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

Mr LAXALE (Bennelong) (18:17): Too often in Bennelong I meet families devastated by a business model treating gambling addiction as a source of profit. Before I was first elected, throughout my first term and since the last federal election, gambling reform has been an important ask of locals in Bennelong, rightly so. Like many in the Labor caucus, I've been working diligently since the day I was first elected to bring our government to this point.

Legislation before this House to bring the strongest gambling reform since Federation is being debated, and I have every hope that it will pass this parliament stronger than it is right now. As I said before the election, I was sick of seeing sport and gambling go hand in hand. The Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 seeks to break that link.

As I said after the election, gambling reform was unfinished business for this reforming Labor government. With this bill we seek to get progress that our communities have been crying out for, for some time. Beyond the statistics of gambling harm, the stories are gut wrenching.

Gambling harm is insidious and must be addressed. The bill we're debating today, late into tonight, is the strongest gambling reform brought to this parliament since Federation. It builds on the last set of gambling reform delivered by this very Labor government in our first term.

Despite the noise you might be hearing from our political opponents, this bill is another significant step being taken by this Labor government to protect Australians from gambling harm. It will protect children from gambling ads, it will break the link that currently exists between gambling and sports, and it will do much more, because it has to. Australians lost approximately $32.2 billion on legal gambling in the year 2023-24.

That's the highest per capita loss globally, at $1,521 per person. These losses have grown 26 per cent since 2018-19. That trajectory is heading the wrong way.

Pervasive wagering ads make it hard for people to distinguish between watching sports and betting on them—from kick-off odds to updates during breaks to social media and influencer promotions, all while children and vulnerable adults are watching. We should no longer accept that a 10-year-old cheering for their team should be marketed to by gambling companies.

This bill will end that. What surprised me over the discourse is that some antigambling advocates have claimed that this bill is equal to or worse than the status quo. I say to them that that is an absurd proposition.

Before us now is the option for Australian families who stream to remove gambling ads from their homes forever. That in itself is not worse than the status quo. That is reform and that is progress.

We on this side of the House know that progressive reform is always hard to achieve but is always worth fighting for. To those who claim that this reform is meaningless, I'll now take the House through the detail of this bill, because the detail matters. Schedule 1 introduces a legislative ban on wagering advertising during live coverage of sporting events across every platform, not just broadcast free-to-air television.

It bans gambling advertising on radio during school drop-off and pick-up times, when parents and kids are travelling together. Outside those windows, on broadcast television it caps the frequency of gambling ads to no more than three times in any 60-minute block, it bans wagering advertising on sporting uniforms and inside sporting venues and it bans athletes, celebrities and influencers from being used to promote wagering products.

We know influencers are being used to deliberately target kids and young men. That stops should this legislation pass this parliament. Critically, this bill extends the advertising regime online to social media, to news websites, to streaming platforms, to podcasts, to search, to Spotify.

If an online platform wants to keep showing wagering ads to Australians, the obligation is on that platform to keep those ads away from under-18s and from people who have opted out. If a platform cannot do that, the rule is simple: no ads at no time to anyone. That is the level of seriousness that this gambling problem demands, and that is the level of seriousness that this government has brought to this issue.

Then, of course, there's BetStop, the national self-exclusion register, which deserves particular attention in this debate. Since it launched in August 2023, BetStop has supported more than 63,000 Australians to exclude themselves from gambling. As of this year, more than 39,000 of those registrations remain active, meaning tens of thousands of Aussies are right now protected from the marketing and inducement tactics of an industry that would otherwise be chasing them daily.

But the statutory review of BetStop found something confronting: only one in four Australians knows that BetStop exists. Even amongst people who placed a bet in the last 12 months, awareness sits at only one in three. A self-exclusion register that two-thirds of active bettors have never heard of is not doing its job.

We want to see the community know that there are protections available for them and those who are vulnerable to addiction. This bill seeks to address that deficiency. It strengthens BetStop's legislative framework.

It improves clarity and the user experience and implements recommendations of that statutory review. And this government will back that up with a national awareness campaign, because a protection nobody knows about is a protection that cannot help anyone. In some aspects of the bill, it goes further than the Murphy review.

One of those is by banning online keno. These are basically pocket pokies—high-intensity gambling that stays with you 24/7 in your pocket on your person. We're outlawing foreign matched lotteries that just siphon money out of Australia with zero benefit to our community.

This bill also closes the loophole around fake trade promotion lotteries, where some operators dress up a straightforward lottery as a rewards club or trade promotion to dodge the consumer protections that genuine lottery providers in Australia are subject to. Australian charities estimate that these fake lotteries diverted more than $60 million away from the charity sector in 2024 alone.

That's $60 million that should have gone to causes Australians thought they were supporting. This bill closes that gap. I want to address something directly, because it goes to the heart of why this debate matters.

We have never pretended that this bill is the final word on gambling reform in this country. We have said from the outset that we would work with all members and senators in good faith to get gambling reforms legislated and to keep strengthening them as we go. We have listened throughout an extensive consultation process, and we've heard the community loud and clear on the issue of inducements.

Last week's Senate inquiry showed this parliament allegations of some of the most toxic versions of inducement conduct in this industry, and the government condemns those alleged actions in the strongest possible terms. Throughout this debate and these negotiations, none of us can walk away from that. We are working with the parliament right now to strengthen this bill further and to provide stronger protections for children and vulnerable Australians while striking the right balance.

We are focused on ensuring that this bill goes further on limiting the harm of inducements and on utilising and strengthening the great work that BetStop already does. I also want to take the time to acknowledge the Labor Party rank and file here too, because this issue has been a hot topic in branches right across the country and, of course, in Bennelong. It was their advocacy that saw the ALP platform recognise for the first time the heightened risk of gambling harm facing children and young people, and their advocacy committed our party to strengthening protections around inducements and much more.

This is what a broad party membership engaging with this issue looks like—a platform commitment borne out of years of advocacy from our own membership right across the country. I'm hopeful that the bill that leaves this parliament supported by both houses addresses much of what is in the Labor platform. That brings me to the point I want to leave this House with today.

This government is the only political force in this building that has actually done the work to get real change on gambling reform into legislation. We are the ones who announced this suite of reforms. We are the ones that ran the consultation and who sat down with the state and territory governments, with banking and payments providers with broadcasters, with digital platforms, with sporting codes, with racing organisations and with antigambling advocates to get these settings right.

We are the ones who have been in this chamber and in the Senate negotiating clause by clause in good faith to get this bill passed rather than talking about it. Every other voice in this debate has had the option to engage constructively, and I welcome every one of them who has. But it is this government, the Albanese Labor government, that has runs on the board in this space.

We have legislated the ban on credit cards for online wagering. We launch BetStop and will strengthen it. We legislated the restriction stopping gambling companies from accessing research-and-development tax concessions, and we have now brought forward the most significant suite of gambling advertising reforms that any Australian government has ever attempted to legislate.

There's too much at stake for this bill to fail, and we have made decisive action to ensure that children and those who are suffering from gambling harm are protected. We want to break the link between the sports we that love to watch and the pressure to bet on them. We want a future where we celebrate skill, teamwork and the joy of watching our friends compete at their best and not become obsessed with the odds on the corner of the screen.

This government has done the hard work. We have consulted and negotiated in good faith at every step, and this government will keep going, with further reforms still to come, because getting the balance right on gambling harm is not a once-off exercise. It's an ongoing responsibility.

The time for reform is long overdue. I commend this bill to the House.