ASIC chose not to mount a case that Crown’s directors breached their legal duties. It later explained that it did not have sufficient evidence to build an actionable case against them. The agency faced a harsh public rebuke, with the claim that James Packer and his establishment mates were just too powerful to be held personably accountable.

  Star was slapped with a $100-million fine and ASIC decided to throw the book at its management. As mentioned, nine former executives and directors of Star are being sued by the corporate regulator. This has been billed as potentially a groundbreaking case: if successful, it will, for the first time, clarify the responsibilities of directors. ASIC has already settled with former Star chief financial officer Harry Theodore and former chief casino officer Greg Hawkins, who admitted wrongdoing and agreed to a fine.90 The case against the others, including former CEO Matthias Bekier, is ongoing at the time of writing.

  Without doubt, the scandals have affected the viability of the casino industry. The fallout from the official inquiries and the increased regulation that has flowed from this has reduced the number of high rollers wanting to come to Australia. Blackstone has had to inject hundreds of millions into Crown to keep it afloat; staff have been laid off; and its market capitalisation has shrunk from $5 billion to $1.5 billion. Its flagship Southbank operation is similarly in need of a substantial injection of capital, having recently been described as ‘tired, outdated and in desperate need of a glow-up’.91

  Star has lurched from one financial crisis to another, with fears that its Queen’s Wharf project in Brisbane will be a white elephant. At the time of writing, Star’s troubled Queen’s Wharf casino in Brisbane was struggling to attract a financial backer, resulting in the company’s share price dropping to a record low of 9 cents.

  It’s no longer clear that Australia’s casinos will be profitable in an era of greater regulation. The wild ride appears to be over. The New South Wales government banned poker machines from the Barangaroo casino, despite fierce lobbying from Blackstone executives.92 In addition, the greedy CEOs have moved on, the crims have been cleaned out, and the private jets have stopped flying in from China. But how long will the impasse last?

  12 ALBO DUCKS FOR COVER

  The headline on 4 April 2023 was like a mask falling from a face: ‘Betting inquiry sees wagering companies squirm over blocking winning gamblers’. The ABC was reporting on the federal parliamentary inquiry into online gambling and its impacts on those experiencing gambling harm, established the year before by the House of Representatives’ Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs and chaired by Labor MP Peta Murphy. The Big Gambling companies’ dirty secrets were finally being aired in public, although they were known in gambling circles.1

  Murphy engaged in tense exchanges with the CEOs of some of the biggest online gambling companies in the nation. She had dug up material on the manipulative underpinnings of the industry’s business model and wanted the bookmakers to face a Canberra grilling.2 Under questioning, the public learned that if a gambler was winning, the companies would slow down their bets; if they still won, they’d be banned. But if gamblers were losing, they’d be showered with inducements to keep them betting.

  These revelations were just the start of the committee’s impact. Headline after headline poured from its hearings, revealing the social misery that underpinned the gambling industry’s towering profits. A particular focus was the damage wrought by the industry’s saturation advertising: a generation was being groomed into gambling. When the committee issued its final report in June 2023 calling for gambling advertisements to be banned, a shockwave went through the political system. It could scarcely be imagined that the gambling industry, one of the most powerful in the country, was having the blowtorch of scrutiny applied to it in such a public manner.

  It is curious, therefore, that the inquiry led by Peta Murphy had been established almost by chance. In the wake of the 2022 federal election, which brought the Labor Party, led by Anthony Albanese, to power, Labor backbencher Murphy was disappointed at having missed out on a ministry. One day, she was sharing a gin and tonic with her neighbour, prominent gambling reform campaigner Tim Costello, who offered a suggestion: ‘Why not an inquiry into gambling?’3

  Murphy embraced Costello’s suggestion. Although gambling reform had not previously been one of her priorities, her outer-Melbourne electorate of Dunkley contains disadvantaged areas with large numbers of poker machines, and Murphy had observed the social damage they had created.4 She was confident she could convince Amanda Rishworth, the social services minister, of the need for a public inquiry. Rishworth agreed and, according to Costello, ‘it basically escaped Albanese’s notice’. Murphy chaired the groundbreaking committee.5

  The inquiry’s call for a ban on gambling ads sparked media and public interest. Hatred of gambling ads had been widespread and growing. One committee member, Labor’s Louise Miller-Frost, blurted out a comment during one of the committee’s public hearings that seemed to sum up the disquiet members felt about the ubiquity of gambling advertising: ‘People are saying, “I can’t put the TV on, I can’t watch sport, I can’t drive with the radio on in the car, I can’t go on social media – it is just everywhere.”’6 Her spontaneous outburst reflected public opinion. A study by think-tank The Australia Institute found 70 per cent support for a ban on gambling ads.7

  But there was much more to the Murphy Inquiry’s recommendations than ridding our screens of gambling ads. The committee also called for the creation of a designated federal minister in charge of reducing gambling harm, and for a national strategy funded by a levy on gambling companies that would be informed by a public health approach. This call for a public health approach called into question the industry’s self-serving constructs of ‘responsible gambling’ and ‘problem gamblers’. The committee also wanted a national regulator for the industry that would enforce stricter standards on gambling companies, by which inducements would be banned and a legislated duty of care would underpin their operations. Lastly, the committee called for a public education campaign that would aim to counter the years of damage caused by the industry’s advertising.

