Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, National Self-exclusion Register (Cost Recovery Levy) Amendment Bill 2026
Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (17:14): This is a line-in-the-sand moment, a day on which the Australian government can decide to act with integrity in the best interest of all Australians or continue to serve the best interests of its donors, lobbying groups, sporting codes and media organisations. Unfortunately, the signs at this point are that the Albanese government is going to cave yet again to its friends in the NRL and AFL—the same vested interests that gifted members in this place about $245,000 of free tickets to sporting events in the last two years alone.
Three years ago, every member of the Murphy inquiry agreed on 31 steps to protect Australians from gambling harm. In the thousand days since the Murphy report was delivered, the Albanese government has blown an opportunity for legacy reform. Today is possibly its last chance to redeem itself on what has become a defining issue for this government—1,000 days of inaction, 1,000 days of harm, $104 billion in gambling losses, countless lives lost to suicide.
Australians have the sad distinction of being the biggest per capita gambling losers in the world—$32 billion a year. About 40 per cent of that comes from people who are experiencing significant gambling harm. One in seven Australians experiences some gambling related harm every year.
That's more than three million Australians annually. Almost 70 per cent of high-risk gamblers suffer behavioural or mental health issues. One in six experiences suicidal thoughts.
Young Australians aged 18 to 24 are nearly twice as likely to experience that harm. We have created a generation for whom a 'multi' is as normal as a pie and chips at the footy. Close to 200,000 Australian children are exposed to moderate or serious levels of parental gambling harm every year.
Australians are being preyed on by an industry which is actively seeking to do them harm, whose model depends on normalising gambling behaviour from as young an age as possible, and that industry is being aided and abetted by a complicit government, which has furiously resisted attempts to make it act on this emerging crisis. Earlier this year, I introduced a private member's bill to have gambling harms addressed through a public health framework, because gambling harm deserves to be treated with the same rigour and resourcing as the harm that results from tobacco and alcohol.
But the government wouldn't debate that bill. The legislation now before the House is a sad and sorry reflection of what happens when good policy, developed with experts and with those with personal experience, gets systemically subverted by donors, by lobbyists and by vested interests. We have a bill which fails to ban advertising on streaming services—in fact, it could increase.
It includes a pathetic—sorry, 'partial'—ban on broadcast media. We have a bill which completely ignores the issue of inducements, advertising and direct messaging, which can involve offers of free cash, same game multi bets, bonus bets, sign-up offers and rewards programs. Gambling companies use inducements to go after individuals who they know are at risk.
They do everything in their power to get them back. Witnesses told the Murphy inquiry that, even after they'd self-excluded from one operator, they still received inducements from other operators or from affiliates, who receive a trailing commission on those referrals. In Victoria, we have a coronial inquest currently investigating the suicide of a young man who was offered 500 inducements over four years.
Further, last week's Senate inquiry heard of people who were offered free accommodation, $50,000 in bonus bets, free flights to sporting events, escorts, drugs—whatever they want. Inducement marketing, like cashback offers, creates a perception among young people that gambling doesn't carry any risk. They're influenced by celebrity endorsements from former sports stars, people who they admire, who are offering same game multis and bonus bets.
They find themselves going down a rabbit hole. Inducements are a cynical tactic. They are used by predatory gambling companies against the most vulnerable.
They are disproportionately targeting and disproportionately affecting problem gamblers. The communications minister has tried to argue that the self-exclusion register, BetStop, offers a way for people to avoid inducements, utterly unconvincingly. I have heard from constituents who are registered with BetStop that those affiliates keep contacting them even though they've signalled that they want to stop gambling.
Many companies have breached BetStop. Entain breached it more than 500 times and was not penalised for doing so. The Australian Communications and Media Authority has repeatedly documented breaches of the code and the harm that has resulted from them.
We've banned tobacco companies from using promotions to recruit new smokers. We restrict the way that alcohol is marketed. But this government allows gambling companies to entice Australians with incentives specifically designed to increase gambling losses and harm, and inducements are only one example of how this bill falls short.
The transition arrangements of the bill allow uniform and venue contracts entered into before the bill's introduction to continue until 31 December 2031. So those entities which have entered new gambling related sponsorship and branding arrangements—codes like the NRL, with its recent $5.3 billion deal—will benefit from a grandfathering period of more than five years.
That is a very generous gift to the NRL from the Australian Labor Party, a party which also recently gave the NRL $600 million for an expansion team in PNG. The close friendship between this government and the NRL reflects a level of generous support which is sadly lacking from the government's attitude to problem gamblers in this country. It is a travesty.
The transition period should protect genuine existing agreements, not provide a pathway for generous agreements entered into while the Albanese government has dithered and delayed its response to the Murphy report. Let's talk about what else is missing from this bill. If the government were serious about gambling reform, it wouldn't allow our biggest sporting codes—professional organisations that partner with the predatory gambling advertising industry in various ways with varying degrees of transparency—to continue to receive taxpayer subsidies and pay no tax on tens of millions of dollars in gambling revenue.
