Melissa Clarke: If you’re watching or listening to sport on the television or the radio, it’s hard to escape the bombardment of gambling ads. Last year, a committee of Labor, Coalition and crossbench MPs all agreed that gambling ads should be banned during sports broadcasts. But 12 months on, there’s little sign of progress. Today, we speak to ABC political reporter Matthew Doran on the push and push back when it comes to sports, gambling and politics. I’m Melissa Clarke in Canberra on Ngunnawal Country and acknowledging other custodians, this is ABC News Daily.
Melissa Clarke: Matt, when you turn on the TV, the radio or a podcast, you’ll almost certainly run into a sports gambling ad. I know you don’t mind watching the odd game of cricket. I’m sure you’ll agree it gets pretty annoying.
Matthew Doran: Yeah, Mel, I’ve got to tell you, watching the cricket at the moment is genuinely a more enjoyable experience than the footy, being a long-suffering Crows supporter, but I do digress. You are absolutely right. Watching a game at somewhere like my favourite place, the Adelaide Oval, it is a delight. Watching it on the telly or be it free-to-air, be it through a streaming service, that is a vastly different experience at the moment because, yes, you’re paying a whole lot less for a pint while you’re watching it, but you are subject to a barrage of gambling ads.
Andrew Wilkie MP: At Bet365, we don’t do ordinary.
Rebekha Sharkie MP: Keep your finger on the pulse with the NRL Same Game Multi-Tracker.
Melissa Clarke: We’ll take the guesswork out with Tab’s popular Same Game Multis.
Matthew Doran: It’s quite remarkable just how many of these ads you see and while there are some restrictions around when they can be aired, rules around the proximity to play beginning, for example, it’s pretty hard to ignore them. There’s $300 million spent on advertising gambling in a single year. Certainly there was back in 2022 and that figure had grown considerably over the decade prior. It was more than five times the figure that we saw back in 2011.
Melissa Clarke: That is a lot. And look, as well as being really annoying, there’s also a lot of concern for people about is this pushing more people to gambling, or to gamble more than they can afford?
Matthew Doran: Yeah, Australians are great athletes. We’re also great gamblers. And some of the figures that have been crunched on this over the years by groups such as the Australian Institute of Family Studies, they’ve found that back in March last year, it was reported Australians were losing around $25 billion a year on gambling. That is billion with a B.
Melissa Clarke: A phenomenal amount of money.
Matthew Doran: Very, very big B. Of course, that is a mixture of betting. It’s not just sports gambling. It takes into account things like pokies, casinos, even lotto tickets and scratchies. But gambling spend in Australia equates to roughly $1,300 per person per year. We do need to point out that for a lot of people, it isn’t a problem for them. But for many people, it is becoming a problem. And that is why we are having this debate all the time around gambling advertising.
Melissa Clarke: And I guess that’s what led, in late 2022, to the government calling an inquiry into online gambling. Why did they take that route?
Matthew Doran: I think it kind of reflects the community concern in this space. That parents are worried their kids are being exposed to gambling advertising while they’re watching or listening to sport. There’s been research over the last couple of years finding that two thirds of children can name a betting company or a sports betting company, a brand.
Melissa Clarke: They can’t remember their homework, but can remember the sports betting company. Such is the volume of ads.
Matthew Doran: It’s remarkable. And around one in five are identifying even three or more of those sports betting brands. Many adults are fearing that this is just normalising gambling behaviour. That rather than seeing this as something that is separate to the sporting experience, this is becoming part of the sporting experience and it really shouldn’t be.
Melissa Clarke: Matt, when the government set up this parliamentary inquiry, it was chaired by a backbencher, a Labor backbencher, Peta Murphy. She was a really important part of this story. Can you tell me a bit about her?
