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

Mr BURNS (Macnamara) (09:29): The former member for Dunkley, Peta Murphy, was a great friend of mine. In fact, she liked to tease me from time to time. When I was giving speeches in this place, if I didn't focus on the material, she used to call it 'story time with Josh', and only Peta could distil it down to that in such a great way.

But I will try not to have 'story time with Josh', Peta. I will try and do your incredible report justice. I want to start my speech by paying tribute to Peta Murphy, who, through the work of a committee report, has left an incredible legacy.

All of us in this place feel a sense of responsibility and a sense of duty to honour Peta, and I know the minister, who is next to me, feels that deeply. She also was a great friend of Peta's. We miss Peta very much and we will continue on with the work she has left us—and that can't be said of every member of parliament—via a committee report.

This parliament feels so strongly about the work that was done in that committee report, and that shows the intellectual bravery that Peta Murphy brought when she came into this place to this and her skill as a parliamentarian. We miss her very much. The toxic relationship between gambling and sport is one that, frankly, every single member of this place understands we need to do something about it.

The way in which it has really ingrained itself in the culture of sport in this country has meant that not only is there a cultural aspect of it but also a reliance on it, There is a toxic reliance on gambling—on gambling advertising, on this cycle of companies looking to target the most vulnerable people who are susceptible to their advertising, and sporting codes and organisations who are reliant on the money that gambling produces.

Football clubs, with their pokie licences; commercial television; local sporting clubs; stadiums—it is everywhere. There will be repercussions from this bill. This is not a bill where there aren't going to be any consequences in making the changes that we are putting forward in this bill.

This will have an impact and it is real, but we have to do it. We have to break this nexus and this connection between gambling advertising and sport. When I think about my eight-year-old daughter, who loves the Carlton Football Club—that is one of the proudest things that I have been able to impart on her.

We watch games together; I love watching the footy with her. And then you see the ads pop up—the multies, the betting, the celebrity endorsements—and you think, 'What is going to be left inside this child's mind about what she is actually watching?' It should be all about the game, not about the odds. We need to do something about that and that is what this bill does.

Unfortunately, it is not easy. The number of reforms that we have in this bill—I'm going to run through them in a moment—is significant. And, like every piece of legislation where we sit down with people across the parliament and we work out how we're going to pass it through the Senate, I know there has been a huge amount of work done by the minister and members in this place.

Hopefully, it will be a great moment where we can make significant changes to improve the situation where gambling isn't investing in our sport and our TV channels. I also want to mention a bit of history. The closest example of what we're trying to do here is when our country got rid of tobacco advertising.

Actually, if you look at the timeline of how long it took for us, as a country, to take out tobacco advertising, it was significant. The first health warnings in Australia about tobacco were introduced in 1973. There was a radio advertising ban on tobacco three years later, in 1976.

Australia subsequently banned tobacco advertising in newspapers and magazines in 1990—14 years later. The Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act 1992 imposed much broader national restrictions on the broadcasting and publication of tobacco advertising from 1993. It took Australia 20 years to take away tobacco advertising.

Think about the media markets and the state of journalism in Australia in the nineties versus what it is now. If you look at the commercial advertising in the newspaper classifieds—around $4 billion a year was going into classified advertising back then; it's now about $200 million. All of that directly funds journalism in this country.

All of that directly funds free and independent media. All of that funds commercial television and the sort of other advertising that funds Australian programs, and Australian content and kids programs, Australian industry and Australian jobs. It took 20 years to take away tobacco advertising, at a time when media advertising revenue was going up.

Right now, we are seeing the greatest transition away from independent news, from journalism, from the advertising that funds the important pillars of our democracy, not to mention our local sporting clubs and our sporting codes. And we're entering into a time when money is being moved into large tech companies and being invested in artificial intelligence. It's moving away from holding people and moving away from being invested back into the institutions that help create all of the different parts of our democracy and is moving towards other parts that make our democracy and our truth and our politics so much more difficult.

This is not simple. This is actually really difficult. I know that people out there ask: 'Well, why not just do a full ban?

Why not just do it?' They are legitimate questions, and Peta Murphy laid the groundwork and the pathway against which we all must hold ourselves. But this also is real, and the consequences of this will be real: there will be millions of dollars less for journalism, for institutions, for sport—to invest in women's sport, in the AFLW. All of these things are going to need time to adjust.

But we need to make sure that we are true to the point of what this bill is all about, and that is breaking the nexus and the connection between gambling and sport. Even though there will be consequences, we need to push on with these reforms. The bill will make a significant number of changes to the number of ads on TV, making sure that gambling ads won't be on TV during sport, especially during specific hours.

