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

Ms LE (Fowler) (10:50): A constituent of mine from Villawood said this just recently: 'I don't want my community, especially our kids, growing up thinking gambling and sports are inseparable.' He's a father. He coaches his son's junior side on Saturday mornings. He is not an activist.

He has never lobbied a politician in his life, and he came to see me about something else entirely, but he needed to tell us that. He was asking for his son to be able to watch a game of football without being taught, ad by ad, that betting is simply part of it. I myself have had loved ones who've been impacted by gambling, as I'm sure many members of this House have heard.

Many members of the House have also shared stories from their own experience as well as from their constituents. My proposition today is a simple one: Australians should be able to watch the footy, use their phones or sit with their children in the lounge room without being relentlessly targeted by gambling advertising. Betting companies should not follow people from the television screen to their phones, from the live commentary to their social feeds and into their text messages.

Our children should not grow up recognising betting logos as easily as they recognise the jersey of their favourite team. Let me put some of the numbers to what this looks like in my electorate. Fowler has long been the epicentre of gambling harm in this country.

The profits flow to the wagering industry; the damage stays on our doorstep. For years, the Fairfield local government area, at the heart of my electorate, has ranked among the worst in New South Wales for gambling losses. The latest club gaming report, covering the three months from December 2025 to February 2026, shows Fairfield was the single highest losing local government area in the entire state.

In 90 days, my community lost $131 million on gaming machines in clubs alone. That is more than a million dollars leaving the pockets of local families every single day. Broken down further, it is roughly $60,000 an hour, close to what a typical household in my electorate earns in an entire year—gone in 60 minutes.

Across the whole of 2025, total losses on gaming machines in Fairfield exceeded $720 million. In neighbouring Liverpool, which my electorate also takes in, losses have risen 17.5 per cent in a single year—not levelling or declining but accelerating. None of those figures include online sports betting.

They do not include betting apps, racing or lotteries. When you add those, the drain on the families of Fowler is difficult to comprehend. I understand gambling machines are regulated by states, not by this parliament, but it's important to know the numbers, which tell you about the ground on which this bill lands.

In multicultural, hardworking communities like mine, gambling harm is deeply entrenched. We cannot then allow online wagering platforms to exploit the same vulnerability by turning every smartphone into a portable casino. This parliament has a duty to act where it holds the power.

I'm not here to attack our clubs. In south-west Sydney, our clubs are not simply gaming rooms. They are where families hold funerals and weddings.

They are where a pensioner can get a meal that they can actually afford. They are where our kids play sports, where community language groups meet and where new arrivals find their footing. Many of the people I represent are employed there, so I will not stand in this place and pretend that that is nothing.

I know where my community chooses to spend their Friday nights and their weekends with their families and where they can go to eat cheap meals, but I will not pretend that a million dollars a day is the price of a community meal. Both of those things are true at once, and the people I represent are perfectly capable of holding both. The national picture is stark.

Australians lost approximately $32.2 billion on legal gambling in the 2023-24 financial year—$32.2 billion. We have the highest gambling losses per person of any country in the world. Adults in this country lose an average of more than $1,500 every year to gambling, and total losses have risen 26 per cent since 2018-19.

One million Australians either experience severe gambling harm themselves or live with someone who does. Many more have lost more than they can afford. Australia has taken a lax approach for decades, and the consequences are plain.

Per capita losses have grown almost every year since national reporting began in 1975. This is not about advertising being annoying. Gambling advertising exposes Australians, including children, to a product that causes serious harm with very little corresponding social benefit.

It normalises gambling from an early age. It teaches children that betting is part of sport, rather than a commercial product engineered to extract money from their families. The Grattan Institute and public health experts have made the point that gambling products are uniquely addictive—and I think we've heard often in this House, from many members, about how those products are designed to make them very addictive.

That is why we must move past the idea that this is solely a matter of individual responsibility. The traditional 'responsible gambling' framing places the entire burden on one person, while ignoring the extraordinary imbalance between a single consumer and a multibillion-dollar industry armed with data, algorithms and marketing. We learned this lesson with tobacco.

We did not ask individuals to resist cigarette advertising through willpower. We recognised the risks and we restricted the marketing. That brings me to this bill before us, the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026.

I acknowledge the government's intention to begin addressing this, but this bill falls short of what is required. In 2023, the Murphy report, You win some, you lose more, gave this parliament a clear road map. That bipartisan inquiry produced 31 practical, evidence based recommendations.