  It was a big agenda but this seemed to be a once-in-a-generation opportunity. It appeared that the political stars had aligned and the government might finally achieve significant reform. Unsurprisingly, Peta Murphy and her committee would encounter stiff opposition. The industry would vigorously fight any reforms they put up. But committee members went for broke anyway, achieving bipartisan support for a bold approach to counter the many harms gambling caused the community. Much of this was due to Murphy’s inspired leadership and advocacy.

  A fighter for gambling reform

  With degrees in psychology and law and a career spent working in legal aid, Murphy appeared to have more in common with grassroots independent politicians than with those produced by the major parties’ ruthless machines. She was a founding member of Open Labor, a group that sought to change the Labor Party from the inside, to make it more welcoming to a greater variety of personal backgrounds and more amenable to wide-ranging discussion. As one member explained, Open Labor’s approach could be summed up in a simple question: ‘Hang on, what is the problem here and how can we engage people to solve it?’8

  Murphy was elected to the federal parliament in 2016. According to Tim Costello, she had ‘a fierce instinct for social justice’. Former independent senator Rex Patrick said Murphy was ‘a rare politician with the courage to take on a big and avaricious industry’.9 Murphy brought special qualities to her chairing of the committee – notably, her commitment to ensuring everyone had their chance to be heard. She didn’t allow any political point-scoring; her focus was always on the content of the issues; and she encouraged cross-party collaboration. One Labor MP described Murphy’s approach as one of ‘quiet diplomacy’.10 But she also had the tenacity to make the powerful squirm as she sought the truth.

  Murphy’s life was also caught up in personal tragedy. Aged just 50, she succumbed to a recurrence of the breast cancer that had first struck her in her 30s. She died in December 2023, just months after the committee’s report – titled You Win Some, You Lose More – was released. She had spent her last months in defiance of the illness that was robbing her of life. She refused to wear a wig to hide her head made bald by chemotherapy because she wanted to show solidarity with other cancer sufferers.

  Her sad and untimely death elevated recognition of the committee’s work and its recommendations. The proposed ban on gambling advertising became known as ‘Murphy’s Law’,11 and her work chairing the committee was acknowledged as a ‘legacy’.

  A ‘universally adored figure’, Murphy and her husband, Rod Glover, were longstanding personal friends of Anthony Albanese. The prime minister shed tears as he announced her death to the media.12 It was an occasion where politics became very personal. But what would Albanese do about his friend’s legacy? As Glover told the media, Murphy ‘wouldn’t have copped that it was too hard to implement a total ban [on gambling advertising]’.13

  There appeared to be broad community support for the Murphy Inquiry’s recommendations. The moment offered a chance for Albanese to take action in a key area of social reform. From the time of the report’s release, the media, commentators and independent MPs all pressured the government to announce its response. However, Albanese and his Minister for Communications, Michelle Rowland, batted away any demands for a response with the time-honoured political retort that ‘the matter was under consideration’.

  As the pressure mounted, Albanese announced in September 2024 that a partial ban on gambling advertising would be introduced, and just as quickly withdrew the government’s only response to the Murphy Inquiry. Behind all the dithering and obfuscation, the message was clear: the government didn’t want to pursue gambling reform.

  Reform shelved

  In mid-November 2024, I was sitting in a cafe in the inner-city Perth suburb of Subiaco interviewing Kate Chaney, one of the ‘teal’ independent MPs who swept aside sitting Liberals at the 2022 election, and who had been a member of the Murphy committee. It had been nearly 18 months since the inquiry’s report had been released and I wanted to hear Chaney’s thoughts on its impact.

  I couldn’t help thinking of the defeat of Andrew Wilkie’s attempted implementation of mandatory pre-commitment 12 years earlier, when Prime Minister Julia Gillard had capitulated to an aggressive gambling industry campaign. What would happen this time?

  The signs weren’t promising. As ABC Melbourne radio presenter Jon Faine wrote on the eve of the inquiry, gambling reform had become a political black hole: ‘There is a conveyor belt running from pokies to prison … Every family violence worker … any drug or alcohol therapist, any mental health worker, any suicide counsellor will confirm the wreckage left by gambling addiction … Yet nothing changes.’14

  As Chaney and I settled into our conversation, it struck me why many voters have shifted their allegiance away from the two major parties to endorse independents. The highly intelligent Chaney had previous careers as a lawyer and as an international corporate consultant, but shining through was her commitment to solving problems in the public interest. Many think the steady decline in the major parties’ primary vote shows that they are perceived as being ruled too much by political self-interest.

