Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, National Self-exclusion Register (Cost Recovery Levy) Amendment Bill 2026, Interactive Gambling (Cost Recovery Levy) Bill 2026
Senator ANANDA-RAJAH (Victoria) (10:27): I rise to speak on the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026. We have a generation of Australian adults and Australian children who have grown up in an environment where gambling has become normalised—dangerously normalised. This has led to all kinds of harms both to the individual and to broader society.
We know that around one in 10 Australians experience gambling harm. However, that belies the fact that this harm has a knock-on effect, a ripple effect, on families and on communities. It's not just mental health impacts.
It means that families and individuals are unable to pay their bills. They're unable to put food on the table. Sometimes businesses are put at risk.
Sometimes people end up homeless, or worse. The trendline when it comes to gambling losses is going in an upward direction. Last year, gambling losses amounted to around $36 billion.
That is nearly $100 million per day. That is money from hardworking Australians going out the door, in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis, and into the coffers of gambling corporations, some of whom are not even domiciled here. That's going offshore.
We know that this package of reforms is not going to please everyone. I understand that—this is a morally charged issue—but I believe that these reforms are highly significant. I want to thank the coalition for working collaboratively with the government on these reforms, particularly Senator Sarah Henderson, who sits with me on a committee that has also prosecuted this work.
I also want to pay tribute to one of our own: the late Peta Murphy, former member for Dunkley, whose seminal work kicked off this response. This has been going for a number of years. We didn't fulfil all of Peta's requests, but I think we have delivered in this package of reforms highly significant changes that will make a tangible difference, bearing in mind that this is building on other reforms that we introduced in our first term of government.
The work of social policy, as the minister says, is never done. It is never done. I will go through, broadly speaking, what this package entails.
It involves shielding children from gambling ad exposure; creating one set of rules for every screen, whether you're watching it on free-to-air or online through TV in an app, for example; giving people control over what they see through the triple-lock function, which gives them an opt out if they're an adult and they're logged in; closing off inducements at vulnerable pressure points and banning commissions which have driven predatory marketing behaviour; and having an industry-pays approach and enforcement with teeth, bearing in mind that this package of reforms is complementary to what we introduced in our first term.
In 2024 on some channels in this country, you could sit through eight gambling ads an hour in the middle of news. These bills cap it at three an hour on broadcast TV, meaning free-to-air TV, between five am and 8.30 pm, brought forward from 6 am, and none at all during live sport inside those hours. The blackout around a game goes from five minutes to 15—15 minutes before the first bounce and 15 minutes after the final siren.
On radio, gambling ads disappear in the morning and in the afternoon around the time of children's programming, which is to say that, every time a child is strapped into the back of a car on the way to school and on the way home, they're not going to hear these ads. It's really important to ensuring that we don't normalise and socialise our children into believing gambling is part of the furniture of their lives.
It isn't. Online, the ads are off by default unless a person is logged in, verified as over 18 and given a way to switch them off. That is the deluge dammed.
As a former medical practitioner, I can tell you that gambling harm almost never walks through the door of a hospital announcing itself. It manifests in other ways. It presents as a mental health crisis, and I saw plenty of those.
I saw plenty of young men coming through the emergency department door, some of whom were jaundiced from nearly drinking themselves to death. These were people who had really good jobs and had everything to live for and for whom something had gone badly wrong. They would come in silence.
It was incredibly difficult to extract what was wrong with them, but then we would chip and chip away, and we would find that, in many cases, gambling was travelling with alcoholism and with other problems. It may also present in other ways—a young bloke who has chest pain but not a single cardiac risk factor to explain it. Chest pain can be a manifestation of anxiety.
It presents as a family sitting in the waiting room who have stopped speaking to one another. Family breakdown is real. You treat what is in front of you, but, very often, you may not find out what is underneath it.
We're not very good at picking this, because it is a highly stigmatising disorder. Gambling harm runs into mental health, into family violence, into financial counselling, into homelessness services, into our emergency departments and into our family courts—one ecosystem of pain and harm and suffering. Break one part of it, and you will find the cost somewhere else.
Everyone is paying for this harm. There are some scenarios worth considering. This one should be familiar to every Australian.
It's Saturday afternoon. You've got the game on. Your kid is on the floor watching telly, and, by the time the second quarter is done, she can recite the odds back to you—not the ladder but the odds.
I didn't even know what the odds were when I was a kid. I don't think I really still do either, because I didn't really grow up gambling. It wasn't part of my life.
It's very different with a generation of young kids in Australia today. She thinks that the odds are part of watching football because that's what her entire life has been like. Here's another scenario: you're 19, you've just opened your first betting account, and, for the next fortnight, your phone lights up with bonus bets, matched deposits and a little push notification at 11 pm at night telling you there's money waiting for you.
