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

Mr KENNEDY (Cook) (16:46): There are four problems that remain in this bill. Firstly, the bill allows unlimited gambling advertising online. Secondly, the bill leaves predatory inducements untouched.

Thirdly, on social media, it allows personalised, repeated predatory advertising when no-one is watching. Lastly, it's missing any future review to look at the consequences of the bill on gambling harm victims, the media industry and sports codes. Australia has the highest gambling losses on planet Earth.

That means this government, our government, does the worst job on planet Earth of protecting vulnerable people from gambling harm. In the coalition, we believe in three principles: freedom of choice, protecting kids and protecting the vulnerable. We want to apply these three principles to the bill and to those four problems I just outlined.

I want to be very clear. No-one on our side, or even the other side, is talking about doing anything to how you can gamble. It has never been easier to gamble in anyone's lifetime.

You can gamble in question time. You can gamble in the party room. You can gamble in the bathroom.

All you need is your phone—and no-one is talking about doing anything to that. No-one on our side is even talking about banning gambling advertising. We're not even talking about banning the ads.

What we're talking about is protecting kids and vulnerable Australians from predatory advertising—with choice, not bans. It's just the advertising. I think it's very clear for the public listening to understand that.

I've socially punted, and I occasionally still do. So do many, many Australians. There's nothing wrong with that.

Anyone who socially punts knows that, over time, you lose, but you do it for entertainment. That's not what we're talking about. We are not talking about that at all.

What we're talking about is the parents of a young man I met, who read me a letter from him. The letter said he was walking down the beach, and he talked about the addiction he had and the pull he felt. He had to pull his phone out, even though he was walking with his girlfriend and their dog, and he talked about the shame and self-hate he felt to look at the phone, to look at the odds, to put on a bet at the beach with a woman he wanted to marry.

He talked about the shame he had that his mum had to take another job, in retirement, to pay off his gambling debts. And then his parents and his sister looked at me and cried when they told me he'd killed himself and that that was his suicide letter. That's what we're talking about.

What we're talking about is a young footballer with a gambling addiction, in his early 20s, who has a VIP manager looking after him—an older man, trying to be his mate. But this man is paid a percentage of what he gets this footballer to lose. The more he gets this footballer to lose, the more money this man takes home—performance pay.

And so what does this man do? He buddies up with this footballer. He asks him what drugs he wants—asks him if he wants cocaine.

He introduces him to the betting executives: 'Let's do a few lines with the CEO and the founder.' That's what we're talking about. We're talking about the man in my office who was given hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonus bets, to lose millions. He was told: 'If you turn over a million dollars in the next month, we'll give you this big chunk of bonus bets.' A man who loses his houses, his life and his livelihood—well, we're talking about the teacher I idolised at school.

I watched gambling take everything from that man, over 15 years. We're talking about protecting the vulnerable from advertising—that is it: the vulnerable, and kids. And it's surprising if anyone can disagree with that.

We're talking about watching the World Cup recently, where 850 kids from a local primary school in my electorate were watching Australia play Paraguay and 20 minutes before kick-off they see a bet365 ad where a talking head comes across the screen and walks them through the odds. This bothers me deeply, and I think it bothers millions of Australians deeply. We know that 80 per cent of people want to see fewer gambling ads.

Let's talk about the Prime Minister and his role in this legislation. For three years, the Prime Minister had the bipartisan Murphy report on his desk. He ignored it, day after day after day, for three long years.

When it came time to draft the legislation, the Prime Minister capitulated—he bent to the betting companies, to the sporting codes, to the tech giants. When he did that, he ignored ordinary Australians. He ignored those people I just talked about, that this legislation should be about.

These vested interests have lobbyists who walk the halls of this parliament, in and out of offices. But the people who don't have lobbyists are those kids at the primary school, that teacher I had, and the young man with his betting VIP manager who's getting paid a percentage of what they can make him lose. These people do not have lobbyists.

And this is the job of the Liberal Party. This is the job, I believe, of all elected representatives in this building. The Prime Minister tried to stop this bill going to a Senate review, personally.

He told the Senate and every Labor senator there to vote against the Senate review. They lost that vote, because the Liberals teamed up with the Greens. And that inquiry exposed exactly why scrutiny was needed.

What did we learn in this Senate inquiry that the PM didn't want us to hear? We learnt he didn't touch inducements. We learnt about these VIP predatory managers being paid on a percentage of losses or turnover and giving illegal drugs to people.

We learnt about the unlimited gambling advertising online. We also learnt that the department was unable to explain where the three ads an hour came from or the gambling broadcasting windows. Why couldn't his department, the elected officials, explain this?

Why? The Prime Minister then said, at this very dispatch box right in front of me, 'Take it or leave it.' His words were: This is a major step forward, and the parliament should vote for it. He went on to say: If they don't, then they do have the option of the status quo.

