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 HANSON-YOUNG (South Australia—Manager of Australian Greens Business in the Senate) (10:42): The government has one core job, and that is to protect its citizens. The piece of legislation before us today, Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, fails to do exactly that. The Prime Minister and the leader of the coalition have not just failed to protect Australian citizens; they have failed the clearest moral test of all—to be honest about what they are failing to do.

Labor has proven itself to be captured by the gambling industry. All of those political donation inducements over years and years, adding up to millions and millions, cashed in by the gambling industry to stop this law working, to protect the gambling industry and its self-interest above and ahead of the protection of Australian families. These laws are designed to fail.

Labor has proven itself to be captured by the industry, and the Liberal Party has proven itself to be weak and toothless. It is gambling companies who are the winners today, not Australian families—not even Australian media companies. The gambling industry has won the house.

This bill has become so convoluted it looks less like gambling reform and much more like a protection racket for the gambling industry. It's full of loopholes, delays, complexities, carve-outs. It is designed to not work.

There was a very simple proposition put to this parliament, and put to the government, off the back of the Murphy review. That report recommended the ban of gambling advertising. It said clearly: 'Halfway measures do not work.' It said there needed to be a ban on inducements because of their 'predatory and harmful' nature.

It said there must be a national regulator because the gambling industry has proven itself 'incapable' of doing the right thing. This bill fails on all three of those points. There is no ban on gambling advertising across any medium, there is no ban on inducements, and there is no national regulator to ensure gambling companies—who have shown themselves to be immoral, to be improper and to be corrupt—do the right thing.

They have proven themselves unfit to be an industry, and yet the key recommendation, to have a watchdog to hold them to account, is missing from this entire bill and entire conversation, from both Labor and the Liberal Party. I'll tell you one thing: advertising works. That's why the industry has fought tooth and nail to stop any attempt to ban ads.

I'll tell you why we know it works: the gambling industry have done everything they can to get a piece of legislation that does everything but stop them from being able to advertise their dangerous product. We know that ads for gambling work because the gambling industry, in just one single year, spends $600 million on gambling advertising. In the 2023-24 financial year, Australian gambling companies spent $600 million flogging their dangerous and predatory product.

You don't spend $600 million if it doesn't work. What is even more galling is that not only are they spending $600 million on gambling but it's six times more than they pay in tax. No wonder the gambling industry want anything but a ban on their advertising.

The Labor and Liberal parties are so addicted to the gambling industry and the inducements that come from this industry that, despite all of the evidence and all of the stories of heartbreak and damage, they cannot bring themselves to do the obvious and simple thing. I foreshadow that I will be moving a second reading amendment to ban the inducements that the gambling industry fork out to Labor and Liberal parties and MPs here today.

Australians have lost $104 billion to gambling since the Murphy report was handed down. That's $666 million a week—$666 million a week is what Australians are losing. It is going straight into the coffers, to the profits, of the vultures in the gambling industry.

Since this debate has been elevated over the last few weeks, and we've seen the Senate inquiry and heard the experts and the people telling their personal stories, I've been inundated with accounts from Australians right across the country with their stories of absolute, complete and utter devastation. They are stories that are so shameful to tell, but Australians have been desperate to be heard.

There are so many stories of people driven to suicide because they couldn't see any other way out of their gambling addiction. For one victim who wrote to my office, even in death, the gambling companies would not let her husband go. His widow kept receiving inducement offers after her husband had killed himself.

What a pack of bastards. How disgusting. There are mothers who have had to bury their sons, who will never, ever get to meet their grandchildren.

There are fathers who will never know retirement, because they have to keep going back to work to support their children's rehab or addiction habit. There is the love of parents, brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts as they desperately try to keep their loved ones from doing the ultimate, heartbreaking act of ending their life to end the suffering for them and their family.

There are decades worth of savings, millions of dollars and houses lost, vanished, to save a son who has a gambling addiction. There are entire small businesses that have gone bankrupt because someone in the business stole from the company in order to feed their gambling illness. The list goes on and on, yet it doesn't seem to matter how many bodies pile up on these companies' watch.

It doesn't matter that the Murphy report set out a detailed road map of how this harm could be stopped. Expert after expert has told this parliament what needs to be done. But the Labor Party, the Liberal Party, the National Party and One Nation don't care.

It's all too hard. They are cowards. As they cowardly come into this place today to pretend and to beg for a pat on the back for putting through a piece of legislation that is designed to fail, the body count will continue.

I feel exhausted by this. Australians and Australian families feel exhausted by this. This is what is wrong with the state of politics in this country.

All of the evidence is so clear, and the public have been crystal clear, that the majority of Australians don't want these ads. Even if you like a flutter, you don't want to be bombarded with gambling advertising. You're worried about what it does to the vulnerable person next to you.

But it doesn't matter, because vested interests have won the day. This opt-out register—what an absolute joke. It's as if people in this place or in the Prime Minister's office don't understand how the internet even works, and they expect a pat on the back for a fancy new product called AdStop.

We know the ads are not stopping; they're not being banned. How will this opt-out register even work? The government can't even answer that.

But we do know that every person in this country who doesn't want to receive ads will have to give their name, email address and phone number to the government, who will then take their name, phone number and email address to every website in the country that runs advertising—every app, every gaming platform. It beggars belief that the government and the opposition come in here today and think they can sell this rubbish.

We're not idiots. The Australian people are not mugs. They can see what has happened here, which is that the Labor Party and the Liberal Party have been played.

The Murphy report said that inducements need to be banned immediately because they are so harmful. The government recognises they're harmful because they've had to do something, but it's just to look like they're doing something, because if inducements are so harmful then they should be banned. Are we going to let the gambling companies decide who is vulnerable to their inducements?

Andrew Wallace, the Liberal Party MP in the other house, is right. This is putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank. The gambling companies were on the radio today saying they've already identified these vulnerable people.

I bet they have. They know exactly who to target, and they do. There is nothing that is going to stop them from doing that further, because the one thing this government has refused to do is establish a national regulator.

These companies all run their dodgy, predatory grooming activities through the regulator in the NT because it's a free-for-all. Everyone knows it, and you haven't had the guts to do anything about it. The gambling companies are getting away with murder.

They groom people like paedophiles groom their victims. They have no social licence in this country anymore, yet the Labor Party and the Liberal Party are rolling over for them. What a bunch of cowards.