Unfettered gambling advertising means young Australians are losing big
If you’re sick of ads for sport betting interrupting the footy – or anything else you watch on TV – you’re probably not alone, writes Dr Morgan Harrington.
Free-to-air TV shows more than a million gambling ads a year – and this is not to mention the online torrent.
If 85 per cent of 12-17 year olds have seen a gambling ad on TV in the past month, is it any wonder that young people talk about betting odds like they once did player stats?
The $244.3 billion in bets made by Australians in in 2022-23 makes us the world’s biggest gamblers, and the saturation level of advertising is probably one reason that since 2019, average gambling losses have increased to almost $2500 a year – that’s more than the average home pays for a year’s worth of electricity.
As a nation, we lost a collective $31.5 billion, which is comparable to the size of the entire Northern Territory economy ($33.1 billion), and greater than the $21 billion lost to gambling in all of Las Vegas.
As if the harm gambling causes to adults isn’t bad enough, analysis by the Australia Institute shows that large numbers of Australians start gambling well before they reach the legal minimum age of 18.
Almost one in three (30 per cent) 12-17-year-olds gamble, and this increases to almost half (46 per cent) when young people turn 18. More than 900,000 teenagers (aged 12-19) gambled in the past year.
That’s enough to fill the MCG nine times over, and it means that Australian teenagers are more likely to gamble than they are to play any of the most popular team sports. Gambling companies accept an estimated $18.4 million a year in illegal bets from underage Australians.
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The good news is that there’s something the Labor government could do, if only it listened to advice from its own parliamentarians.
In 2023, the Australian parliament released the results of its inquiry into online gambling and gambling advertising. Its official title is You Win Some, You Lose More, but it’s more often called the Murphy review, after the late Labor MP Peta Murphy who chaired the inquiry.
The Murphy review recommended 31 ways to better regulate gambling in Australia, including a ban on all forms of advertising for online gambling.
Australia Institute polling research shows widespread support for this kind of initiative.
Three in four Australians (76 per cent) support a total ban on gambling ads phased in over three years, and four in five support banning gambling ads on social media and online (81 per cent) and in stadiums and on players’ uniforms (79 per cent).
The report also calls for a single Australian government minister to be made responsible for online gambling and for an online gambling ombudsman to be established.
As it stands, the Commonwealth has no oversight over the companies that have flooded our screens with betting ads. Instead, in an arrangement that allows online bettering companies to pay less tax, Australia’s de-facto online gambling regulator is the Northern Territory Racing Commission.
But none of the recommendations of the Murphy review have been taken up. Although Labor floated the idea of a ban on advertising in August 2024, it was never introduced.
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According to a report in The Sydney Morning Herald, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese shelved the reforms, allegedly because they would put media and sports organisations offside in the lead-up to the federal election.
The gambling industry has deep enough pockets for our elected members to get lost in.
Analysis by Reuters found that Australia’s parliamentarians accepted $245,000 in free tickets to sporting events at the same time they were supposedly considering the advertising ban.
The Prime Minister alone got $29,000 in tickets, mostly to Rabbitohs’ games and grand finals. Then Opposition Leader Peter Dutton got $21,350 worth.
Australia’s professional sporting codes support the gambling industry because they get a cut worth millions.
Political donations from the industry are common. A 2021 ABC investigation found that gambling-related donors made more than $80 million in political payments between 1998 and 2020.
In the run-up to the 2022 election, Michelle Rowland accepted a $19,000 donation from Sportsbet. In the months after Rowland’s election and appointment as Communications Minister, Responsible Wagering Australia – a group that represents Sportsbet, Ladbrokes, and Bet365 – picked up the tab for her lavish birthday lunch.
As minister, she was responsible for considering the ban on gambling advertising. She is now Australia’s Attorney-General.
In a matter of years, gambling has become normalised among young Australians and the only ones happy about it are the companies that are raking in millions from vulnerable people.
As the Murphy review makes clear: “Australians do not like being flooded by messages and inducements to gamble online and worry about the effect this is having on children and young people.”
Through the inquiry, Murphy achieved a rare consensus in Australian politics – ambitious reforms taking on vested interests that were backed by every parliamentarian on the committee, Labor, Liberal and independent alike.
The Albanese government knows what the answers are – all it needs to do is implement the recommendations of a unanimously supported review led by a respected Labor MP.
Dr Morgan Harrington is a postdoctoral research manager at The Australia Institute.
