David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

In the game of bridge, table talk is ruinous. A player might let their partner know that they have hearts by touching their chest, or they might play with their wedding ring when they have diamonds. This is cheating, plain and simple. Table talk is unfair for current players, discourages new players and hurts the organisations that host casual games of bridge and more serious bridge competitions. And they are serious, including national and international competitions.

When some people see a problem, they decide that something should be done about it, and they pretty quickly conclude that the government should be doing that something. So what should we do to crack down on table talk in bridge? Should we establish a government agency and fund it to police the bridge tables around the nation? And, if this agency finds a table talker, should we write a law that allows the agency to ban the table talker from ever sitting around a bridge table again? Surely the answer is no. I would like to think that everyone in this chamber believes that the answer is no. After all, bridge is just a game. Table talk is not a criminal act, and the organisations running the game can ban table talk without getting the government involved. In fact, they already do.

That brings me to the bill before the chamber, the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority Amendment Bill 2014. In the late 1980s, some people came to see Ros Kelly, the sports minister at the time, to say that something should be done about cheating in sport. I would imagine they did not mention table-talking in bridge. Instead, they would have focused on the use of steroids in more physically demanding sports. Ros Kelly should have told those people that sporting codes are perfectly capable of banning the use of performance-enhancing substances by their players. Instead, she created the Australian Sports Drug Agency, which has now become ASADA.

ASADA is a government agency that tells players in various sporting codes not to use various substances, from caffeine to peptides, many of which are perfectly legal. ASADA tests the players and, if it finds that the players use any of the various substances, it tells the sporting codes that the players cannot play anymore. I emphasise that we are talking about legal substances here, not illicit drugs. Taxpayers pay more than $12 million a year for ASADA to do this.

There is absolutely no justification for it. Sporting codes are owned and managed by private organisations. If they think their players should not take various legal substances, they can make that a rule of their sport. No-one wants to maintain the integrity and popularity of a sport more than the sporting codes themselves. What ASADA does cannot be justified on health grounds. There is no case for stopping a tiny percentage of people, mostly elite athletes, from taking caffeine or peptides while letting them punch each other in boxing, torture themselves in triathlons or attack each other's hamstrings in rugby league. It is none of the government's business.

This bill before the Senate ramps up ASADA's powers. ASADA already requires sporting codes to ostracise players who have taken the wrong substances. The bill will give ASADA the power to require sporting codes to ostracise players who merely associate with previously ostracised players. This is government overreach in the extreme, and for that reason I oppose this bill.

Finally, to those who agree that it would be ridiculous for the government to spend taxpayers' funds to crack down on cheating in a game like bridge but who fail to see the connection with the ASADA bill we are now debating, let me pass on some news: ASADA regulates the humble game of bridge. So, if your mother is on a diuretic and is playing in a serious bridge competition, she might be in for a shock; and, if you associate with her and play bridge, you might be as well.