Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to acknowledge the support for the Greens amendment from the Nationals and also from Senator David Pocock, although I was much more enamoured of Senator Pocock's contribution than I was of Senator Canavan's. I want to make two fundamental points here in support of our amendment.

Firstly, what Labor is doing here is moving that a private senator's bill from the crossbench not be referred to a committee for inquiry. Now, that is a very unusual approach from the government and from Labor. It leads to the inescapable conclusion that there is a political reason for Labor not wanting this particular bill under the name of Senator Hanson-Young to go to an inquiry. Ask yourselves, colleagues, why it might be that the Labor Party doesn't want a bill that simply proposes a ban on gambling advertising—not a ban on gambling itself, I might add. Why is it the Labor Party doesn't want that legislation to go to inquiry? The answer is abundantly clear. Firstly, Labor doesn't want a platform to be created that would expose their mediocrity and their gutless failure to act on this issue and address the manifest harms caused by gambling advertising that were spoken about so eloquently by Senator David Pocock and by Senator Hanson-Young. Labor doesn't want a platform that would expose Labor's culpability in allowing this egregious social harm to continue to be perpetrated against so many Australians by a greedy, parasitic gambling industry. And Labor doesn't want to be exposed as the recipient of political donations from big gambling corporations in this country. It is an inescapable conclusion to this position of Labor that they are ashamed of their failure to act.

I want to say to Labor: if you are ashamed of your failure to act on gambling advertising—and you should be—the solution is clear. Join with the Greens and put in place a ban on gambling advertising, as proposed by Senator Hanson-Young's legislation, because the numbers are there in both houses of this parliament. With Labor having a majority in the House and Labor plus the Greens making a majority in this chamber, the numbers are there in both houses of this parliament to ban gambling advertising and to mitigate the massive social and personal harms caused to so many Australians by the parasitic actions of the greedy gambling operations. The numbers are there. There's only one thing stopping action, and that one thing is the Australian Labor Party.

So we have an opportunity, folks, to act. Now is the time. It's the perfect opportunity. The mood of the people is with us and the numbers are there in the parliament. What we are asking for today—just to be clear—is not your vote in support of this bill but simply your vote to send the bill to an inquiry so that people can come in and have their say. I think that is what Labor is fundamentally afraid of here. They don't want people to come in and share their stories, as Senator David Pocock has done, about the harms gambling advertising has inflicted on them. They don't want those stories told, because they know that when those stories are told the argument for change becomes inevitable and the argument to ban gambling advertising becomes too strong to resist.