Parliamentary Updates

Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026

National Self-exclusion Register (Cost Recovery Levy) Amendment Bill 2026

Second Reading

 I rise to oppose the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 and call it out for the hypocrisy and the offensiveness that it is. To couch this as in any way responding fully to the Murphy report's recommendations or what the scale of this health crisis demands is an insult to the Australian people and to victims of gambling. And of course I see the minister walking away. I normally have great respect, but on this issue have none. This is a cave-in, and it is shameful, especially when I hear members of the committee who unanimously supported recommendations to genuinely address this health crisis now coming in here trying to peddle to their community that this legislation is going to meaningfully impact this health crisis.

It is wrong. I can't even begin to express the outrage I feel at what I've heard in some of the speeches in this place in relation to this issue. Members of the government would have you think that this is better than nothing, that there's good progress, and more will come. But we've seen that all too often in this place. The experts are all saying that this will not make any meaningful change to this health crisis. More Australians will continue to be targeted and harmed by this predatory industry through their advertising, through all the loopholes to this legislation that you are letting through. So shame on you. How many more victims is an acceptable number? That is the question, because there will be many more victims from this.

Australia urgently needs real gambling advertising reform—a comprehensive advertising ban. If this had come into effect three years ago we would nearly be there: strong consumer protections, an end to predatory inducements and effective national regulation. Gambling is destroying families. It's leading to suicides. It's destroying the integrity of sport. After three years of delay, the Albanese government and the minister have brought forward a bill that ignores the central recommendations of the Murphy inquiry, a bill that preserves major loopholes for the gambling industry and sporting codes that disgracefully profit from a public health crisis. Three ads an hour is not a ban. An opt-out is not a protection. A fragmented system is not national regulation. The government says this bill is better than nothing. After they've sat on the report and recommendations for three years, we all have to think that this better-than-nothing approach is an appallingly low bar. It's a cop-out bill. It has all the hallmarks of legislation designed around the gambling industry's wishes, not around the evidence, certainly not around the Murphy report recommendations and absolutely not around the best interests of Australian families. But hey, follow the money.

The industry and its allies warned that stronger regulation could affect broadcasters and sporting code revenue. Their financial interest is pretty obvious. The NRL and AFL and other areas of sport, particularly those two sporting codes, enjoy tax-free status and significant funding from state and federal governments. Yet the media reports indicate that the NRL receives more than $50 million a year and the AFL more than $40 million a year in wagering product fees, which allegedly include commission structure. They have an interest in continuing this. Meanwhile, both the Labor and Liberal Parties received around $5 million each from gambling companies over the past five years. Well, doesn't that explain a lot?

I want to be really, brutally clear to all those people in the communities that are hearing all this grandstanding and hypocrisy about what voting for this bill actually means. A vote for this bill is a vote to permit up to three waging ads an hour, which is still potentially more than 40 a day on a single television channel. It's a vote to preserve the streaming loopholes and force parents to opt out of advertising that should not be there in the first place. It's a vote to leave predatory inducements untouched, despite the unanimous Murphy inquiry and reports saying they should be prohibited without delay. It's a vote to proceed without a national regulator or ombudsman, nationally consistent harm detection standards, proper gambling harm and suicide data or a ban on commissions from recruiting gamblers.

The failure of courage is just staggering. The government has adopted these reforms the gambling industry can live with; that's clear. They've abandoned the reforms that would actually threaten their profits and actually help Australians. I think this is a deliberate political choice to protect a toxic industry revenue stream. A vote for this bill means owning these political choices and the harm that follows to every one of the members in your communities. Government members can't claim there was no alternative, because the Murphy Review Committee gave them a clear roadmap of 31 unanimous recommendations grounded in extensive evidence.

If this bill passes through the other house and comes back here, the government and industry will point to it for years to say they've dealt with the problem. We already hear it in the speeches—allegations that, 'Oh, the Albanese government has done more than any other government before it.' Well, how effective has that been? How many families have been destroyed by this predatory industry? We know this legislation is a weak compromise. It falls so far short and delays the real reform into the foreseeable future, because we know exactly what's going to happen. You're going to have the chest-beating of saying, 'But we've acted more than any other government before us.'

So—where is Australia in the scheme of things? Australia holds a deeply unenviable world title. We have the highest per capita gambling losses in the world. Official statistics released this week show Australians lost almost $33 billion to legal gambling in 2024-25. That's approximately $1,500 for every Australian adult. The Grattan Institute analysis has found that our per adult losses are more than twice those of the United States and almost three times those of our neighbour in New Zealand. Australia is not merely above average; we're a global outlier. And so how has the Albanese government responded? With weak reform.

These billions represent mortgage repayments, rents, groceries, school expenses and retirement savings. They also represent partners discovering secret accounts and hidden debts. They represent children going to school without what they need, while a parent desperately tries to win back what has already been lost. They represent small businesses being defrauded, homes being sold and families being torn apart.

