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 WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens) (12:04): I rise to speak on the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, a bill that the Greens have opposed from the moment it was introduced by Labor. Every member of Labor should hang their heads in shame today. They say that the house always wins, and, boy, are they winning big today with this deal between Labor and the Liberals to deliver for the gambling industry.
With this cowardly deal, the Prime Minister has abandoned vulnerable Australians and given predatory gambling companies the freedom to keep overrunning our sport, our screens and every aspect of our lives. The Murphy report was clear: Gambling advertising is grooming children and young people to gamble and encourages riskier behaviour. The torrent of advertising is inescapable.
It is manipulating an impressionable and vulnerable audience to gamble online. Three years on from this landmark report, after doing nothing for three whole years, we get this embarrassing excuse for gambling reform, the weakest possible version. It's a semblance of action done in a way that actually delivers for the gambling industry.
How very Labor. This is claytons reform that actually just delivers for their donors, the gambling industry—the same industry that, in the last five years alone, have donated $4 million to the Labor Party. They're having a bet each way because they've also donated $2 million to the coalition.
They're having a bet each way, buying policy inaction for three years and now buying a weak and ineffective response from government that was three years too late and is too little, too late. That's the inducement that should be banned, as my colleague Senator Hanson-Young, who's done an excellent job on this for the Greens, said. The political donations that the gambling industry uses to buy the complicity of the Labor and Liberal parties is the inducement that should be banned.
Boy, haven't they won big today. These laws will not work to protect Australian families. They will allow the gambling companies to continue with business as usual.
This bill doesn't implement the Murphy report recommendations; it is the very half measures that that report warned against. There's no national regulator—a recommendation ignored. There's no total ban on gambling ads.
Three an hour is three too many. It is the ultimate half measure, and it will not work. The minimal amendments that the Liberal Party have extracted don't fully address the inducements that prey on folk that have a gambling addiction—and there are so many of them.
Our heart goes out to them. We should be helping them, not condemning them. This bill still relies on an opt-out model for gambling ads instead of putting people in control with an opt-in function that they could choose, if they wish.
I bet barely anyone would because no-one likes these ads, they're sick of them, and they want them gone. You two have colluded to deliver for the gambling industry. The Liberals think they're really clever at creating some new powers for ACMA to administer what is basically a 'do not call' register for the internet.
Does anyone think that's going to work? It's costly, and it's not going to work. The only guarantee that people have to not be spammed with gambling ads would have been to give them the right, like the Murphy report recommendation suggested, to choose to opt in, rather than having to opt out or having to send an email to ACMA, hoping they can somehow put some parameters on the internet.
It doesn't match this century. After this bill passes with bipartisan support, Australians will still be the biggest gambling losers on the planet. Did you know we've got gambling losses of $666 million every week?
Generations of Australians who've suffered through the gambling industry's bombardment will still have the ads relentlessly following them. With this dirty deal, Labor and the Liberals have teamed up to leave your living rooms, your cars, YouTube and even your kids' Spotify playlists at the mercy of gambling corporations. The predatory behaviours of the gambling corporations were laid bare through days of devastating testimony from people with a gambling addiction, from experts and from advocates.
But, instead of actually taking that on board and listening and then making changes that are based on evidence to protect people, we get this pathetic policy, this absolute capitulation to the gambling industry, who donate to both sides of politics. Even some of the Liberal backbenchers are crossing the floor because this bill is too weak, and I commend them for doing so.
I salute their moral stance. They're taking a stronger stance than the Labor government's—how pathetic! How will you go back to your electorates and explain that, instead of working for people, you've backed in laws that only benefit the gambling industry?
Last time I checked, the job of any government is meant to be to look after people, but Labor seems to have completely forgotten that, and they seem to have forgotten that they shouldn't be supporting an industry that is making massive profits off people's pain and misery and loss and, in some cases, their lives. You're not meant to be here to run a protection racket for corporations that have offered people with a gambling addiction drugs, booze and sex workers to keep on spending.
You're not meant to be here to deliver for the companies that have breached the law over 500 times in the last three years. Oh, but you can't do anything about that, because you took too long to investigate and because there still won't be a national regulator. Instead, every chance they get, Labor bends the knee to their wealthy donors.
They side with big corporations, and they leave Australians behind. Whenever Labor and Liberal team up to rush through dodgy legislation, it means one thing: it's good for rich corporations and it's bad for people. These two parties have taken, as I said, over $6 million in donations from the gambling lobby in the last five years, so of course they will gang up to pass through weak gambling laws that will not protect Australians but will protect the profits of those donors.
Corporate donations are the fatal flaw of the Labor Party. When they come under lobbyist pressure, they fold every single time. A vote for Labor is a vote for the vested interests that they protect.
A vote for the Greens is a vote for people. Think about it.