Ollie Peterson:
The Prime Minister has stopped short of implementing a full ad ban. Now, these changes follow years of pressure after a major parliamentary inquiry into online gambling harm. Kate Chaney has been very outspoken on this issue, and I wonder whether the independent member for Curtin views this as a missed opportunity. She joins us live on Drive. Good afternoon.
Kate Chaney:
Ollie.
Ollie Peterson:
I see you've described this, sorry Kate, as a feeble half measure. What exactly is missing from the government's plan?
Kate Chaney:
Well, it is a missed opportunity. This was the opportunity for the government to lead here and do for gambling ads what we did for tobacco a generation ago. Instead, we have talk about balance. And it's really important to remember when he's talking about balance, he's talking about balancing the financial interests of the predatory industry against the wellbeing of Australians. And this partial ban is just, I think, not unfortunately going to have the impact that it needs to. All the evidence shows that partial bans don't work and the industry just finds its way around them.
Ollie Peterson:
The government says it's a significant step forward, Kate, but why do you believe it falls short of meaningful reform?
Kate Chaney:
Well, it is a step forward and after three years of pushing on it, I'm glad that they're at least acknowledging that there's a problem. But we will still see an ad every 20 minutes on daytime TV outside live sport and unlimited after 8.30pm. And if you think about what we did with tobacco, imagine if when we got to that point with tobacco we said alright, you know, an ad every 20 minutes, that seems fine. Now that seems unthinkable.
And when it comes to the online ban, for digital platforms and streaming services, it puts the onus back on the individual or the parent to go into every account and manually find out how it is that you opt out on this particular platform and tick that box. It's very different to an overall ban. Lots of households would have one streaming account that the whole family uses in the name of an adult. And so you are going to keep seeing those ads unless you actually go through and opt out of each of those.
And SBS has actually had this opt-out approach and it's described as a success. I can't find any new information about how many SBS subscribers it was blocked out for in an FOI request that I put in. But the 2024 data on that was 0.01% of SBS in 2024. So an opt-out sounds strong, but actually it goes nowhere near far enough to actually remove this connection and stop normalising gambling as part of sport for young Australians.
Ollie Peterson:
And it's obviously not just sport. Even the other day, Kate, using one of the free-to-air catch-up services, I was trying to find a particular episode of a particular show and every time you'd click on the next episode or go out of the episode to go to the next episode because I was on the wrong episode, that same gambling ad would keep coming up. And I actually thought to myself as well, this is just ridiculous.
Kate Chaney:
Yeah, and so there are some limitations on advertising during live sport and before and afterwards, but not during. You still can get three an hour on all those other platforms or other types of content. And I had an event at Parliament House last week with some researchers from Deakin University who were talking about all the ways the gambling industry is now targeting women and targeting young people with these insidious different types of bets, like you can bet on reality TV shows or what colour dress someone's going to wear to an event, and just that normalising gambling as part of life.
So I think we can expect them to be very good at innovating and getting around these restrictions. When the 2017 restrictions came in to try and reduce gambling ads, the volume of gambling ads on TV actually increased after those restrictions. It moved around, it was at different times, but it increased. And these companies are deeply incentivised to maximise our losses.
So they will find a way around it.
Ollie Peterson:
Well, the Prime Minister says it balances harm reduction with industry realities. Is that just code for political compromise?
Kate Chaney:
Absolutely. Industry realities means what the lobbyists are telling us to do. And it's a crazy situation. These companies make Australians lose $87 million every single day to these gambling companies. And so they're deeply incentivised to lobby hard and say it's the end of the world. But we could solve all the problems with loss of revenue to TV and radio and sports codes with a few days of gambling losses. This is a problem that can be solved. And I don't think it's about balance. I think this should be about commitment, not compromise. If they recognise that there is harm being done, let's deal with that harm, not do this half-measure version where we've got these complicated rules that the industry will just work at getting around.
Ollie Peterson:
So do you think the government hasn't gone further because that industry influence is just still too strong?
Kate Chaney:
Absolutely. I absolutely think that. And we know that the government meets with the TV stations and the sporting codes and the gambling companies about this reform. And all the word I hear is he's only going to go as far as the gambling companies let him go. So it is disappointing. I'm glad there are some good things here. It's good that there'll be no ads on jerseys and celebrity endorsements are out. This is a step in the right direction, but this had better be the beginning of the reform, not the end. And what I'm worried about is that now this becomes the end, and they've got their few talking points on what they've done on gambling reform and they don't really tackle the problem head on.
You have argued that this should be treated as a public health issue. What would that look like in practice?
Kate Chaney:
For a start, we need a national regulator. At the moment, it's regulated at the lowest common denominator out of the Northern Territory, and it's very lax. There are other things like inducements that haven't been addressed in this package, where people are actually given free money to entice them back to betting.
But broadly, the difference of treating it as a public health issue means instead of it being about personal responsibility and consumer protections, you recognise that gambling harms not only the people who are gambling but those around them. It contributes to family and domestic violence and relationship breakdown and homelessness, mental health illness. And so it has impacts across all these other public health issues.
And we've got to stop expecting individuals to be able to take on the gambling companies. It's not a fair fight. They've got all this information about you that means they can target you exactly when they know you're most likely to gamble. And there are people experiencing problems with gambling, potentially more than 3 million people who experience some problems with gambling in Australia. And they're being bombarded with ads. It's really hard to escape. And we heard some heartbreaking problems in the committee about people who've had that experience.
Ollie Peterson:
Kate, appreciate your time. Thank you.
Kate Chaney:
Thanks very much, Ollie.