Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs. Will the minister update the House on the government’s efforts to address problem gambling and any other approaches to this issue?

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the honourable member for Wakefield for his question. He, like so many others in this House, really understands that problem gambling wrecks so many lives. People who are addicted to gambling know, unfortunately, that it is a very dangerous and damaging drug. It wrecks families and it wrecks workplaces. So many people in Australia are suffering from it. It is hard to believe that, on a per capita basis, Australia has roughly five times as many gaming machines as the United States. We certainly know that there are no easy solutions. There is a mountain of challenges that we have to address when confronting this difficult area.

Just today, the Prime Minister met with Tim Costello to discuss some of the ways in which this very difficult issue should be tackled. Key to tackling this problem has to be working with a very wide range of stakeholders. I will be convening a meeting of the Ministerial Council on Gambling. Those opposite might be aware that the council was originally established in 1999. It is made up of state and territory gambling ministers and is chaired by the Commonwealth. When this council was originally established, the then Prime Minister said that the council would ‘focus on stopping further expansion of gambling in Australia’. It is amazing then that the council has not met since 2006. I say to those opposite: how on earth can a council stop the expansion of gambling if it does not meet?

Unfortunately, it is the case that the Howard government’s inaction on gambling did not stop there. In fact, its record reads like an expose of how little the previous government cared about this very, very serious social and economic menace. Let us go through some of the things that the Howard government said it would do. It said that it would establish a national advisory body and it then disbanded it in 2003. In addition, a ministerial working group to consider access to cash in gaming venues was dissolved in 2006. It is hardly surprising that the state governments in South Australia and Victoria gave up waiting on the Howard government to do anything and had to act on their own accord to limit access to cash machines in gambling venues. You would think that the previous government worked overtime not to do anything about problem gambling.

However, it does seem that there was quite a spurt of activity back in 2003. Back then, the Howard government did think about running a national campaign on problem gambling. Just one example of its thinking was the $1.1 million it spent on getting an agency to develop storyboards for another creative content campaign. An amount of $1.1 million was spent on these creative storyboards. I am sure that the Minister for Health and Ageing is very interested in what the previous government spent $1.1 million on. This is what it actually spent the money on. The Minister for Health and Ageing rightly says, ‘And then what happened?’ Absolutely nothing. The former government wasted $1.1 million on these pictures and presentations about possible ideas for an advertising campaign to help encourage people to stop gambling, and nothing came of it—a waste of $1.1 million with zero to show for it. It just goes to show that this previous government did absolutely nothing to deal with what is a very, very serious social and economic menace in this country—and we intend to do something about it.