Under these reforms, that first fortnight will go quiet—completely silent. There won't be inducements, and there won't be direct marketing for two weeks after an account is opened. It's in those first two weeks that a habit is formed.
In those first two weeks, a lot of Australians will also be exposed to information on how they can gamble responsibly and the risks, particularly for young men. Then, there's another scenario. This is one that should trouble us most—you've done the single hardest thing a person with a gambling problem can do.
You've taken that first step, which is to put your name down on BetStop, a self-exclusion register. Some months later, you come off that register. Within days, the offers start again, timed almost to the hour from a company that knows precisely who you are and precisely what will work.
They know your buttons, and they will press them. Under these bills, that stops for 90 days. That's a significant reform.
It's a significant cooling-off period to protect you. Here's the fourth: you've been flagged by the company itself as a customer at risk of harm. Flagged by their own systems!
They know you; they know what buttons to press. The marketing keeps coming anyway. Under these bills, direct marketing of inducements to those customers will be banned outright.
Gambling companies know exactly who to target. They have always known. They have the data, they have the models, and they run them with skill.
These bills take that intelligence and turn it around, using it to protect people instead. We are also banning commissions to staff and to affiliates, and we based this on the explosive testimony that we heard in the Senate inquiry. With regards to advertising, our starting principle is simple: what you see on telly should match what you get online.
It hasn't, and everyone in the building knows that. We are taking the protections that sat in the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice, an industry code enforced by industry, and we're putting them into law. Then we're extending them to streaming.
The rules on live sport and the rules during children's programming will apply on platforms like 9Now and 7plus, and on streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime—one set of rules for every screen. The first is simulcast. Where a broadcaster is running a straight live feed on its terrestrial channel online, it may elect to follow the broadcast rules rather than the triple lock.
This comes with some transparency obligations: providers must declare to their viewers and to the regulator which rules they are operating under, and the whole framework will be subject to review at three years. If, however, you're watching something on a TV on an app like 9Now or 7plus, and it's not a live simulcast, you can opt out of those ads. There should be a prominent feature on those platforms to enable you, as long as you're logged in and over 18, to actually opt out of gambling ads.
It's not a given that, just because you're going to be online watching a streaming platform or a broadcasting platform like a TV in an app, for example, that you will see these ads. You may see them if it is a live simulcast from a broadcast channel, but, if you opt out, then you're not going to see them at other times. The other reform is that we will be grandfathering stadium and jersey advertising.
Existing commercial contracts cannot be voided by this parliament. What we have done here is bring the cut-off forward to the date these bills were introduced—2 July this year—so nobody can rush in and sign a decade-long deal before Christmas. We have also added a sunset, so the whole arrangement expires after five years.
Beyond advertising, these bills also go to enforcement, and enforcement is where reform either bites or it doesn't. Civil penalties have increased to 1,000 penalty units and 5,000 for corporations. In dollars, that is around $364,000 an offence and roughly $1.82 million for a company—more than five times the highest advertising penalty currently in the act.
The penalties do matter. So does the opprobrium that comes from the community if these are breached. These are the difference between a rule and a suggestion.
Illegal offshore operators—since 2019, the ACMA, which is the enforcement authority, has had more than 1,700 illegal gambling sites blocked. It's lot of work but the operators are quick, they are invasive and they are sophisticated. And, frankly, the whole process has been too slow.
These bills will streamline the blocking process, extend the obligation to app stores and search engines so that they must proactively keep these sites away from Australians and their feeds. Even if you reach the site, you will not be able to send funds to it from an Australian bank account—this is important—and ACMA gets the power to issue take-down notices directly, including to an influencer spruiking an illegal service to Aussie kids.
BetStop is a reform we introduced in our last term of government. As of July this year, more than 67,000 Australians have registered, with around 41,000 who are currently active. This is a self-exclusion register.
Before we came to government, that register did not exist. These bills deliver every recommendation of the Eccles review: a mandatory minimum three-month exclusion once you come off BetStop and friction added to the cancellation process so that nobody walks out of it on a bad night. Restrictions are extended beyond email and SMS to apps and push notifications, and old and new accounts will be linked so that harm patterns can actually be seen.
These bills are not a prohibition—I accept that—and not everyone will be happy. But, as a practitioner, I also don't believe in prohibition. I just don't believe it works.
I never saw it work in my practice. If you clamp down, people find ways of circumventing those kinds of rules. These are significant reforms and I believe they get the balance right.
They are a significant step forward in minimising gambling harm on individuals and in our wider community. (Time expired)