Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, National Self-exclusion Register (Cost Recovery Levy) Amendment Bill 2026
Ms BELL (Moncrieff) (10:24): I rise today to speak on the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026. I want to thank the member for Nicholls for his outstanding contribution to this debate earlier. He highlighted some concerns very similar to those I have with Labor's bill as well.
I want to begin with something very simple. This debate is not about telling responsible Australian adults how to spend their money. That's their choice.
That's their freedom of choice. It's not about telling someone who enjoys a punt on the Melbourne Cup that they shouldn't have one. I, indeed, enjoy that myself.
It's not about telling families who buy a lottery ticket on a Saturday that they are doing something wrong somehow. And it's certainly not about treating every Australian who places a bet as a problem gambler. Most Australians understand the difference between entertainment and addiction, and most Australians take responsibility for their own decisions.
I believe in that personal responsibility, as a Liberal. As the shadow minister for youth, my greatest concern lies with our young people, particularly our children, because children don't get to make the same informed choices that adults do. They don't have the same understanding of risk.
They don't have the financial independence or maturity to understand the consequences of addiction. And yet we are allowing gambling to become increasingly normalised in the environments where our children spend their time. Around 600,000 Australian teenagers under the age of 18 gamble each year.
That's a big number—600,000. It's not an abstract statistic. It's sons and daughters.
It's young people sitting on the couch, watching the footy with their families. It's our responsibility to protect those young people. I want to share a story I was told in a meeting this week with the Salvation Army, who support those who are most vulnerable in our community.
It's the story of a 17-year-old. Let's call him Kyle. He was living in a youth refuge when he opened up about his gambling addiction.
He'd been gambling on a sports betting app since he got his first job—good on you, Kyle—at 14. He said: 'I pay rent, bet the rest and get my mates to buy me food. But they know when I win I'll pay them back.' It doesn't leave much wriggle room, does it?
Kyle's story really stayed with me because, at 17, he should be thinking about schoolwork, his mates and his future, not how he's going to find enough money to keep on gambling. What struck me most is that Kyle didn't start gambling when he turned 18, as an adult. No, he started when he was 14.
That's why this debate matters to me as the shadow minister for youth. We can talk about billions of dollars in losses, advertising regulations and industry revenue, and all of those things matter, but behind every statistic is a person encountering harm. Sometimes, that person is a child.
As young people are growing up in a world where a gambling advertisement can appear on their phone, on social media, around sport and, increasingly, alongside the entertainment they consume, we need to ask ourselves: what are we teaching our children about gambling? If every time a child watches a sporting match they see gambling promoted, they hear odds discussed as casually as a score and they see betting presented as part of the excitement of sport, we shouldn't be surprised when gambling starts to feel normal to them.
Gambling harm is not normal. Sport should be an opportunity to bring families and communities together. Sport delivers opportunities; it should not be a vehicle for marketing gambling products to children.
That's why I have serious concerns about this bill in its current form. The coalition has three fundamental principles when it comes to gambling reform. First, Australians should have choice—choice that a democracy delivers.
Second, adults should take responsibility for their decisions and their actions. That is not easy when you're being harmed by gambling. Third, government has an obligation to protect vulnerable Australians, particularly children, from exploitation and harm.
Those principles are not contradictory. In fact, I believe they are common sense. We should be able to strike a balance.
We can respect the freedom of responsible adults while recognising that children should be protected. We don't expect a 10-year-old to understand the risks associated with every financial product. We don't expect a teenager to have the same capacity for judgement as, say, a 40-year-old.
And we shouldn't expect children to navigate an increasingly sophisticated gambling industry on their own. The industry has enormous resources. It has sophisticated data.
It has sophisticated marketing. It understands consumer behaviour. And some operators have demonstrated just how targeted that marketing can become.
The evidence heard by the Senate inquiry last week should concern every member of this parliament. Former NRL player Luke Bateman gave damning evidence about his experience with VIP account managers, including claims that he was targeted with bonus bets, drugs and other inducements. That testimony should make us all stop and think, because, if sophisticated adults can be targeted and manipulated in this way, what chance does a vulnerable young person or a child have?
The advertising provisions are simply not good enough. One of my biggest concerns with this bill is that it does not go far enough to protect children from gambling advertising. On its face, the bill would permit up to three gambling advertisements per hour during children's television—three gambling advertisements per hour.
I struggle to understand how that can possibly be described as putting children's welfare first. We know advertising works—businesses don't spend billions of dollars on advertising because it has no influence on behaviour—and, when children repeatedly see gambling associated with sport, excitement, success and social activity, it contributes to the normalisation of gambling.
We need to be particularly careful about the message we are sending to young people, who are already surrounded by digital advertising. A teenager can sit down to watch a game; they can pick up their phone during the game; they can open up social media, watch a sporting highlight or go on to a streaming platform. Everywhere they turn, they can encounter gambling.
That's the environment today's young Australians are growing up in, and government needs to recognise that reality. The government proposes to weaken elements of the gambling advertisement restrictions introduced by the former coalition government. In 2018, the coalition introduced a broadcast and online ban on gambling advertisements during live sport, including the five-minute blackout before and after live sport between 5 am and 8.30 pm.
