Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, National Self-exclusion Register (Cost Recovery Levy) Amendment Bill 2026

Ms BOELE (Bradfield) (13:04): We know the statistics, and they're frightening. Australia has less than one per cent of the world's population but 18 per cent of its poker machines. We gamble the highest amount per capita globally, and we lose more money per person to gambling than any other country on Earth.

How much money? Well, together, Australians have lost over $107 billion to gambling since July 2023, which is when the Murphy review, the landmark government report into gambling harm prevention, was tabled—$107 billion. That's $35 billion lost a year.

Now, $35 billion a year is more than the government spends on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, more than it spends on childcare subsidy and more than it spends educating our children in schools. What are the consequences of all of these losses? As many as 20 per cent of the suicides in Australia are caused by gambling harm.

About one in seven Australian adults experience gambling related harms every year—that's more than three million Australians—and 18- to 24-year-old gamblers are nearly twice as likely to experience harm. These facts and figures are high level and they could be abstract, but they speak to the thousands and thousands of individual stories. We've all heard these stories; they're everywhere.

Most of us have people in our families or our social circles who are struggling with gambling. Here's what I've heard from some people in my electorate, from constituents, over the past year: a father who describes being constantly and incessantly bombarded with online gambling advertisements while watching sport, whether online or on TV—he describes this as 'bordering on harassment' and feels that his children are being targeted; a constituent who calls gambling 'Australia's gun problem'; an older constituent who grew up in a family unable to buy food because of the father's addiction to betting on horses, and who sees gambling today as even more pervasive; a teenager who, because of the ban on social media for under 16s, now watches more TV and sees even more gambling advertising than ever before; a parent who describes intense and repeated exposure to gambling promotions while watching cricket with their kids, and the fear that this normalises gambling for very young children; and a constituent who describes watching young men at an AFL match paying more attention to their online gambling than to the game being played right there before their eyes.

I could go on, but it's almost too painful to do so. These stories do not reflect individual weaknesses; they are the result of a predatory industry taking advantage of weak regulation over a highly addictive product. They are the result of systemic issues which this bill claims to fix.

The government says that these laws are an attempt to break the connection between wagering and sport, and to minimise the exposure of vulnerable people to gambling advertising. The Prime Minister himself says that kids should grow up thinking that gambling and sport are different things, that they're not the same thing—and he's right. But he's wrong when he claims that this bill will achieve that admirable goal.

How do I know this? Because over 1,000 days ago, his former colleague the late Peta Murphy handed down a report called You win some, you lose more. That laid out, in comprehensive detail, all the things that the government should be doing to break that connection between wagering and sport.

This bill falls far, far short of those recommendations. What does the bill do? On advertising, it makes some changes.

It bans TV ads during live sport between 6 am and 8.30 pm. Outside sport, it caps ads to three hours per day. It bans athlete, celebrity or influencer promotion of gambling, and it bans ads in stadiums and on jerseys.

These are welcomed steps forward, but they're small steps. They're too small, because gambling ads continue around these limited restrictions. A partial ban does little to address them.

The Murphy report clearly found that partial bans just don't work. Let me read out exactly what was said in that report: A phased, comprehensive ban on all gambling advertising on all media—broadcast and online, that leaves no room for circumvention … Well, these new laws leave plenty of room for circumvention—three hours per day, every 20 minutes. That's still a lot of ads, and there are more gaps.

Advertisers will find ways around partial TV bans and aggressively market their products on social media, for instance. That's what tobacco companies did, and gambling companies will simply repeat that playbook. Then there are, of course, streaming platforms, where most Australians now watch their sport.

This new bill will require platforms to have an opt-out function to allow people to self-select out of gambling ads. But that's not good enough. It's not good enough for governments to defer responsibility to families and children, to make them do the work of avoiding gambling ads and harm.

We know that the opt-out model only works if people know it exists, if they know how to change their settings and if they're motivated to change them. I want to tell the House about organ donations. The top deceased-donor countries in the world for organ donations per million in population are Spain, the United States, Portugal, Belgium and Croatia.

What do all these countries have in common? A presumed consent to donate. For these countries, donation rates are as high as 50 per cent.

By contrast, here in Australia, where people need to change their default settings from 'no, I'm not an organ donor' to 'yes, I want to be an organ donor', that rate is just 20 per cent. One example closer to home is that, when the SBS introduced an opt-out feature for gambling advertising on its streaming services, it was reported that only 0.2 per cent of active subscribers used that option over almost two years.

