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

Mr REBELLO (McPherson) (09:55): I rise to speak on the gambling legislation before the House today. This is an area where I think we need to start from a fairly simple proposition: adults should be free to make choices for themselves, but with that freedom comes personal responsibility. But government also has a responsibility to protect vulnerable Australians, particularly children, where products or commercial practices can cause general harm.

Those principles are not contradictory; in fact, good public policy requires us to hold them together. For the overwhelming majority of Australians, buying a lottery ticket, having a punt on the races or putting a small bet on a sporting event is entertainment. Government should not treat every Australian who enjoys those activities as though they're incapable of making their own decisions.

But, equally, we should never minimise gambling harm. Australians lose more per person to gambling than people in any other country, with total losses now exceeding $36 billion a year. Behind that extraordinary figure are people who have suffered financial distress, damaged relationships and profound impacts on their mental health, and families who have carried those consequences alongside them.

There is a role for government here, but the test of reform cannot simply be where the government has done something; the test is whether it has done the right thing, and whether the legislation is targeted, evidence based and capable of reducing harm without creating new and unnecessary consequences. Unfortunately, these bills do not yet meet that test. The Murphy inquiry reported in June 2023 after undertaking extensive work, and delivered 31 recommendations.

Australians have now waited more than three years for the government to bring forward this legislative response. After that amount of time, we were entitled to expect legislation that was coherent, carefully designed and able to withstand scrutiny. Instead, there remain serious gaps.

The coalition wants meaningful and workable gambling reform. We want the legislation to succeed. But, after three years of delay, parliament has an obligation to strengthen the bills where their protections fall short.

We're engaging constructively with the government because gambling reform is too important to be reduced to political theatre. There are negotiations occurring about how this legislation can be strengthened, and I hope that the government and the minister listen carefully to the concerns that have been raised. One of those concerns is gambling advertising.

There's been some rewriting of history in this debate. Australians should remember that restrictions on gambling advertising during live sport did not suddenly appear with these bills. The former coalition government introduced the live sport restrictions that came into effect in 2018.

Under the existing regime, gambling advertising is prohibited during live sport between 5 am and 8.30 pm. including during breaks in play and for five minutes either side of the event. That was an important reform because sport should be something families can enjoy together without children being conditioned to believe that every kick, every try and every result needs to have a price attached to it.

The scale of gambling advertising in this country demonstrates why this matters. The Australian Communications and Media Authority found that, in a single 12-month period, more than one million gambling advertisements were broadcast across free-to-air television and radio. Online, Australians are being exposed to more than half a million gambling advertisements.

That is not advertising at the margins; it's saturation. When gambling messages are appearing at that scale, they become part of the background noise of everyday life. They normalise gambling.

They embed it into the experience of watching sport. For people already struggling with gambling harm, that constant exposure can be deeply damaging. There are measures in this bill that move in the right direction, but there are also aspects that require substantial improvement.

The bill proposes a general cap of three wagering advertisements per hour on television between 6 am and 8.30 pm. I struggle with the proposition that we can say that we're fundamentally changing children's exposure to gambling while still designing a legislative framework capable of delivering three gambling advertisements every hour through much of the day.

There are also serious questions about streamed live sport. The existing online rules contain strong protections during play, during breaks and immediately before and after an event. We should be strengthening those protections, not creating new opportunities for gambling advertising to find its way back into the family viewing experience.

You cannot credibly say that you're breaking the connection between gambling and sport while continuing to permit gambling advertisements during live sporting events. That is the contradiction at the heart of this aspect of the bill. Sport is one of the great institutions of Australian life.

It brings families together. It builds communities. It teaches young people about teamwork, discipline, resilience and competition.

I want the next generation of Australians to grow up loving sport because of the contest, because of their team and because of the excitement of the game, not because they've been taught from childhood to associate every result with a bet. We can't go back and undo the gambling harm that's already occurred in Australian families, but this parliament does have control over what happens next.

And then there are inducements. This is an area where the evidence has been particularly confronting. The Murphy inquiry did not equivocate.

Recommendation 16 called for online gambling inducements and inducement advertising to be prohibited without delay. The committee was particularly concerned by the role of VIP programs and inducements in encouraging people to continue gambling and losing. Yet, three years later, this bill still does not adequately deal with that problem.

The evidence heard by the Senate committee recently about the treatment of vulnerable gamblers and the use of VIP account management, bonus bets and other inducements should concern every member of this parliament. Government has an obligation to act where commercial practices are deliberately exploiting vulnerability. That's exactly where targeted regulation belongs.

At the same time, we need to remember that legitimate gambling related industries employ Australians, sustain businesses and make significant contributions to communities. Racing in particular supports trainers, breeders, jockeys, stable workers, veterinarians, hospitality venues, transport businesses and communities right across regional Australia. We should be capable of protecting vulnerable people without pretending that every person who enjoys a bet needs government to save them from themselves.

That is the balance that the coalition is seeking. That brings me to a part of this bill that I'd like to spend some time addressing because its consequences are very real for the people in my electorate of McPherson. Schedule 4 proposes to prohibit foreign matched lotteries.

Now, I've spoken to many across this chamber about this. That might sound like a fairly technical change buried within a much larger gambling reform bill. It's not.

For one Australian owned business based in my electorate, it is an extinction notice. The Lottery Office operates from Robina in my electorate on the Gold Coast. Its parent company, Global Players Network, is Australian owned and operates under a Northern Territory gaming licence.

