Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

People shouldn't bet with money they don't have. It's really as simple as that. But betting with money they don't have is exactly what happens to people who are experiencing gambling harm. At the very least, they bet with money they can't afford. This is an important piece of legislation to continue us down the track of harm minimisation by putting in place a prohibition on using credit cards for gambling—because that is the very definition of gambling with money that you don't have.

As the Chair of the House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, I had the privilege of chairing an inquiry which wrapped up in the middle of this year into harms from online gambling. We in this country have to acknowledge that gambling is a public health issue and that gambling is an addiction and start talking about it and treating it similarly to the way we treat other mental health issues and addiction problems, such as alcohol and drug abuse. We have to take away the stigma and let people know that they are suffering from an addiction but that they can talk about it and they can get help and they shouldn't feel ashamed that they need help to deal with the harms that they're experiencing from gambling or the harms that they're inflicting on others from their gambling. They shouldn't feel reluctant to speak out.

This is Gambling Harm Awareness Week. On Tuesday, I was joined for a Facebook live session by Jesse Murphy—no relation—from my electorate, an incredibly courageous 29-year-old man who talked about his experience of becoming a gambling addict—what it did to him, how it made him feel, how it affected his relationships with his flatmates, his friends and, importantly, his family and his parents and how hard it was for him to overcome it. It was hard for him to overcome it in the face of the bombardment of ads on the television telling him to bet. He's a footy player, an AFL player. It was hard for him to overcome in the face of everything to do with the AFL—the AFL app and the AFL advertising online—talking about sports betting. It was hard for him to deal with it in the face of the fact that he'd been given a personal concierge. After he'd gone almost a year without betting, he was out one night and they rang him and offered him free tickets, matched bets—things that he just couldn't resist—and he went back down that rabbit hole.

But he's courageous, because he was speaking to me on a Facebook Live in order to, as he said, maybe help just one person not to experience that themselves, maybe just help one person to understand that if you feel that you might have a problem then you've probably got a problem, that if you feel that it's something you need to get help for, you probably need to get help for it. This piece of legislation would have been very helpful for Jesse when he was in the grips of his addiction.

Another reform brought in by the Albanese Labor government—BetStop, which is now live—has been really helpful to Jesse, and he spoke about that as well. BetStop is a way that people can basically exclude themselves from all online gambling bookmakers for periods of time from three to six months to life, which is what Jesse chose. He explained that once he'd banned himself he had this feeling of freedom, this feeling of safety, of letting go, but that it wasn't that easy to do it, even for someone who's been going to Gamblers Anonymous, who's been getting counselling from psychologists and who is being all he can be in building up his wellbeing and resilience.

Jesse said the process of filling in that form to exclude himself for the rest of his life from being able to gamble and pressing that button was harder than he ever imagined it would be, because it represented a phase of his life and giving away something in his life. His gambling addiction was related to wanting to feel thrills and adventure. He said he'd spoken to a couple of other people with problems with gambling, and they said the same thing: once they excluded themselves there was this feeling of freedom and accomplishment and a sense of being able to get on with the next phase of their lives, but the steps getting to excluding themselves were harder than they thought they would be. So, BetStop is a game-changing reform, but perhaps we need to think about how we can better help people to get through the psychological barriers of accessing it.

The two takeaways from my conversation with Jesse on Tuesday night in terms of reforms were how important BetStop is and how we have to get rid of ads for gambling. We have to get rid of them from our television screens, our radios and online, because they target people who are vulnerable, they target young people, and the harm from gambling is not worth retaining gambling ads in our advertising system. In Australia we are world-champion gamblers. We not only gamble more than any other country in the world; we lose more by gambling online than any other country in the world. And whilst I love the thought of Australians being world champions, that is not a title we want to retain. Per capita we lose more by gambling online than any other country in the world.

So I'm really pleased at the positive response of the Minister for Communications and the Minister for Social Services to the report that the committee that I'm the chair of handed down: You win some, you lose more, on the harms from online gambling. I'm really looking forward to the government's formal response to the recommendations in that report, because I know they get it; I know those ministers understand that gambling is a public health issue, that it must be treated from a harm reduction perspective and that harm reduction starts at preventing people from suffering harm in the first place and goes along the spectrum to then helping people who are in the grips of an addiction. I know that as long as we have people like Jesse Murphy, who is courageous and who has taken the worst experiences of his life and decided to speak about them publicly to help others, we will get the reforms and the changes that we need. Those stories are incredibly powerful.

My committee, when recommending that the government continue on the path we are now finalising, to ban the use of credit cards, also noted that the government should look at the use of payday loans. There seems to be emerging evidence—and Financial Counselling Australia talked about this in the inquiry—that gamblers are using payday loans to gamble. So we also have to make sure that compliance of payday loan lenders with their responsible gambling obligations is on the agenda.

I congratulate the minister for this piece of legislation. It's going to make a lot of difference to a lot of people and their families and their communities. I reiterate that I'm right there beside the minister for reforms to address the other harms that continue to pervade our community from the scourge which is gambling.

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