Gambling Reform [S1-08]

Show Notes

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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

Callum Sinclair
Welcome to Why Can’t They Just, looking at politics, policy and getting stuff done. My name is Callum Sinclair. I’m a Labor member and joining me is Janaline Oh.

Janaline Oh
Hi, I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. And before we start, I would like to acknowledge that both Callum and I are recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia and we would like to extend our respects to elders, past and present, and also to any First Nations listeners that we have today.

Callum Sinclair
So we are recording on the 15th of October 2025 and this year there’s been a Four Corners report into the gambling industry focusing on the Northern Territory, for reasons we’ll get into soon, and there’s been some talk about a national response to online gambling with a report which had recommendations where nothing has kind of come out of that.

Just for some context, online gambling is de facto regulated by the Northern Territory, which has the lowest gambling tax rate in Australia and a six person regulator which has never revoked a gambling licence. Past commissioners have often owned race horses and some of them have gone to free events. So given this, why can’t the other states just regulate online gambling and ignore the Northern Territory rules, which are clearly insufficient?

Janaline Oh
Yeah. So I think the problem with that is that other states do have gambling regulations, but because the Northern Territory is the easiest jurisdiction to get registered in and to operate in with the lowest tax rates, as you’ve pointed out, there is a huge incentive for gambling companies to register in the Northern Territory.

For online gamblers, once you’ve registered in the Northern Territory, it’s very hard to stop them from operating elsewhere in Australia, so the Northern Territory has become the de facto regulator for the whole country for online gambling. So that is the reason that the other states can’t really do much.

One of the recommendations of the parliamentary committee that you refer to was to set up a national regulator and I think definitely there seems to be a very strong argument to do that. And I guess the argument is that a national regulator would be subject to a lot more scrutiny than the Northern Territory. It would have to be subject to Senate estimates. The staff would be accountable to the Government and ultimately to the Parliament. So I think there is a very good case for national regulation.

Callum Sinclair
So as you’ve said, you believe there should be national regulation of particularly online gambling, why can’t they just implement the recommendations from the You Win Some, You Lose More report that this government commissioned in its last term of office?

Janaline Oh
Yeah, and unusually for parliamentary reports, the committee was unanimous. So it was a cross party committee, including Labor, Liberal and crossbench members and senators.

Yeah, look, that’s a very good question. I think a lot of people are asking that question, why not just implement the recommendations of this report? The Government has given various responses to that over the past few years. They have implemented a number of constraints on gambling, so one of these things was Bet Stop, which is a mechanism for people to self exclude from gambling and you know the Government has been saying very proudly recently that this is one of the biggest reforms to enable people who feel that they have a gambling problem and want to self exclude or want to limit their own gambling.

It’s one of the most effective mechanisms so far to do that. That is all very good. Like there is nothing wrong with that. Various states are also trialling things like cashless gambling cards, because then it’s much easier to control the limits on your card so you can load a certain amount of money and then once that money is gone, you have to go through significant friction to put more money on it, so it’s better than just letting people use cash.

I mean, gambling reform is a subject that has been discussed in Australia for decades. I mean in 2010 when Julia Gillard won government in minority, one of the agreements that she made with Andrew Wilkie, who was an independent member, is still an independent member for the seat of Clark in Tasmania - one of the deals that she made with him to support her government was that she would actually implement gambling reform. So he’s been asking for it for the last 15 years at least.

One of the ideas that was put forward was the idea of limiting pokie machines to $1.00, so you couldn’t just put, you know, 10 or 20 dollars into a pokie bet, you could only do $1.00 at a time, which obviously increases the amount of time that you need to spend a lot of money. So there have been lots and lots of different measures that have been proposed. Some of them have been trialled, some of those trials have just sort of ended in nothing when they finished.

So it is a problem that seems to have eluded a lot of governments for a long time. And I’m not saying this to let the current government off the hook because I think that parliamentary committee did come up with some very sensible, achievable recommendations, and I think a lot of people around the country are asking why the government is not just implementing them, or at least being a bit more transparent about what they are actually planning to implement and what are the reasons for maybe not implementing all of the recommendations in full. I think it would definitely reassure the community to have a little bit more transparency from the government on those issues.

Callum Sinclair
One of the accusations against the current Labor government and Labor governments in the past is that they take a lot of gambling lobbyist money and they’re swayed by that influence and that these people aren’t giving it this money out of the goodness of their heart, that they are doing it to influence policy and we’ve seen relatively weak changes from governments here, and so it must be that this explains why the Labor Government isn’t able to stop gambling and regulate it properly, so why can’t they just stop taking gambling lobbyist money?