Make no mistake—this is a public health crisis, and it is an absolute conflict of interest that this portfolio sits with the communication and sports minister. This should be in the health portfolio. Gambling harm must be treated as a public health issue, not as a collection of isolated failures of individual responsibility. The latest national research found that nearly one in five Australian adults gambled at risky levels in 2025. Among people experiencing high-risk gambling, two-thirds reported serious financial stress, including going without meals or selling belongings. Sixteen per cent reported experiencing suicidal thoughts. People whose partners gambled weekly or more were substantially more likely to report intimate partner violence. Almost six per cent of Australian adults reported being harmed by another person's gambling in just one year, so gambling harm does not stop when a betting app is closed. Research using the Victorian Suicide Register found that gambling was linked to at least 4.2 per cent of suicides examined between 2009 and 2016, including deaths of people harmed by someone else's gambling. We do not have a complete national data on gambling related suicide, which is itself an indictment of the current system. A serious public health response would collect that data, identify the causes of harm, regulate the environment creating it and intervene before families reach crisis point. This bill barely scratches the surface. It says: 'It's okay. You can still have three ads per hour.'

That is what makes the government's response to the late Peta Murphy's report so difficult to accept. The inquiry was adopted in September 2022. It received 161 submissions and 26 exhibits and held 13 public hearings in Canberra, taking evidence from almost 100 individuals drawn from across Australia. It heard from people with lived experience and their families; researchers; doctors; psychologists; suicide prevention experts; financial counsellors; Commonwealth, state and territory regulators; banks; broadcasters; and advertisers. It heard from the sporting codes, and it certainly heard from the wagering companies. Nobody can say that the industry was not heard. The AFL, the NRL, Sportsbet, Tabcorp, Entain and Responsible Wagering Australia all gave evidence. After that extensive process, Labor, Liberal and crossbench members all agreed unanimously on 31 recommendations. They produced a clear, comprehensive and interconnected health reform agenda. There was courage in confronting industries with enormous financial and political influence, and Peta Murphy had so much courage in putting that forward as her legacy. Her report was a holistic and interconnected reform plan.

Had the Albanese government responded promptly, the three-year advertising phase-out recommended by the committee would actually now be approaching completion. Instead, Australians have endured three more years of saturation advertising while the government has delayed and powerful interests lobbied behind closed doors. It's profoundly tragic that the legacy and the implementation of the Murphy report has been so compromised and that the Albanese government has chosen not to live up to the values that were brought to the work into that report—the compassion, the respect for evidence, the political courage and the determination to put people and their health ahead of vested interests.

Let's be clear about what is in this legislation, because we've heard lots and lots of details from backbench government members trying to justify this poor legislation. Three ads per hour is not a ban. The government described it as an advertising cap, a strong reform. But let's be clear. Three gambling ads per hour between 6 am and 3 pm could still mean more than 40 ads per day on an individual channel. The presumption that people are stopping watching at 8.30 or that children stop watching at 8.30 is just so—I can't even begin to say how naive. But the idea that people aren't channel surfing and thus coming across way more ads than just three is ridiculous. This is not removing gambling advertising from Australian lives.

From May 2022 to April 2023, more than one million gambling ads aired on free-to-air television and metropolitan radio. Half were ads for online gambling providers. In the same period, ACMA found that gambling advertisers spent $34.6 million on social media and $19.5 million on websites and apps, totalling more than $54 million in online advertising expenditure. That saturation has conditioned Australians, especially children, to see betting as an ordinary and inseparable part of sport. It is on their screens. It is in their pockets on their phones. It is everywhere. Children can identify betting companies, repeat promotional language and discuss the odds before they're even legally permitted to open an account. They should grow up talking about the players, the score and the great moments, not the odds and the multi.

The distinction this bill draws between television and streaming is so increasingly—it's just artificial. A family watching a match on television may receive one level of protection, limited, while somebody watching the same match through a streaming device or service can continue receiving gambling advertising unless they locate and activate an opt-out setting. So, again, that responsibility is put on the viewer. The loophole is large enough to drive the future of sports broadcasting through. The opt-out model places a burden on individuals and families to protect themselves from a harmful environment. We know this does not work, yet here we are continuing with it.

Inducements are not ordinary advertising; they're direct, personalised offers designed around an individual's gambling behaviour. They include bonus bets, deposit matches, cashbacks, enhanced odds, VIP hospitality, free travel, gifts and offers delivered at the moment an operator knows a customer is likely to bet and that they are vulnerable. They are not acts of generosity; they are predatory and designed with sophistication to go after people. We saw horrific evidence during the recent Senate inquiry about how far they are prepared to go. How, then, the government can present legislation that does not ban inducements is just beyond me.

We know that, instead of protecting and minimising harm, the gambling companies prey on people. They seek to capitalise on their vulnerability and make more money. The system then rewards those customers with VIP status and further incentives to gamble. This is predatory. It's exploitation. The corporate media, the NRL, the AFL and other sporting codes—they are complicit. We need a national regulator, an ombudsman—we actually need the implementation of the full suite of recommendations.

This is regressive, and Reverend Tim Costello neatly summed it up—'the most generous gift to the sports betting companies I have ever seen'. I agree. Shame!