The bill before us adopts only three of them—just three out of 31. First, there's the advertising cap. Three ads per hour between 6 am and 8.30 pm still allows very significant exposure, because that is peak time.

Three ads every hour, all day, means children will continue to see betting woven into ordinary sports viewing, and it leaves peak evening viewing unaddressed. We should be honest about what happens when we leave loopholes. Previous restrictions during live sport did not end the saturation; companies simply found other routes to the same audience.

A partial ban risks pushing advertising into direct marketing, inducements, social media, streaming and targeted messages aimed at people already in trouble. That is why the Murphy report did not recommend a cap; it recommended a comprehensive ban across broadcast and online media, phased in over three years. A phased approach gives broadcasters and sporting codes time to replace that revenue, as they have adapted before.

Sports will survive without gambling ads. Families in Fowler have already waited long enough. Second, there's the racing exemption.

By excluding horse, harness and greyhound racing from the definition of a 'sporting event', a substantial share of gambling advertising remains untouched, despite racing being a major source of harm. Third, there's the timeline on stadium and uniform branding. Allowing those arrangements until late 2031 means another five years of children seeing betting logos on the teams they love.

Five more years is a childhood that will be still exposed to that. Fourth, there's age verification. Asking platforms to take reasonable steps while prohibiting high-integrity methods such as government ID makes it harder, not easier, to keep young people out.

There is a fifth gap, and I do not believe anyone else in this debate will raise it. In communities like mine, gambling harm carries a heavy stigma. Families deal with financial ruin in silence.

People fear judgement. They hide losses from their partners, their families and loved ones. They tell themselves one more bet will fix it.

By the time anyone asks for help, the damage is done. Now, add this to it: in Fowler, more than three quarters of people speak a language other than English at home. Our gambling help services, our self-exclusion register and our awareness campaigns are built in English for English speakers.

A Vietnamese Australian grandmother, an Assyrian Australian father or grandfather or a Khmer Australian in Cabramatta, Canley Vale or Liverpool cannot ask for help in a language nobody offers it in. Not one line in this bill addresses that, and it should. There's one more thing we do not do: we do not count.

There is not a single published figure for what my electorate loses on online wagering—not by council, not by state and not by this parliament. We meticulously count every dollar lost on machines. The online industry, we do not measure at all.

We cannot properly regulate what we refuse to count. Alongside many on the crossbench, I believe this parliament should aim at the full version of the Murphy report. First, we need a phased, comprehensive ban on gambling advertising across all platforms.

Second, we need direct action on inducements—the bonus bets and the deposit matches that exist for one purpose, which is to keep people chasing losses—not merely the VIP perks that reach the few but the everyday offers that reach the many. Third, we need a strong national precommitment framework for online wagering with enforceable maximum-loss limits. Precommitment means a person decides, before they gamble, what they can afford to lose, and the system holds them to it.

It must be a genuine safeguard not a box-ticking exercise where someone nominates a limit nobody could ever reach. Fourth, we need help services, self-exclusion tools and awareness campaigns delivered in languages our communities actually speak. While machines remain a state responsibility, the Commonwealth has a clear duty to bring states together and pursue nationally consistent mandatory precommitment.

Communities like Fowler cannot afford governments passing responsibility back and forth while hundreds of millions of dollars disappear. Television networks and sporting codes can adapt. They have adapted before, and they will again.

The families in my electorate have less room to adapt. The median personal income in Fowler is about $520 a week, and 46 per cent of renting households are in rental stress. This is money that was meant for groceries, for school, for shoes or for a bond.

The question is simply this: can families in Fairfield, in Liverpool and across Australia afford another quarter of losses like the last one, without stronger protections in place? I acknowledge the work of my crossbench colleagues in this House and in the Senate who have pursued these reforms with clarity and persistence. I will support every amendment that makes this bill stronger because my community cannot afford another decade of incrementalism.

But I want to be honest with the people I represent about what this bill will and will not do. It will take some advertisements off some screens; it will not take millions of dollars a day out of Fairfield. They deserve to be told that plainly.

I want to come back to that father in Villawood. He was not asking for much, only that his son can watch a game without being sold something every time he does. That is not a lot to ask.

This parliament should be able to deliver it. I want to say this message: if gambling is affecting you or someone that you love, please call the National Gambling Helpline. The number is 1800858858.

It's free. It's confidential. It's 24 hours a day with interpreters available.