Janaline Oh
Yeah, I mean that is also a good question. I mean, political donations is a very fraught topic. I actually would like to push back a bit on the idea that just because you donate to a political party, it is just going to do what you want. Clearly, companies and industries donate to political parties for reasons; they’re not just doing it for fun. Clearly, they are trying to either get access to senior people or they are trying to influence things in certain ways. I actually think the evidence that that has been successful is pretty thin. I think there are lots of reasons that parties don’t adopt certain policies and of course there is serious lobbying from all sorts of people, but I think it is too simplistic to say that people are just buying influence.

I think one of the things that political donations do tend to buy is access, and I think that is problematic. I would like to see a lot less of the kind of fundraising dinners and special fundraising events that political parties put on.

But you know that’s a kind of a separate issue and there is a whole process on political donations and political donation reform. And after every election we go through this process and I think in the last term the Parliament passed a number of reforms to political donations around caps on expenditure and caps on donations and transparency of disclosure, which are all good. Could they go further? Probably.

But if the Labor Party cared that much about their political donors, I feel like they wouldn’t have just disaffiliated the CFMEU in such a kind of summary way when an exposé of alleged criminal links came out in the media. The CFMEU was the construction, forestry mining union. It is a big, powerful union.

It has been possibly the biggest donor to the Labor Party over many, many election cycles, and not just in terms of cash, but also in terms of sympathetic political advertising, provision of volunteers. I mean, they have been a big part of the Labor Party. Members of the CFMEU have sat on the Labour national executive.

So to throw them out of the party on the basis of allegations that had not yet been tested in court at the moment when they disaffiliated the union, was a pretty big blow to one of their biggest donors. The CFMEU challenged it. A number of other unions actually threatened to disaffiliate themselves as a result, because of the process. That doesn’t sound to me like a party that is beholden to its political donors.

I don’t think the gambling industry donates enough to the Labor Party to make it such a transactional thing. I think a more credible argument, which has also been put forward in terms of sort of speculation on why the Government has frankly been so lame in terms of responding to that parliamentary committee report, is that they are afraid of the large sporting codes and the media companies, because there was definitely massive push back from the sporting codes and the media companies. And this was about gambling advertising, it was not bans on gambling. Nobody has been suggesting that gambling itself should be banned.

Callum Sinclair
So why can’t the Government just ban gambling ads? Or even at a lower level, just stop gambling ads from being watched by children.

Janaline Oh
A very good question. And I think a lot of people want to hear the answer.

I think the media companies and the sporting codes have all been lobbying hard to say, effectively, if you stop us from running gambling ads, the AFL will collapse, there will be no more community footy for kids. The media companies will go broke; it will be the final nail in the coffin of the mainstream media and everything will just be random people on TikTok.

I think those arguments are massively overblown. I am old enough to remember when the Government banned tobacco advertising in sport and exactly the same arguments were run. that if you banned tobacco advertising in sport then community sport will collapse. It didn’t happen. They banned tobacco advertising, and we still have community sport.

I think the same would happen with the gambling ads. They ban the gambling ads and the sporting codes have to find other sources of revenue, and they will find other sources of revenue because sport is popular and people watch sport.

So I think those arguments are overblown. I think the argument of the media companies is probably a little bit different than it was 40 years ago, I think, for the tobacco ads. The media environment now is a lot tougher, unquestionably. Thirty or forty years ago, you didn’t have YouTube, you didn’t have social media, nearly everybody watched broadcast television, the print media was still a thing. It is a tougher environment for the media companies. But you know what? Gambling ads are not going to save the media companies from the Internet.

Callum Sinclair
If we take the argument by the large media companies at face value and say, well, maybe preventing them from running gambling ads will cause some harm to both the media companies and the AFL leagues at large, why would that have anything to do with gambling ads being put up on YouTube or on Facebook or any other sort of online social media environment? These companies don’t seem to be intertwined in the sports industry in the same way at all, and don’t seem to give that money back to Australians in a way that’s good for community sport. So why can’t we just at least ban online gambling advertisements?

Janaline Oh
That is a really good question too. I mean, look honestly, I personally would favour implementing the recommendation that just said blanket ban on all gambling ads.

It’s easier to implement. You don’t have to go through complicated processes of what time it is, and are kids likely to be watching, and is this channel ok and this channel not ok.

I mean, I get the argument that it is unrealistic and also a bit authoritarian to ban actual gambling. I think if adults who have the means want to gamble on things, they should be entitled to do it. But I think given the ample evidence of the harm that gambling can cause, and particularly to vulnerable people, to poorer people.

The people who suffer most from gambling harm are not the people who can afford to go to the races and sit in corporate boxes and drink champagne. The people who suffer most are people who are gambling their families’ food money. Gambling has been shown to cause all sorts of family problems: breakdowns, domestic violence, financial stresses. And it’s not new. Charles Dickens wrote about the evils of gambling in poor communities in the 19th century. But I accept that people want to gamble and they will gamble.