Matthew Doran: She was indeed. She found this to be an issue that she felt very strongly about. And she had heard from many people in the community that this was a real problem that needed to be looked at. So she chaired this inquiry, a bipartisan cross-party inquiry, looking into the issue and it delivered what was a pretty significant body of work. We’re talking about more than 160 submissions made to this inquiry, more than a dozen public hearings. And she told me at the time of this final report coming out that the testimony came from such a wide range of people who’d had experiences with gambling over their time.
Peta Murphy: We heard incredibly powerful evidence from people with lived experience of harm from gambling, both people who had experienced gambling addictions, but others who perhaps don’t qualify for a diagnosis of an addiction, but nonetheless had lost money, relationships, jobs, because of not being able to control their gambling.
Matthew Doran: I think the name of that final report really sums up what this inquiry was looking into and what it found. The report was titled: You Win Some, You Lose More. And that really sums up what this broader concern is. So 31 recommendations were made and the headline recommendation was to ban gambling advertising during sporting events within a three-year period. So this wasn’t an immediate, it wasn’t saying, right, next week we’re not going to have any gambling advertising at all. This was a phased approach and that was the sort of headline takeout from that inquiry.
Melissa Clarke: This was a big moment. There was across the board support for this change from the Labor MPs, the Coalition MPs across the benches, others who were involved in this committee process. It was a big moment for those seeking gambling reform.
Matthew Doran: It certainly was, Mel, but it does seem to have unfortunately sort of stalled. And I think a lot that has come from the fact that devastatingly, the woman that was the driving force behind this inquiry did pass away just a couple of months after that final report was delivered. Peta Murphy, she’d been battling cancer. That had been very well documented. She’d spoken about it at length during her parliamentary career, mentioning it in her first speech and she passed away in December 2023. Her passing was a real shock, despite the fact everyone knew she was going through this. She was showing up to Parliament right up until the very end, sitting there after having gone through treatment, losing her hair as so many cancer patients do, but still showing up each and every sitting week. The Prime Minister was in tears when he announced that she had passed away, but he said at the same time that the government was taking note of her work and that it was an important piece of work. That is why there’s this pressure on the government now to do what it can to uphold her legacy, even though a lot of the comments so far from the government have not been as explicit in following that up.
Melissa Clarke: So we thought we would soon be watching sport without ads, but it’s 12 months now and not much has really happened. Why the hold up?
Matthew Doran: We do have to point out, Labor have made some changes. So we are seeing things like punters no longer being allowed to use credit cards while gambling online. There is a new exclusion register so people can sign up and say, right, I want to be blocked from accessing gambling sites for X period of time or even indefinitely. And there have been thousands of Australians who have signed up to that register to do so. And we have also seen the gambling responsibly phrase, which used to be used at end of advertisements replaced with new, more detailed taglines.
Advertisement voices: What’s gambling really costing you? Chances are you’re about to lose. What are you really gambling with? Imagine what you could be buying instead.
Melissa Clarke: But what about that big recommendation, that suggestion that was widely backed to ban ads during sports broadcasts?
Matthew Doran: We know that the government has enlisted the help of a consulting firm to try to decide whether to do this and indeed if it did, how to implement a total ban on gambling advertising. But this is a very slow process. I don’t think anyone denies that this will be a significant change and it has to be done very carefully. But this is a particularly slow moving beast. You wouldn’t be betting on this winning any sort of race anytime soon. And there are now people in this parliament who are really arcing up again. You’ve got new voices in this space. People like Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie, who’s long been talking about the problems with gambling, but has really sharpened his focus on this issue.
Andrew Wilkie MP: Speaker, the government cannot allow this madness to continue. It’s entirely unacceptable that an entire year has passed, almost to the day, and the government still hasn’t responded to the report or enacted any meaningful reforms to combat gambling advertising.
Matthew Doran: And also people like the South Australian independent Rebekha Sharkie in the last couple of months or so.
