The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Coalition have not just failed to protect Australian citizens, they have failed the clear moral test to simply do the right thing.
Fri 21 Aug 2026 14.00 AEST
Photo: Anthony Albanese speaks to Communications Minister Anika Wells during debate of the Gambling Reform Bill 2026 in the House of Representatives (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)
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The Prime Minister and the Leader of the Coalition have not just failed to protect Australian citizens, they have failed the clear moral test to simply do the right thing.
Labor has proven itself to be captured by vested interests and the Liberal Party has proven itself to be weak and toothless.
The biggest inducements of all are the donations that the gambling industry gives to political parties. Millions of dollars in political donations, fancy dinners, free tickets to sporting events, all given to buy influence with politicians.
Their investment has paid off. The laws that passed the parliament this week are deliberately designed to fail, keeping the gambling industry business model intact.
Three years ago the Murphy Review put to Parliament a simple but powerful proposition: to reduce gambling harm, Australia needed to stop the relentless advertising and promotion of the dangerous product.
It said simply “halfway measures do not work”.
It said ‘inducements’ — the tricks and gimmicks used to get gamblers to keep gambling must be banned because of their predatory and targeted nature.
And the report called for a national gambling regulator, a cop on the beat, because the gambling industry cannot be trusted to do the right thing.
Labor’s laws fail on all three points.
There’s no ad ban, no end to inducements and no gambling watchdog.
What would Peta Murphy say? This was a simple question I put to the Government in Question Time this week. They refused to answer. The eerie silence as my question hung in the air said it all.
The Labor and Liberal parties are so addicted to the gambling industry that despite all of the evidence and overwhelming public support for an advertising ban, the major parties have tied themselves in knots avoiding the simple solution: just ban the ads.
Every day my office receives more and more stories from Australians telling me their personal and heartbreaking accounts of gambling addiction and loss.
Quality research, analysis, explainers and factchecks from experts you can trust.
Stories full of shame and hurt, but from families desperate to be heard.
Too many stories of sons and fathers driven to suicide because they couldn’t see any other way of escaping the claws of the gambling predators.
For one victim who’s family has written to my office: even in death, the gambling companies would not let him go. His widow kept receiving inducement offers after her husband had killed himself.
Mothers who have had to bury their sons, who will never get to meet their grandchildren. Fathers who will never know retirement because they have no savings left after paying off their children’s debts.
Parents, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, as they desperately try to keep their loved ones from doing the ultimate heartbreaking act of ending their life to end their suffering and shame.
Decades worth of savings. Millions of dollars. Houses lost. To save a son with a gambling addiction.
The list goes on, and on, and on.
Yet it doesn’t seem to matter how many bodies pile up on these companies’ watch. Despite all of these heartbreaking stories, and so many more — Labor and the Liberals have chosen to prioritise the profits of the gambling companies over the interests of the community.
This is what is wrong with the state of politics in this country: when the evidence is so clear that the majority of Australians don’t want these ads, yet they are still not stopped.
The Albanese Government might think they’ve got a political win with the passage of these weak laws, but Australians want change.
No amount of political deception can hide the mounting toll lost to the gambling vultures.
Senator Sarah Hanson-Young is the Australian Greens spokesperson for communications and Senator for South Australia.
