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June 24, 2026 — 5:00am
It’s been a while now, so let me ask you: were you disappointed with the Albanese government’s long-awaited response to calls for a ban on all those gambling ads on television?
What, you can’t quite remember the announcement? Really? Well, Albo will be pleased. I’m pretty sure he didn’t want you to notice it.
Have you heard the expression “taking out the trash”? Politicians and journalists say it to describe a trick governments use when they want to announce a decision without it being noticed by the voters.
They make the announcement at a time when the media are busy covering some much bigger event of great interest to their audience. The media could return to the announcement as soon as the excitement was over, but they rarely do because by then the story is “old” and the media are obsessed by newness.
You may find it hard to believe the media are so easily diverted from their duty to inform their audience about things they need to know, but it’s true. If I were the editor, I’d make it a point of honour to ensure the pollies didn’t get away with a stunt like this by returning to the announcement as soon as possible; but, in the news business, the caravan always moves on.
In 2023, a parliamentary committee recommended that gambling advertisements be banned. It was chaired by a Labor MP, Peta Murphy, who died of cancer soon after, but not before making an impassioned plea for children and young men to be protected from becoming addicted to gambling.
It took Albanese about three years to respond to the report. He announced his decision the day before we all went off for the Easter long weekend.
Then he left his formal response to the Murphy report until the day of the budget. It’s customary to respond point by point to a parliamentary report – more than 30 recommendations in this case – but he just said he noted them all.
According to Albanese, “we’re getting the balance right here, letting adults have a punt if they want to but also making sure Australian children don’t see betting ads everywhere they look”.
But that was a non sequitur. Banning ads to benefit children does nothing to stop adults from having a punt.
Makes you wonder if Albanese wasn’t too keen on the idea of banning gambling ads. But not to worry. We were told the government was taking “strong action” to tackle gambling harms. The words “strong actions” were repeated so often that it made you wonder whether the actions were anything but strong.
Rather than banning ads outright, Labor promised to restrict them to three an hour between 6am and 8.30pm, with a complete ban only during the live broadcast of whatever game you could bet on.
There’ll be no independent regulator and, contrary to the Murphy report’s recommendations, no ban on the use of inducements to gamble.
When polls show 77 per cent of respondents support a ban, you have to wonder what Albo is worried about. Surely not the sports, the gambling companies or the media.
I’m sure you’re aware of the huge fuss business people are making about Albanese’s plans to change the taxation of their capital gains. Have they made much noise over the crackdown on gambling ads?
As far as I can tell, we haven’t heard a word of complaint. Makes you wonder whether the industry – which no doubt has been lobbying hard behind the scenes – knows it’s been let off lightly and shares the government’s desire to hush the whole thing up.
The government department’s impact analysis admits that Australians lose more than $32 billion on legal gambling each year, representing $1500 per person, the largest losses in the world. “The potential for harm has increased with the proliferation of online wagering sites and betting apps, which have fundamentally changed the way people gamble,” it says.
The assessment finds the government’s moves “adequate” – which turns out to be damning them with faint praise. Adequate is better than “insufficient” but not as good as “good practice” or “exemplary”.
Governments have long understood that gambling isn’t like ordinary commercial transactions. Like alcohol and smoking, consumption can become addictive to the point of damaging people’s health. Spending on the addiction may cost so much that the addict’s family lives in financial misery.
This is despite the evidence that gambling is a social problem. In 2021, one in four men who gamble were classed as either having a problem with their gambling or being at risk of it. According to a Victorian study, almost 40 per cent of problem gamblers had a diagnosed mental health condition.
But gambling also has a special attraction: offering people the opportunity to gamble is the easiest and most profitable way to make money anyone’s ever thought of. This is why charities use raffles for fundraising.
I like the smarties’ joke that gambling is a tax on the innumerate. If people were rational – as economists assume they are, but none of us actually is – they’d understand how infinitesimal are their chances of winning the prize and wouldn’t waste their money.
But behavioural economists remind us how bad people are at estimating probabilities. We’re also emotional beings. And when you’re selling a chance to gamble, you’re actually selling hope. For the brief time between buying a ticket and the running of the race, you can enjoy the hope that maybe you’ll win a motza.
All this is why governments have long understood that gambling has to be tightly regulated: to protect the unthinking from being exploited by the unscrupulous. They’ve also long understood that offering people a chance to gamble is so obscenely profitable that if it’s not banned, it should be heavily taxed (poker machines, for instance) or even owned by the government (state lotteries).
All this is what Albo didn’t want us thinking about.
Ross Gittins is economics editor.
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