting through. How many victims do we have to drag through this place, having them retell their harrowing stories and retraumatising them, before something is done? We have the landmark Murphy report, and we have a public crying out for action, but there is nothing.
There is no action from this government. The stories of heartbreak and loss apparently do not move the members that comprise this government, so maybe stories of kids now linking sport with gambling and its negative impacts on athletes will. The crossbench will keep up the fight on this—the government can bet on it.