CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Ms McKENZIE (Flinders) (09:48): There are plenty of fun ways to lose your money on the Mornington Peninsula. For example, you could buy a boat, you could take up golf—or you could put your money through one of our 765 poker machines. Last financial year, locals and visitors lost more than $90 million on poker machines on the Mornington Peninsula.

That's around $250,000 every day. That's money not going to pay down the mortgage. It's not filling the tank.

It's not feeding the family. It's not being invested in a new business nor being put away for retirement. And, importantly, these figures do not capture every bet placed by phone, by every online account or by every person being bombarded with offers to have 'just one more punt', which would amount to tens if not hundreds of millions of lost dollars—more.

Now, I'm all in favour of a flutter. There's nothing like the thrill of a bet with the bookies at the Balnarring races or the marvel of backing a winner in the Mornington Cup in autumn. It's part of the Australian culture, and it's part of our fun.

But for many of my fellow residents in Flinders there is no fun when it comes to gambling. There is misery, there is fear, there is addiction, there are lies and obfuscation to the people we love, there is theft, there is elder abuse, there is family breakdown, there is domestic violence, and, for some, there is homelessness. Today the incentive and the cultural pressure to gamble, particularly for boys and men, has reached epic proportions, largely pushed via the algorithmic firehose online.

Betting advertising has become almost impossible to avoid. When I visited schools with Daniel Principe, an advocate for flourishing men and boys, he asked a large group of young men from year 7 to year 9, 'Who amongst you has seen gambling advertising in your social media feed in the last week?' And every single hand went up. We should not accept that a generation of Australian children will grow up thinking that gambling is simply part of sport, part of their adolescence or part of their journey into adulthood.

I recently joined former prime minister John Howard and my parliamentary colleagues in signing an open letter to the government to demand stronger action on gambling advertising. It pointed to research estimating that around 600,000 Australian children aged 12 to 17 are gambling already, spending approximately $18 million a year. Think about that.

They're children—not adults making an informed decision to have a punt. The late Peta Murphy, my first parliamentary neighbour on the Mornington Peninsula, did important bipartisan work on gambling harm. We owe it to her—to her force and determination in this place—as well as to the much missed intellect of the former members for Menzies and Hughes and to all Australian families to take this issue seriously and to act with impact.