That's a threat unfitting of the office of Prime Minister—the threat of a small man, a schoolyard bully. Well, the Prime Minister has lost this public debate. Mr Giles interjecting— Mr KENNEDY: Well, he was—he was incredibly small and tried to bully this House and this chamber into accepting his substandard legislation.

I won't be lectured to about a man who stood here and told this whole parliament to take it or leave it. Do you think we should take it or leave it? Mr Giles: I think you should follow the rules of parliamentary debate.

Mr KENNEDY: Do you think we should have taken it and left that debate? That is indefensible. The scale of this problem should shock every member of the House.

It's $100 million a day that is lost—not gambled, lost. It's $100 million today and $100 million tomorrow. They are the highest losses on planet Earth.

ACMA—the only thing we're talking about is the ads—found that there were one million gambling advertisements aired across free-to-air television and metropolitan radio in a year, as well as more than half a million online. This advertising doesn't just tell people that gambling exists; it normalises it. It turns odds into part of the conversation with young kids at primary schools watching Australia versus Paraguay.

For gambling addicts, it can provide a trigger at precisely the wrong moment to put them back into the tailspin. The first loophole they left was unlimited gambling advertising. This legislation allows it during sporting events' scheduled and unscheduled breaks.

It's unlimited, all day, every day. Who drafted this? The Prime Minister needs to front up and ask those questions.

Who drafted that? Secondly, it completely ignored inducements. The late Peta Murphy was clear on this.

This is the temerity of this man, to try and lecture me and bully this parliament to ignore that, telling us, 'Take it or leave it,' after he left that out. Thirdly, it ignores social media that uses personalised data to repeatedly target people. It happens when no-one else is watching.

It happens when you're alone with your phone. All through my electorate, I see kids on their phones. The social media ban hasn't worked, and they can be targeted personally and repeatedly when no-one is watching.

The last thing I would say is that I commend the Labor members who stood up here today and spoke on this bill. I commend you for having the courage to do what not many do, which is talk about the need to go further, in spite of this prime minister, who tried to silence his backbench and silence his own party. I commend those Labor Party members because this is what this prime minister thinks democracy looks like: silencing his own party, trying to threaten the parliament—'Take it or leave it'—but he's been pushed into a humiliating backdown, a capitulation, because we're standing up for average Australians, and I commend those Labor Party members who are as well.

That is what the Prime Minister thinks of this democracy, and that's what he thinks of your role as a backbencher. He wants to shut you up, get you into line and not have you speak out—'Take it or leave it.' I welcome some things in this bill—to get gambling advertising off sporting uniforms and out of venues, restrictions on celebrities, stronger action on illegal offshore operators.

Those are genuinely good stuff that will address harm. But good measures in a bill that allows those loopholes don't work. I want to be clear.

We need a healthy, free-to-air television and journal television sector, a free press and a healthy free press. Because of that, I think we should look at removing what is a digital ID. They want to digitally ID every single person who logs into every single website—Facebook, Instagram, Claude, ChatGPT, Spotify, Kayo, Foxtel, Go, the Guardian, The Australian, the Daily Telegraph, you name it!

You're going to have to digitally ID yourself. It's a digital ID by stealth. Remove that.

There are 20 million customers who've got 7plus and 9now apps. Secondly, we need to prevent digital leakage. We can't have this leak away from Australian free-to-air providers to these tech social media giants.

We need to shut that down. If that means looking at an opt-in on the social media giant, so be it. Social media needs tighter advertising.

Thirdly, we need to pass a fair news media bargaining incentive to support the free press and support free TV. We should be looking at protection with AI companies for the copyright for journalists and free-to-air networks. We should look at the anticompetitive behaviours by Google on their adware and advertising platforms.

We need a healthy, free-to-air sector and free journalists and press sector. This should not, ultimately, be an argument between Left and Right. It shouldn't be an argument between people who gamble and those who do not.

It shouldn't be a contest to see which industry lobby can get the most meetings in Parliament House. This is about whether we are prepared to acknowledge the enormous harm that gambling advertising—just the advertising—can cause and if we can design laws that genuinely reduce the harm. We want the next generation to grow up loving sport without being taught to gamble on it.

We may not be able to undo the damage that gambling has already done to families in Australia, but I don't want the kids, those 10-year-olds at my local primary school, who were watching to see a Sportsbet ad and be walked through the odds before they're about to do it. Those 10-year-olds want to watch the Socceroos. They want to think about the players and have pride in this country, the green and gold.

They want to think about the score and the excitement of representing Australia, about how they might take that back to the football pitches in their local area or to their local teams. I don't want the first lesson, just before the game begins, to be about the odds on the game or on the first goalscorer or what you can do with a multi, and neither does the rest of Australia.

So, Prime Minister, stand up, grow a backbone and listen to Australia.