  I wanted to find out why Chaney thought the committee’s report appeared to have been shelved, or at least kicked into the long grass. I could anticipate her answer, of course, but it was important to hear from someone who had been in the thick of the debate.

  ‘I could talk for hours on the subject,’ Chaney began. Like most people who take up the gambling cause, she was brought to it, she explained, through a horrifying personal story relayed to her. But, as a newly elected MP, she’d also heard horror stories from people about the impact of gambling on their teenage sons and the way gambling had become a normalised part of sport. Many MPs have heard similar things from their own constituents.

  The failure of the government to respond to the Murphy Inquiry’s recommendations, Chaney said, is ‘an important example of why the two-party system is broken’. She explained: ‘Members of both sides of the parliament come up to me and say, “Keep up the good work on gambling, we need to do more,” but they don’t feel they can speak up publicly because party interests take priority above their community interests.’ They feel ‘trapped in the party system,’ Chaney said.

  And driving these party interests were powerful vested interests, ever willing and able to flex their muscle.

  Skewering the gambling industry

  Chaney told me that the evidence the committee heard on the perils of online gambling was confronting, and that this had a cumulative impact on committee members’ resolve to tackle the issue in a bipartisan way with bold reform. This alone made the committee unusual.

  New methods of calculating the growing scale of community harm had been developed, and a new reality emerged. The industry’s claim that less than 1 per cent of Australians were affected by gambling addiction – a statistic that pre-dated the online revolution – was officially debunked.

  Queensland Central University informed the committee of the findings of its longitudinal studies into problem gamblers, the first of which was done in 2011 and the second in 2021. The researchers found that the rate of problem gambling among online gamblers – those who use apps and the internet to place bets – is three times that of those who play the pokies.15 This finding contradicted the consensus that pokies were still the main problem in the community. This increase in gambling harm in Australia, the researchers highlighted, stands in contrast to the situation in many overseas jurisdictions, where the prevalence of problem gambling is static or declining.

  The Gambling Research Centre at the Australian Institute of Family Studies presented its findings relating to the Problem Gambling Severity Index. This uses nine questions to map gambling intensity from low to high. Research it conducted in 2022 found that almost half (46 per cent) of Australians aged 18 and over who gambled would be classified as being at risk of or already experiencing gambling harm.16

  Experts told the committee of the enormous damage being done to children through gambling advertising. Monash University’s Charles Livingstone bluntly stated that the evidence showed ‘there is enormous harm being done to those young people, and their desire to gamble becomes fairly obvious’.17

  The committee heard from a wider range of experts on gambling harm than had previously been considered, and, consequently, a more accurate picture emerged. Shocking data, for example, was provided by peak body Financial Counselling Australia. In its 2022 national survey of the financial counselling sector, the organisation found that 80 per cent of financial counsellors specialising in gambling harm reported that they had clients who talked about suicide, and 48 per cent had clients who had attempted to take their lives.

  Financial counsellors had been concerned about the issue for years. In 2015 the organisation had released a report raising the alarm about the rising rate of gambling-related suicides. Its manager of policy and strategic projects, Lauren Levin, won a Churchill Fellowship in 2020 to study online gambling harm in Europe and Britan. On her return from overseas, she said:

  I went to countries who were stopping gambling advertising and inducements, and actively requiring gambling operators to not let people lose their homes. I’m angry because we have done so little, and have been so unambitious in our thinking. We get caught up on tiny changes, when only comprehensive reform will work.18

  One estimate indicates such inaction leads to 400 Australians harmed by gambling committing suicide every year.19

  Suicidal impulses emerged as perhaps the darkest side of Big Gambling. In fact, the spokesperson for Financial Counselling Australia highlighted the lack of a national discussion around the issue, and the absence of a national plan to tackle ‘what might very well be a national gambling suicide epidemic’. No one had ever publicly suggested that such a phenomenon existed. In defence of its claim, the organisation told committee members that suicides provoked by gambling harm are often not recorded in that way, ‘because police preparing the coronial reports look for health data, but not financial-gambling data’.20

  Gambling-induced suicide actuality or ideation is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon, and psychologists from Sydney University’s Gambling Treatment and Research Clinic explained why. Many younger men, they testified, were motivated by such factors as risk taking, sensation-seeking, competitiveness, inherent interest in sporting events, and a desire to demonstrate their skill and prowess. Gambling ‘can act as a boost to masculinity’.21 And gambling ads exploited this vulnerability.

  The ripple effects of men’s toxic relationship to gambling harm were analysed by the committee. Personal stories provided by Relationships Australia highlighted the problem. One client was a prominent former athlete who constantly watched sports on TV. He was a classic ‘leisure gambler’. When watching AFL matches, he placed bets on things such as who would kick the first goal, who would lay the next tackle or how many disposals a particular player would get. When he lost, ‘he became angry and aggressive. He sought help and stopped watching sports on television in order to avoid gambling triggers.’