CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Mr KHALIL (Wills—Assistant Minister for Defence) (16:02): I've received a lot of correspondence from my constituents on one particular issue, and that's gambling reform. Many have shared their stories of how this scourge of gambling has ruined families and friendships and how they or a loved one had lost everything through gambling. Sadly, it's never been faster or easier for Australians to lose money in gambling.
We now outspend the citizens of every other country on online gambling. I've also heard from parents and teachers about how kids are talking in the schoolyard about the betting odds. One parent even let me know that there's a 16-year-old already gambling online at the high school he sends his kids to.
As a father, the effect that normalising gambling has on our kids hits particularly close to home and particularly hard. I love sitting down and watching the footy with the kids, but I absolutely hate that there's this inundation of gambling advertising when we're watching during the ad breaks. Before I entered this place, I worked as an executive at SBS and I was part of the team that removed gambling advertising during the A-League soccer games at half-time and before the game.
That was strong action at the time, and it was needed to reduce the harms caused by gambling advertising. Our government has proposed restrictions on gambling advertising that is particularly targeted towards preventing the normalisation of gambling amongst children. Our legislation does so by restricting gambling advertising to three per hour between 6 am and 8.30 pm, with no radio advertising during school pick-up and drop-off times.
These reforms represent the strongest national restrictions on gambling advertising that Australia has ever seen. I wish they had happened earlier, many years ago. But I don't think our work should end here.
I want to see these reforms being the best possible reforms going forward and being built upon. I want to see further action, not just for my kids but for the people I represent, and I'll keep pushing hard to achieve exactly that. Many of us were very good friends with the late Peta Murphy.
She was a wonderful person. She was a wonderful representative. She did some remarkable work on gambling reform and on gambling reform policy.
She fundamentally called on us to be ambitious in doing that work, and I think that's because she understood that not only do we owe it to our kids to be ambitious but also we owe it to our communities and we owe it to the Australian people we represent. With Peta's example, we need to get this reform done, get it through this parliament and build upon it in the coming years.