The government's own review identifies the Lottery Office as one of the licensed providers of foreign matched lotteries operating in Australia. This business supports around 50 jobs in my electorate, as well as expenditure with many other local businesses and suppliers of whom I have had the opportunity to speak. These are not theoretical jobs.

They're not figures in a departmental briefing note. They're real people who go to work each morning. They pay their taxes, they have mortgages and rent, they raise families, they buy their groceries locally, and they contribute to the Gold Coast community in spades.

They fund our sporting clubs and our community organisations, and they fill the funding gaps left by government. And this parliament is now being asked to vote for legislation that could potentially wipe them out. This isn't gambling reform; it's a Labor protection job.

Roger Cook, the Premier of Western Australia, has asked Canberra to effectively kill off a legal Gold Coast competitor to shield Western Australia's state owned lottery. The Prime Minister and the minister, through this legislation, will simply be rolling over to support their Labor mates. Before doing that, members on that side of the chamber should understand exactly what this product is.

A foreign matched lottery is materially different from a synthetic lottery, where there is no underlying ticket purchased in the relevant lottery and the operator itself pays an amount based on the result. That distinction matters. It matters even more when we look at the evidence the government itself commissioned.

The department of infrastructure undertook a specific review into online keno and foreign matched lotteries. That review was published earlier this year, and what did it find? It said: The harms associated with … foreign-matched lotteries are not well understood.

It said: Due to the lack of available data, the review could not identify a different harm profile or customer spending profile for foreign-matched lotteries compared with Australian-exclusive lotteries. It recorded: All foreign-matched lottery providers advised that winnings had been paid to customers ... The Northern Territory regulator advised that complaints it had seen related to identity verification, and that consumers received their winnings once those verification issues were resolved.

Most importantly, the department did not respond to that evidence by recommending that these businesses be banned. The department said that further research was needed to properly understand the risk profile before restrictions were imposed. The review went so far as to say that 'more evidence' was needed to determine whether further regulation of foreign matched lotteries would actually be 'commensurate with the harms'.

That is the government's own department. Only months later, the government's answer is not more research. It's not stronger consumer protections.

It's not a nationally consistent regulatory framework. It's not extending appropriate provisions of BetStop or the credit card restriction. It is prohibition.

How did we get from 'we need more evidence before imposing further restrictions' to 'we're going to ban the entire product'? I do not understand it. That's the question the government has not adequately answered, nor was the prohibition on foreign matched lotteries—one of the 31 recommendations of the Murphy report.

That inquiry called for major reforms across advertising inducements, consumer protection regulation and research, but it did not make the case that this government is now making for the destruction of this particular business model. I ask the minister and I ask those opposite: Where is the evidence? What changed between the department's review and the drafting of this legislation?

What new harm was identified? What problem emerged that could only be solved by prohibition rather than regulation? And, I ask to the minister sitting at the table, why should around fifty jobs on the Gold Coast, in my electorate, be put on the line before those questions have been answered?

I'm a great believer in personal responsibility. It's why I joined the Liberal Party, but I'm equally a great believer in government taking responsibility for its own decisions. It's very easy, in Canberra, to amend a definition in an act.

It takes a few lines on a page. But, when those lines remove the legal basis upon which an Australian business operates, the consequences are not a few lines on a page. They're livelihoods, they're employees sitting around a kitchen table wondering whether their job will exist next year, they're suppliers wondering whether a customer will disappear, and they're people who have built careers in a business that is lawful, licensed and regulated who are being told that Canberra has simply decided that their industry should no longer exist.

I cannot support that approach. I say to the minister and I say to the government, deep down, I'm sure you can't either. There is also an important competition question here.

Whatever the government's intention, the practical consequence of this prohibition is to eliminate a regulated competitor from the Australian lottery market and leave the largest incumbent lottery operators facing less competition. That should concern everyone in this parliament who believes in competitive markets. There are stakeholders arguing strongly on the other side.

Lobbyists claiming to represent traditional lottery retailers and newsagents have told the parliament that foreign matched products divert revenue and threaten their businesses. Even if those claims are true, government does not resolve competition between lawful businesses simply by banning one of them. If there's a consumer protection gap, close the gap.

If regulation needs to be strengthened, strengthen it. If credit card use presents an unacceptable risk, address it. If consumers need stronger self-exclusion options, build them.

Apply the appropriate safeguards consistently, and require every operator to meet them. That is regulation. Simply extinguishing a licensed Australian operator, when the evidence for doing so has not been established, is something very different.

The Gold Coast has been built by people willing to take a risk, build a business, employ others and back their own ingenuity. My electorate is full of those people. It's part of what makes our city so successful.

Government should be very careful before it tells one of those businesses: 'You played by the rules, you obtained the licence, you employed Australians and you complied with the regulatory framework, but we've now decided to abolish the framework beneath you anyway.' That destroys confidence well beyond this particular industry. The government should remove the proposed prohibition on foreign matched lotteries from this legislation and, instead, undertake the evidence based work its own department recommended.

Gold Coast workers, the hardworking people in my electorate, should not become the collateral damage in a rushed regulatory decision. In the short time I have left, I'll say that we can preserve the great Australian tradition of enjoying sport without surrounding the next generation with gambling advertising, and we can regulate an industry without sacrificing competition, small business and Australian jobs in the process.

That is the balance this parliament should seek and it is the standard against which this legislation should be judged.