Rebekha Sharkie MP: I think the Australian public’s behind us. Mum and Dads don’t want to see this constant messaging happening to their children. We need a national strategy because I think state and the federal government and state and federal political parties are really addicted to gambling.
Melissa Clarke: The sports betting companies are cashed up. They’re powerful. Let’s not dance around it. They’re pretty good lobbyists too. What’s their argument? How much influence are they having in this debate?
Matthew Doran: The big sport betting companies, they argue that the revenue that they receive from gambling advertisements helps make some of the big leagues sustainable. It helps their competitions, not only at the top end of those competitions, but also at grassroots, that they’re funnelling some of the financial benefit from the money that they get from this through to community outreach. And this is something that Peta Murphy, back when she delivered this report, said that the big codes had made clear when they appeared before her inquiry.
Melissa Clarke: What about the other influence they have at a more direct political level, shall we say, the big gaming companies make political donations to the political parties that are making decisions about what regulation they face?
Matthew Doran: Yes, that’s a really interesting point and something which has been canvassed quite a bit in recent times. We know that not only is a league like the AFL making between $30 and $40 million from some of the fees it gets from bookmakers, but then also sponsorship deals through Sportsbet and things like that. Sportsbet are also making donations, and that’s just one example, it’s not the sole example, but Sportsbet are also making donations to political parties. Indeed, there was an incident recently where it was reported the Communications Minister, Michelle Rowland, had taken donations from Sportsbet ahead of the last election. That’s something her office said was above board and was appropriately disclosed, but something her critics took great issue with, saying there is a conflict because she’s the one with portfolio responsibility for managing and regulating gambling advertising in this sector. This is not a new phenomenon. This is something that’s been kicking around for some time, and millions of dollars have flowed to the major parties over the last couple of years.
Melissa Clarke: Can you run me through some of the regulations that the wagering industry have said they might be willing to consider that’s something that they could work with?
Matthew Doran: I think the gambling industry is seeing the writing on the wall here, and they know that they have to give up some ground. We know that the peak body for gambling providers, Responsible Wagering Australia, they’ve said that they could look at stopping radio ads during school pick-up and drop-off hours. Maybe we can cap the number of TV ads that are allowed in an hour, but they are also warning of extreme over-regulation, or in short, this could be a bit of a nanny state sort of thing. People should have the freedom, if they want to place a bet on their favourite team, on whatever race it is, that they should be able to do so. And that over-regulating this sector could have a catastrophic impact on the sporting leagues themselves, and also the broadcasters. We are in a time where the media industry in Australia is being squeezed and squeezed and squeezed for revenue. Advertising revenue, the rivers of gold, do not exist anymore like they did even just a decade ago. Cutting off this sort of money going to some of our commercial colleagues in the industry could have dire consequences for them, according to the industry.
Melissa Clarke: So where to from here? What happens? Are we in a limbo, or are we going to get movement here?
Matthew Doran: I think at the moment we are in a bit of a limbo period, just because it seems, for the time being, the government is kind of going, okay, we need to look at this. We know we need to look at this. We have seen a private members bill introduced by independent MPs Andrew Wilkie and Rebekha Sharkie, trying to wedge the government on this issue, trying to bring it back into the fore and to highlight that we are now a year out from that final inquiry being tabled in Parliament.
Melissa Clarke: And in the meantime, while we sort of hurry up and wait for some progress here, there’s some pretty real consequences going on from that incredibly high level of gambling we have in Australia that we talked about earlier.
Matthew Doran: People looking at harm in this space, they’re all saying that the harm caused by gambling continues to rise. It’s not just in dollar terms, it’s also a social cost as well. The stress that it’s putting on Australians, on their families, is simply too much to bear and it’s something that really needs to be addressed, rather than being allowed to continue to develop and, in some ways, fester.
Melissa Clarke: Matthew Doran is a political reporter for the ABC. This episode was produced by Oscar Coleman. Audio production by Sam Dunn and Anna John. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Melissa Clarke. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.