Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, National Self-exclusion Register (Cost Recovery Levy) Amendment Bill 2026
Ms BRISKEY (Maribyrnong) (10:46): There's no moment in an Australian football match you can't bet on: the result, the quarter, the margin, the next goal, the bloke who kicks it. The game has been carved up into markets the way a butcher works through a carcase, and every one of those markets is live while the ball is in the air. That didn't happen by accident and that didn't happen because we asked for it.
That was built deliberately by an industry that clocked how our sport could be the most efficient distribution network it could get its hands on. And that has cost the country a great deal more than money. For all the talk about apps and algorithms in this debate, gambling harm in Australia mostly wears the face of an adult: a man in his 50s who has not told his wife; a woman who has repaid the same debt three times over; someone who has lost a house, a business, a marriage or all three.
It was done quietly because the shame attached to this particular harm keeps people silent longer than almost anything else that we deal with in this place. They are not weak people. They are not stupid people.
They are people who have been sold a product engineered to take money from them by companies who measure success in exactly how much they can take. Every one of those stories begins in the same place—not with a bet, but with an advertisement. My community is home to two of the most iconic racecourses in the country: Flemington and Moonee Valley.
Between them they carry the better part of the Spring Racing Carnival, including the Melbourne Cup and the Cox Plate. On the first Tuesday of November, my community plays home to the race that stops the nation. The streets and businesses are buzzing, and a good many of my constituents either work the carnival or know someone who does.
Twenty years ago, having a punt on a race meant something fairly particular in this country. You had to go somewhere to do it. You had the space to make the choice: at the track or a TAB.
You'd queue on a Sunday morning. You'd put your money down and then you'd wait, sometimes the better part of a week, for a race that took about three minutes. And, when the race was run, that was the end of it.
Let's be clear: things have shifted substantially from being able to back a horse on cup day or have a punt on the weekend. The objection those of us have is what the betting industry has done to that tradition since. Australians didn't decide they wanted to bet more.
What changed is that the industry worked out that it no longer needed the racecourse or the queue or the weekend, and, once it didn't need any of it, it no longer needed to wait for us either. You used to have to go find it. Now it finds you.
Like the new cycle, it's 24/7. And, having found us, it went where the crowds were. If you go to the footy on the weekend, like many in my community do, you'll count the ads: the logos on the boundary signs; the odds on the big screen at half-time in front of 80,000 people; the odds read through the commentary by the same voice calling the play or by a beloved champion of the game, so the market and the match arrive in the same sentence; the sponsor on the ground, on the ticket, on the apparel; then the ad break and then another ad break; and on the phone in the hand of the bloke two seats down, who has not looked up for about a quarter and a half.
That's the quiet list, and it's non-stop. I think we can agree that it's not sport with advertising around it; it is a wagering product with a game of football inside it. So the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 goes after exactly the place it lives.
From 1 January next year, gambling advertising comes off television during all live sports within restricted hours and is capped outside them. It comes off the stadiums; it comes off the uniforms. Celebrities and athletes will no longer be able to lend their names to it, and neither will the influencers, because, when a young person is being sold a bet by someone they follow, someone they adore, someone they trust, they are not watching an advertisement; they're taking advice from a mate.
And it will come off the radio at school drop-off and pick-up, because those are hours we know children are captive in the back seat of the car, and this industry worked that out long before we did. But the ground and the broadcast are only the start of it, because most of this advertising now reaches kids and parents somewhere else entirely: on the phone in their pocket.
So the ban goes online—social media, news sites, streaming podcasts and search engines. And it will be up to the platforms to put these restrictions in place, because they, too, carry the responsibility. Any platform that will not put these restrictions in place will lose the right to carry gambling advertising altogether—at any hour, to any user.
This bill goes after the products that are online too. We are banning online keno, rapid draws, high frequency, high limits and $1,000 gone in just three minutes. That is pokies in your pocket, and there is no version of that that is safe.
We are also shutting down foreign-matched lotteries, which sell Australians a ticket in an overseas draw nobody overseas is obliged to honour. And we are closing the loophole on fake trade-promotion lotteries, schemes with no product behind them, which charity lotteries estimate have pulled more than $60 million out of the Australian charity sector in a single year.
That was money raised for people who need it. That brings me to the Australians this industry has already hurt and what we owe them. BetStop has helped more than 61,000 people shut the door on gambling since 2023.
