Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to talk tonight about credit card gambling. I started the day talking about this, and I want to end the day talking about this. Australians spend $25 billion a year on gambling. We are, per capita, the worst gamblers in the world in the amount of money that we spend. I don't mind so much if someone wants to gamble their own money away, provided they can feed their kids, put shoes on their feet, send them to school and pay their bills. The states and territories have all banned the use of credit cards from places like TABs, from poker machines, from casinos and RSLs et cetera. There's one place you can still use your credit card to gamble, and that's on the internet. We as the Commonwealth government control that space, and we need to do better than we are doing right now. Twenty-five billion dollars a year is spent on gambling. Have a think about that. That's about six Sunshine Coast University Hospitals that could be built each and every year.

I've had lengthy discussions with the banks about this in the last couple of weeks—banks like Citibank, Suncorp, Macquarie and other smaller banks. These are banks that have made a conscious decision to ban the use of credit cards for gambling. But the big four banks haven't: Westpac, ANZ, Commonwealth and the National. So I've gone and seen senior executives from each of them. Do you know what, Mr Speaker? They agree with me. They are in furious agreement with me that the use of credit cards for online gambling should be banned, just as it is banned for gambling in the real world. We often talk about this issue. We often say that what is legal in the real world should be legal online and what is illegal in the real world should be illegal online. If you can't use your credit card at the track, at the pokies or at the TAB, why should you be able to use your credit card gambling at home on the internet? It's a very simple question.

Not only are people losing tens of thousands of dollars—in this case, up to $25 billion a year—in gambling, but when you use your credit card to gamble you are paying 22 per cent interest on the loss that you will inevitably incur when you gamble, because the house always wins. Ultimately, the house always wins. We are seeing people racking up debts of tens of thousands of dollars and paying 22 per cent interest as a result.

So I went to the banks and I said: 'This has got to change, and you should be out the front making those changes. It is your obligation to your customers. There is a moral imperative here that you make these changes.' They said: 'It's too hard. What we want you to do, Andrew, is press your colleagues in parliament to make us make those changes.' If the banks won't enter into a voluntary code of conduct amongst themselves, we can make simple changes to the Interactive Gambling Act to prohibit the use of credit cards and the likes of PayPal with gambling companies that operate online. It is very simple. This will save people's lives. We know that gambling is a root cause of things like domestic violence. This is an opportunity for us here in this place to do the right thing, and it is always the right time to do the right thing.

House adjourned at 20:00