We see this across a very broad range of public policy areas. People very rarely change their default settings, and, as gambling-harm prevention expert Professor Samantha Thomas wrote in her submission to the Senate inquiry, 'young people and parents should not be expected to navigate sophisticated commercial marketing systems to continuously identify and block novel gambling promotions'.

The government's own impact analysis assessed that a full advertising ban would deliver twice greater net public benefit than a partial ban and at half the administrative cost. Our kids just really shouldn't be forced to endure the flood of ads. This bill does reduce that flood or that flow a little bit, but it's still not enough.

Ads teach kids that the only way to enjoy sport is to throw money at it, but gambling is not a normal part of sport. Professor Thomas poses an excellent question: if gambling promotions are deemed harmful enough to be removed from stadiums and players uniforms, then why are they still acceptable across other forms of media that children consume daily? These inconsistencies, to me, don't make sense, and that's because I think they simply aren't about logic and rationality.

They're about caving to corporate pressure over and above the public interest—free tickets to AFL and NRL games, to the Australian Open and to the Melbourne Cup, and direct access to politicians through the parliamentary sports club. That corporate pressure was enough to ensure that the other key recommendations of the Murphy review were left out of this bill altogether, like a ban on inducements, where gamblers are encouraged or even rewarded with free money to keep gambling.

Inducements are abhorrent, and they drive compulsive gambling and target our most vulnerable. Another way that this bill fails and where I feel that the policy makers from the government have caved to that pressure is that there's nothing here about a national gambling regulator, a national watchdog that is solely responsible for all licensing and regulation and is tasked with reducing gambling harm.

Without a national regulator, we cannot have consistent monitoring and enforcement. It's just not possible. Any changes to the law will only be effective if they're supported by strong national oversight.

As submissions to the inquiry have explained, there is already evidence of the gambling industry engaging in regulatory shopping across state and territory borders. The NT racing commission has become a de facto regulator because it offers the lowest taxes and the least stringent regulation. It's just simply unacceptable.

This process has been flawed from the start. We've had to wait over 1,000 days to get the government response to the Murphy review, and then that response was released on the afternoon of budget night, when the nation's political journalists were quite literally locked up in Parliament House without their laptops and phones so they couldn't properly report on it.

Then the response and the legislation that followed were grossly inadequate, but that's not all. The consultation process on the new legislation was flawed. Some gambling-harm prevention stakeholders were invited with less than 24 hours notice, and then that consultation was short and crowded, without opportunities to meaningfully engage and to raise concerns.

The department has been unable to provide evidence for multiple parts of the bill, which diverges from the recommendations of the Murphy report, and the likelihood is that they can't. They can't, because there is no solid evidence. The Murphy review was the solid evidence, and this bill just doesn't stack up.

These decisions, in my opinion, are purely political. They're about serving corporate interests and protecting party revenue provided by the gambling industry. The government says that what it's doing is sensible and is landing somewhere in the middle between the two opposing sides and entrenched views.

But when one of those sides is the gambling lobby and the other side is people who are dying because of gambling addictions, landing in the middle does not make sense whatsoever. The sensible centre is arbitrary when it comes to issues like gambling, where the choice is clear between public harm mitigation and corporate profit because four in five Australians support a ban on gambling ads, and there's major support across all voting intentions.

The government needs to listen to this public opinion and be brave to stand up for Australians and to keep them safe. It has an opportunity here to do that by improving these laws before they are passed. The crossbench will not waive this bill through in its current form.

We will keep pushing for what Peta Murphy actually recommended in that report—a total ban on gambling advertising, regardless of whether it's delivered online or broadcast on platforms. At the very least, and I mean at the very least, the government should change the opt-out requirement for online ads to opt in. That would mean that people wouldn't see ads unless they actively choose to.

I'll be moving an amendment to that effect. The crossbench want the government to implement all 31 recommendations of the Murphy report in full. We want a national regulator.

We want a ban on inducements, and we have proposed a raft of amendments to make that happen. But watch the government. They'll try to ignore them all or try and find some middle ground for what is clearly never going to happen when people are literally dying in Australia from harm and addiction from gambling.

But with your help, we can keep the pressure on and make this bill the strongest that it can be.