Gambling Harm Awareness Week
Katherine COPSEY (Southern Metropolitan) (13:35): We have just come to the end of another Gambling Harm Awareness Week, with the now familiar messages about making more informed choices. The people who know most about gambling harm, advocates with lived experience of that harm, used the week to call for concrete action not just more awareness. That means action from those of us in this place to introduce reforms and protections such as mandatory carded play in Victoria and those in federal Parliament to ban gambling advertising. But just this week we have seen federal Labor refusing again to back our community and stand up to the gambling lobby. By shelving reform of gambling ads they are condemning us all and, most gallingly, another generation of kids to the incessant and harmful barrage of gambling ads that contaminate our nation’s love of sport with unhealthy gambling products pushed by a predatory industry. I have spoken many times in this place about Australia having the worst gambling harm figures in the world. But behind those figures is the litany of human misery: poverty, suicide, family violence and homelessness. As Anna Bardsley from GHLEE, Gambling Harm Lived Experience Experts, so clearly puts it:
Gambling companies think Australia is the place to come. ‘Come here. Look what they let us do here.’
Why do we have some of the weakest protections in the world? Why do our laws let gambling companies do so much? Because the political class of the old two parties are captured by the gambling industry, which we see so clearly from federal Labor’s actions this week. We welcome the introduction into Parliament today of the gambling reforms and look forward to reviewing those.