But what the government can do is stop companies from profiting by advertising gambling and actually trying to draw people in. There is a good argument if they don’t want to take the full blanket ban route, if they want to do something in a more incremental way, maybe they could start with the online platforms. Maybe that would be a politically easier place to start. Maybe they could implement the proposal that they drafted last term but never actually put to Parliament, which would have limited gambling advertising, I think it was an hour or two hours either side of sporting matches and not during times when children are likely to be watching. Maybe they could do that.

I don’t really understand why in this term, again, with this very successful election behind them, I think they could probably be a bit more courageous. I think potentially last term, there was a concern in the Government that, if there was a concerted political campaign by the sporting codes and by the media organisations against Labor for taking these measures that could have had a bad electoral outcome.

I’m not saying that’s a justification. I get that political parties need to be elected. You need to be in government to have an impact, but I think at some point you also have to implement stuff in government, otherwise what’s the point?

But I would say that you know, there are certain media organisations that have campaigned consistently and vigorously against Labor for several elections that Labor has won significant majorities in, at both state and federal level. So I don’t think the government strategists should be swayed by that concern.

That said, I don’t have an in to, you know, the electoral strategy of the Australian Labor Party. I don’t know why the Government is being so cautious about this reform. And I wish they weren’t.

Callum Sinclair
So why can’t the States and Territories just hand over the regulation of gambling to the federal government? At a local level in terms of the States, political donations do seem to have more sway, and it would get rid of this race to the bottom dynamics in terms of both for gambling taxes and gambling regulations. So why don’t we just have a federal regulator for all gambling?

Janaline Oh
Yeah, I think it’s a really good idea. And it was one of the recommendations of the parliamentary committee. Some States ban property developers from donating to political parties and politicians because there is a danger of swaying individual decisions and there is evidence from the past that individual decisions have been swayed. The opportunities for personal corruption increase the lower the level of government, partly because the amounts required are smaller and partly because there’s just a lot less scrutiny at those levels. So at a national level, a national regulator would be subject to national media scrutiny, would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. And also there’s the National Anti Corruption Commission. So there is a lot less opportunity and probably less incentive for personal corruption. I think it would be harder for companies to sway a federal regulator in the way that they seem to be swaying the Northern Territory regulator.

Callum Sinclair
And also there’s been a number of whistleblowers in NSW flagging the use of pokies and gambling places to launder money from drug businesses.

Why can’t they just implement cashless cards or other forms of tracking to help prevent laundering from illegal activities?

Janaline Oh
I think NSW has recently implemented cashless cards for pokies so that you can put a certain amount on your card, and when you’ve run out of that money, you can top it up, but you have to go through certain processes. It’s basically to create friction because the more you delay and the harder you make it for someone to top up their card, the more opportunities they have to say, actually I don’t want to do that today. I think, definitely measures to kind of increase the friction for people to gamble very large amounts is good. They have been shown to be effective in reducing harm, and I think States are looking at that and States are trying to implement those things.

I’m not sure that a national regulator would regulate all of the state pokies. I mean in theory they could. I think that would be a whole other fight with the States and Territories to be honest. But I mean, pokies is also a pretty terrible story. I mean, there was a time when only casinos could have poker machines, and then, you know, somehow we’ve got to a point where pretty much every local pub can have one in some jurisdictions. It is a problem because frankly poker machines have been shown to be a mechanism for massive wealth transfer from essentially low income people to very rich gambling companies and the Government. Part of the problem with the so-called sin taxes,in other words, taxes on things that you want to discourage, is that yes, you raise the cost of the thing, but then you run the risk of increasing the dependence of the Government on that stream of revenue. And that is problematic. I don’t think it’s problematic in terms of gambling ads. So the gambling ad revenue is not going to the Government.

But that is a risk that needs to be considered when you’re applying these taxes. I mean, I think the UK government was at one point earning a noticeable percentage of the national budget from gambling taxes, which then makes it very hard to reduce gambling, if you’re going to take a big revenue hit.

Callum Sinclair
One of the things that the States would say though, is that the federal government has taken over many other taxable sources of income for them, which has made them more reliant on these taxes. So income used to be done at a State level.

Why is it advantageous for all of these taxes to be done by the federal government and not done by the States.

Janaline Oh
The thing is the federal government has the power of taxation and is able to I guess distribute the money, in theory, in a more equitable way. It redistributes money from wealthier states to poorer states. Federal programmes like federal income support, and federally funded healthcare, and federally funded education means that if you live in a poorer State, you are more likely to get the kinds of the same kinds of services as people who live in a richer State than if you just had all of your revenue generated at a State level.

The way that the Commonwealth has worked increasingly is that the federal government kind of has the money and the States actually deliver the services. So that’s sort of the way in which it’s flowed, and that’s largely been because of this sort of sense of inequity argument that you don’t want to disadvantage people just because they live in Tasmania or the Northern Territory, which are poorer than Victoria or WA.

But you know, it’s not perfect.

Callum Sinclair
So the music is called Insurrection, written by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Incorporated. My name is Callum Sinclair.

Janaline Oh
My name is Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just.