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 DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory—Independent ACT Whip) (19:17): Minister, I want to follow up, because part of the strategy, it seems, from the gambling lobby post Murphy, was to, obviously, lobby very hard but then really lean on sports and free-to-air TV and say that, rather than protecting Australians, 'We need to get the balance right.' Part of the strategy, it seemed, was to say, 'Don't look at us.

Look over there. Look at pokies, look at lotto, look at all these other things. Don't worry about us; we're a small part of the market.

We're not to be regulated first. The real harm is happening over there.' I was very troubled when I heard, and I know many others were troubled when they heard, the Prime Minister say in the House in 2024: We know, when we look at where the harmful gambling comes from, that almost 70 per cent of that harmful gambling is actually poker machines. More than or around 15 per cent off the top of my head—it's about that figure—comes from lotteries and lotto and those tickets as well.

When the Senate asked where these mystery statistics came from, the Deputy Prime Minister, who was Acting Prime Minister at the time, said, 'The Prime Minister was relying on a recollection of published material.' I asked every researcher that my office could contact, 'Where does this come from—can you find it?' No-one could find it, but it sounds suspiciously similar to comments attributed to Mr V'landys in the Sydney Morning Herald, which read: V'landys argued that independent statistics show that out of 100 people who sought help from a problem gambling hotline, 70 were due to poker machines, 15 due to lotteries, eight due to racing, four due to sport and three due to casinos.

Apparently, when the ABC contacted the NRL to find out where these stats came from, the NRL refused to respond, just as they refused to respond to questions on notice from the Senate and they refused to turn up to the Senate inquiry. Now that a couple of years have passed since these remarks, do you or any of the officials know if there's any more clarity about where the PM got those figures?