That is 61,000 acts of courage. And this bill strengthens that register so that the moment somebody makes that decision, the marketing stops. That is the heart of this bill: backing Australians to make the choice about gambling that was never given to them when the industry ramped up its activities.
But only one in four Australians knows about BetStop. Among people who have placed a bet in the last 12 months, it's one in three. A service that saves lives is of no use to the person who hasn't heard of it, so this government will run a national campaign to fix it.
And we are moving on the illegal offshore operators who sit outside our consumer protections altogether. I've got two young daughters, aged 12 and nine. I've spoken about them before in this chamber, most recently when our government passed our world-leading social media reforms.
And I think of them during this debate, because we know young children, mostly teenagers, are the target. They're not being sold a bet. A nine-year old doesn't have money, and the industry knows that.
What is being built is an 18-year-old—one who already knows the brands, already knows the language and already believes that a wager is a part of watching their team play. Children are not collateral damage in this business model; they are a pipeline. A company can wait 10 years for a customer.
It will wait 10 years, unless this parliament stops it. That is the same principle that took this government to the minimum age for social media: when a company builds a business model off targeting children, we legislate to protect them. Peta Murphy's name has been, and will continue to be, invoked many times in this debate, and it should be.
She went after this industry with the same determination she brought to everything else that she cared about, and she did so whilst being very sick. I didn't get a chance to serve with Peta—I arrived after we lost her—but, like many in the Labor party, I had the great privilege of knowing her. In her first speech to this House, she told us that the hard things facing this country would require 'a willingness from all of us' to 'persist with complex debates' over sustained periods—certainly longer, she said, than any news cycle.
She did not believe reform arrived in a single piece because somebody had shouted loudly enough. She believed you kept at it. She said something else in that speech.
She said she wanted to belong to a generation of politicians who rejected the politics of division and who refused to treat the problems of our society as weapons to wedge political opponents. Peta was a proud Labor member who did this work inside a Labor government because she understood that is where things actually get done in this country. She persuaded members of every party in this place to sign up to tackle this issue.
That is who she was. She kept at it and she wanted to bring people with her. Anyone reaching for her report as a weapon on this debate has picked up the wrong end of it.
This reform may be culminating in Canberra, but it didn't start here. There are people right across my community who have been making this argument for years, long before it was in the headlines and long before I was elected. They've not been shy with me since—and I wouldn't have it any other way, because they are the reason a bill of this size is in front of this House at all.
Our government is taking gambling advertising off the TV during all live sport within restricted hours and capping it outside of them; taking it off the stadiums, off the uniforms, off the radio when kids are in the car; and banning it across every platform online, with any platform that won't comply losing the right to run the ads at all. Keno—gone; the lottery rackets—gone.
BetStop's being strengthened, with a national campaign to make sure people know it is there. This is the strongest action to tackle the harms of gambling that any government in Australia has ever undertaken. The Prime Minister has been clear that further reform is coming and has flagged amendments to the bill, and I welcome that.
At our party's national conference, rank and file members, including those in my local branches, put strengthening these protections in our party platform. I thank every one of them for doing that. It highlights our commitment as a movement to tackling this issue.
For most of our country's history, if an Australian wanted to have a bet they had to go and find one. This industry decided that they could find us instead: in our living rooms, in our sports stadiums, in our pockets and in the language our children now use about their own team. It did that without ever asking a single one of us whether we wanted it.
It did it because nobody had drawn a line and told it to stop. This bill, for the first time, draws that line. The bill will not undo what has already been done to the people in my community who have lost more than they can talk about.
Nothing this parliament passes today or any other day will give that back. But it does mean that the kid who saves up for a jumper is not wearing a betting company on their chest. It means that the family sitting down to watch their team is not being marketed to between every bounce.
It means that the next person who finds the courage to shut the door on something that is hurting them will not have it pushed back open by an advertisement they never asked to see. This is not inadequate. It is the biggest action an Australian government has taken in this area, and it marks the beginning of the work we do to arrest the significant harms of problem gambling.
This bill has been a long time coming, and there are Australians who can't afford to wait through another season of it. To those opposite and to the crossbench: I implore you to work with us in good faith to pass this legislation, so that the next generation grows up with a love of the game and nothing else. I commend the bill to the House.