There'll be frequency caps outside of those hours. I also want to mention the fact that, whenever you're watching sport and you see these celebrity endorsements parading as being part of the television coverage, it's actually just an endorsement by Sportsbet or Ladbrokes or one of these other companies. All of that will be banned.

Gambling advertising is not going to be normalised—this culture of 'what's happening over at the odds?' All that part of our radio and television coverage of sport is going to be gone. When kids walk into a stadium, they're not going to see advertising all around the stadium. They're not going to see it on jerseys.

They're not going to hear it on the radio while they're going to and from school. The way this bill outlines the online ban basically means that, as a parent, I am going to be able to opt out or switch off all gambling advertising on the streaming platforms in my home. That is a power that we want to give to each and every parent around Australia: if you don't want your kids to see gambling advertising, you can do something pretty simple and click 'opt out'.

If platforms choose not to have that function, the alternative is no gambling advertising on their platforms; they have to comply with this, or the answer is no gambling advertising. Here is the choice that this bill gives parents: either, if online platforms, social media and tech companies choose to not comply with the law and not provide these three steps of verification and options for parents, they will have no gambling advertising or, if they want to have gambling advertising on their platforms, they have to give parents and other people the choice and the ability to turn it off.

That is a power that does not exist right now. When you think about all of that and you think about my eight-year-old daughter, when we go to the footy and the MCG, there will be no gambling around the MCG anymore. There will be no gambling on the stadium.

There will be no gambling advertising on the uniforms. When we travel to and from school, there will be no gambling advertising. When we're watching the footy at home, when we're watching it on 7plus, there will be no gambling advertising.

We will have created a gambling advertising free home. That sounds pretty good to me, and that's exactly what this bill will be able to do. There are also much broader reforms that are contained in this bill that I don't want to run out of time on, because they are significant and they have required a lot of work, and I'm really proud that we are taking them.

We are going to ensure that illegal offshore gambling providers are reducing their gambling harm and ensure that anyone participating in gambling in Australia is doing so within the safety of Australian consumer protections. We're strengthening BetStop, which has helped thousands of Australians pull themselves out of problem gambling. We are going to address harmful and emerging online gambling products, including banning online keno and foreign match lotteries.

If you want to just pause on online keno, these are online pocket pokies where people can just click pokie and pokie time and time again. We see the ways in which people lose themselves in casinos until all hours of the morning. Well, just imagine lying in bed, pressing the pokie over and over again.

People are losing thousands of dollars. All of that will be banned under this bill, and I think that is a fantastic reform. I've never spent a cent at a pokie.

I've never spent a cent with any of these companies. I've never spent a cent on Sportsbet or Ladbrokes or any of them. That's a personal choice I make.

But I think this is a wonderful thing, where we are not making it easy for these companies to just take money off people lying in bed with an algorithm and a formula that is not designed for people to win. It is designed for companies to make money. The impact on foreign match lotteries also will mean that the local small businesses that are selling lottery tickets aren't going to have these foreign lotteries able to undercut them and have situations where people can buy tickets in offshore lotteries.

People want to be a part of the lotto. My grandmother used to love doing that. I've never really seen the appeal, but at least we will ensure that Australians are buying from local newsagencies, and I think that's a good thing.

There are many other things that this bill does. It closes regulatory gaps that allow some operators to offer lottery-style products under the guise of trade promotions and reward clubs. There are a number of other things that we're going to ensure that this bill does.

But I want to make this point: when negotiating anything in this parliament, we don't have the numbers, as the Labor Party, to pass everything through the Senate. That requires us to sit down with people and negotiate. It requires us to negotiate with either the Liberal Party or the Greens.

There have been bills where we've gone through one, and there have been bills where we've gone through the other. Ultimately, that's about respecting our democracy. Obviously, I want to see a whole range of things that this bill makes an incredible contribution to.

One of the things that we passed in our national conference was around inducements and the way in which these companies are offering people extra incentives to continue gambling and targeting the most susceptible people on that. I think that in the negotiations that is obviously something that the Labor Party in our conference said that we want to see included in the bill, and I know that there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes.

I am working as closely as I can with my colleagues, and I know everyone is working to make sure we get something through this House and we get these reforms in. That is because they will make a difference. They will make a profound difference.

They'll give parents the power to turn off gambling advertising. They'll mean that, when young kids are walking into the colosseum of Australian football, they're not looking around seeing BetStop and Ladbrokes; they're walking around and seeing the great Australian athletes, men and women competing on the best sporting field in the country and possibly the world.

It took 20 years from the moment in which tobacco advertising and health warnings were issued in Australia for a bill to come in. Well, we are doing this. This has never been done before, and this is a huge set of reforms that will have a big impact on breaking that nexus between gambling and sport.

I thank every member who has contributed to this, the minister and so many others. Most of all, I thank Peta Murphy, who laid down the path, and now it's our job to walk down it.