That was an important reform, yet this bill would allow digital platforms to show gambling advertisements during scheduled and unscheduled breaks in live sport, subject to the proposed triple-lock opt-out. For live sport streamed online, gambling advertisements could appear during breaks in play. That means a child watching a game online could potentially see a gambling advertisement immediately after a goal.
The five-minute blackout before and after live sport has also been removed for online streaming. So we need to ask: why are we weakening protections when we should be, in fact, strengthening them? The Prime Minister has repeatedly suggested that this government is introducing a ban on gambling advertising during live sport, but the reality is that the coalition government introduced that ban eight years ago.
Australians deserve honesty about what this legislation actually does. None of this is to suggest that gambling is inherently wrong. It's not.
Millions of Australians participate in legal forms of gambling—we know that. But we cannot ignore the harm experienced by some Australians and their family. Australians lost approximately $32.2 billion to legal gambling in 2023-24.
Those are among the highest per-capita gambling losses in the world. And the consequences aren't just financial. Gambling addiction can contribute to psychological distress; it can cause relationship breakdown; it can cause or contribute to financial hardship; it can affect people's ability, indeed, to work—and families often carry the consequences alongside the person experiencing their addiction.
A parent who can't pay the mortgage, a family struggling to pay the bills, a relationship under enormous strain, children who don't understand why there isn't enough money for the things their friends take for granted—these are the human consequences behind the numbers. And that's why this parliament has a responsibility to get the balance right. At the same time, I want to make something very clear: we cannot pretend that the gambling and wagering industries don't matter to Australia.
They do. The gambling sector directly employs around 33,000 Australians. Gambling-specific taxes generate more than $10 billion for governments around Australia, which contributes to critical infrastructure projects and programs.
The racing industry is particularly important to regional communities. Thoroughbred racing contributes more than $13 billion in economic activity and supports more than 100,000 jobs. More than half of those jobs are in regional Australia.
So, when we talk about gambling reform, we need to be responsible in our approach. Good regulation should target harm without creating unnecessary harm of its own. That means listening to the community.
It means listening to families, to experts, to industry and carefully considering the evidence before making changes that affect thousands of businesses, workers and the community. And that's the track record of the coalition. When we were in government, we delivered some of the most significant gambling harm minimisation measures in Australia's history.
We introduced the broadcast and online ban on gambling advertising during live sport. We legislated BetStop, the national self-exclusion register, to help people who need support to take a break from gambling, and we prohibited betting companies from offering sign-up inducements under the national consumer protection framework. These were meaningful reforms and they were designed to reduce harm while preserving choice for responsible adults.
That is the balance we should be seeking today. What is particularly disappointing about this bill is the time the government has had to get it right. The Murphy inquiry handed down its report in June 2023, and it contained 31 recommendations covering gambling regulation, consumer protections, advertising research and harm minimisation.
Australians have waited more than three years for the government's legislative response, and, when that response finally came, it was released on budget day, when journalists were in budget lock-up. That is hardly the kind of open and transparent consultation Australians should expect for legislation of this significance. The government then opposed the current Senate inquiry into this bill.
But ultimately, for me, this debate comes back to the young Australians that we all represent in this place. I think about the young people who are growing up surrounded by technology. They're exposed to more advertising and more commercial influences than any previous generation, and we have a responsibility to make sure that the things we allow into that environment are indeed appropriate.
There are many things that aren't. Our children should be able to watch sport without being sold a bet. They should be able to enjoy their favourite team without being told what the odds are.
They should be able to watch a game without gambling being presented as an essential part of the experience. The normalisation of gambling doesn't happen overnight; it happens gradually. A bet here, an ad there, an odds promotion during a game, a bonus bet, and before long something that should be treated as an adult activity becomes just another part of growing up.
That's what concerns me. So let me be clear about where the coalition stands: we support reducing gambling harm, we support protecting vulnerable Australians, we support protecting children, we support evidence based reform and we support responsible adults having the freedom to make their own responsible choices. After three years of delay, deflection and deception over gambling reform, the Albanese government's failings on this bill are inexcusable.
Australians can be assured we won't be supporting this deficient legislation in its current form. That said, we appreciate that the government is engaging with the opposition in good faith to strengthen this bill, and those negotiations, of course, are ongoing. There have been a range of negotiations between the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, as well as between the communications minister and the shadow minister for communications and digital safety.
While the second reading debate is now underway, potential amendments to this bill are still being worked through. These will then return to our party room to be considered and to be finalised. We need stronger protections around gambling advertising, we need to address gambling inducements that target vulnerable people, and we need to make sure that existing protections are not quietly weakened through changes to online gambling advertising.
This isn't about stopping a responsible Australian from having a punt. It's about making sure that a child doesn't grow up believing that gambling is simply part of watching sport. It's about making sure that vulnerable Australians aren't deliberately targeted by sophisticated marketing.
And it's about making sure that families don't have to pick up the pieces when gambling does become an addiction. It's about recognising that, while adults can make choices for themselves, children depend on us to make responsible choices for them. As the shadow minister for youth, I take that responsibility the most seriously.
We owe our children an environment where they can grow up, play sport, watch sport and enjoy life without gambling being marketed to them at every turn.