It's estimated that the AFL receives as much as $40 million every year from betting agencies. Five AFL clubs are still sponsored by gambling companies. The NRL receives an estimated $50 million from gambling companies.
All NRL clubs are sponsored by gambling companies. Between them, Australia's two largest sporting codes receive approximately $90 million every year directly from the gambling industry. Cricket Australia and the Victoria Racing Club are in the same camp.
None of them pay any income tax on the profits of their gambling income, but the VRC reportedly uses some of that tax-free income and donates it back to the political parties. It is a very cosy arrangement, and it is possible because, under section 50-45 of the Income Tax Assessment Act 1997, sporting organisations are not-for-profit entities exempt from assessable income tax.
This concession recognises that sporting organisations exist to promote participation in sport. We grant them an income tax exemption because they are assumed to exist for the public benefit. But many of these same organisations derive tens of millions of dollars from their commercial arrangements with a predatory industry whose business model relies on harm, loss and addiction.
The AFL's turnover last year was over $1.2 billion. The NRL's was $845 million. The Victoria Racing Club's was $225 million.
That income is derived from profitable commercial relationships with betting companies, which means that in a cost-of-living crisis, with three million Australians harmed every year from gambling, the Australian government is happy for taxpayers to subsidise professional sporting organisations as they profit from commercial relationships with an industry that harms those taxpayers and hurts the sporting codes' supporters.
We don't even know the scale of this relationship. While some direct sponsorship arrangements are disclosed, there's no comprehensive public reporting of gambling related income, so Australians don't know how much revenue the AFL, the NRL, Victoria Racing Club, Racing Australia and other codes receive from clipping the ticket on every bet placed by supporters—from betting sponsorships, wagering partnerships, integrity agreements, gambling advertising, product and data fees, electronic gambling machines and other commercial and broadcasting arrangements.
Although we've given these codes tax-free status, we have no insight into their sources of income. I will be moving amendments to this bill to deliver reporting obligations on professional sporting organisations with a turnover in excess of $50 million. It's not on the local cricket or netball club but on those billion-dollar sporting codes.
Those organisations will be required, under the Interactive Gambling Act, to report, every financial year, on their tax-free revenue from gambling sources. It's not their broader income base but their income from gambling. That is the money that is coming straight out of the pockets of their supporters and which they are receiving tax free.
To enforce compliance with this reporting obligation, I'm proposing a 1,000-penalty-unit fine for failure to disclose gambling revenue. If this government were actually open, as was recommended by the Murphy report, to creating an independent national gambling regulator, then that should be the entity to enforce this reporting. The amendments will not remove the tax concession of professional sporting codes.
They would simply ensure that Australia's largest tax-exempt sporting organisations are subjected to a semblance of public accountability and reporting standards for the millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies that they receive. Looking forward, we need the government to tax gambling related income from those codes. The sporting codes should no longer be subsidised by the taxpayer on the income that they get from gambling companies.
If the sporting organisation chooses to profit from gambling, a predatory industry, then those profits should be taxed like any other income. Earlier this year, the government introduced a bill to remove the tax incentive for the research and development of gambling. It recognised then that taxpayer money shouldn't subsidise the gambling industry.
The member for Griffith said, 'Public resources should not be subsidising gambling related activities.' The member for Maribyrnong said, 'Taxpayers should not be subsidising activities that entrench addiction.' The Assistant Treasurer said that the legislation was about 'not subsidising activities relating to gambling'. I agree with that principle, but we shouldn't stop at subsidies provided as research and development tax incentives.
We shouldn't say that taxpayers shouldn't subsidise gambling on one hand while allowing Australia's wealthiest sporting organisations to receive tens of millions of dollars in tax-free gambling income on the other. All of these issues point to political parties which are beholden to the interests of the gambling industry over the interests of the community. The Labor Party received more than $4 million in gambling donations over the last five years, including $1.5 million at the last election.
The Liberal Party was about the same. In the lead-up to the Voice referendum campaign, Shaquille O'Neal visited Australia. His visit to Australia was part of an advertising campaign for the Australian online gambling company PointsBet, but he had an opportunity to meet with the Prime Minister privately, ostensibly to talk about the Voice referendum.
Is it a coincidence that one of PointsBet's significant shareholders is an individual who made significant individual donations of $315,000 to the Victorian Labor Party in both the 2022 and 2025 elections? Did Shaq get that private chat with the PM because he's a long-term supporter of the Voice? Did he get it because he's a banging basketball player, or did he get it because his sponsors from the gambling industry were major donors to the Labor Party?
We need to reform the Commonwealth Electoral Act to ban political donations from predatory industries so that Labor's next election isn't funded off the back of everyday punters and Australians with a gambling addiction. We need better, robust political donation laws. We need to ensure that prediction markets around the electoral system are snuffed out, and we need a national lobbying act so that the major parties' relationships with lobbyists can finally be regulated.
When this bill is passed, Australians will be told that this government did enough. Let me tell you now: it's not enough, and this is not the end of the line for this issue.