The consequences of this affected the life of the client’s entire family. His partner and children were no longer able to watch sport on TV at home, and the client wasn’t able to attend his children’s sporting events without being triggered. ‘The problem was so overwhelming for the client that going to his children’s sports events prompted urges to gamble that ultimately led him to abstain from attending.’ His online gambling had restricted his family’s lifestyle choices ‘and ultimately limited the degree to which the client was able to share his children’s lives’.22 Such intimate but devastating effects had rarely, if ever, surfaced publicly before.

  Then there was the question of the relationship between gambling and domestic violence. The Murphy Inquiry heard evidence of this link – as would Prime Minister Albanese’s own panel of domestic violence experts.

  In April 2024 Albanese established the panel after community uproar over the spate of killings of women early in the year. Albanese labelled the rise in homicides involving women and children as a national crisis. The experts, including renowned feminist, author and senior public administrator Anne Summers, said the government must pursue a total ban on gambling advertising and introduce stronger pokies regulation if it wanted to get serious about protecting women.

  The panel’s report issued a blunt conclusion: not enough attention was being given to the links between problem gambling and violence. Policy decisions barely considered it. But the evidence showed that gambling escalated the frequency or severity of gendered violence: ‘Survivor accounts illustrate how men’s gambling harms can create situations that heighten the risk of intimate partner violence, such as men experiencing anger and shame over losses and responding with violence when female partners objected to gambling behaviours.’23 The panel endorsed the Murphy Inquiry’s report and recommendations.

  As I waded through the voluminous evidence presented to Peta Murphy’s committee, it was impossible not to be shaken by the suffering of so many Australians at the hands of Big Gambling. It underscored for me that a national crisis had arisen out of the rapid and unregulated spread of online gambling, which of course was building on a gambling culture already saturated in poker machines in clubs and casinos.

  The call for an advertising ban became a focus of the committee’s work. And, predictably, it led to a fierce backlash from the big television networks and the two big football codes. While the online bookies largely stayed out of the fray – they knew they could leave it to the two more highly exposed actors to protect their interests – the backlash exposed how financially intertwined these sectors had become. Banning ads threatened to stall the business model of gambling companies and remove an estimated $300 million of revenue from the free-to-air TV stations, which were already feeling a steady decline in their advertising revenue as companies redirected their advertising dollars towards the internet. And it would puncture the profits of the AFL and the NRL, which were incentivised through their broadcast deals to grow the gambling market.

  Channel Nine, which also owns The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, had a TV rights deal with the NRL. Channel Seven had long-standing rights to broadcasting AFL, while Lachlan Murdoch’s Fox Sports was heavily invested in both codes. Swirling around the media industry was speculation that Australia could no longer support three commercial TV stations and that Channel Ten – which had the lowest ratings of all – was merely limping along.24

  Gambling advertising had been a sugar hit for the TV industry. But the highs its revenue offered needed continual reinforcement. Income from gambling ads was needed to pay for the escalating rights to football broadcasting, monies the TV industry recouped through gambling advertising. A three-headed monster has been created under the noses of sports fans and voters, who had never consented to its creation.

  Would the Albanese government rise to the occasion and implement the Murphy Inquiry’s full list of bold recommendations?

  Albanese’s leadership

  Kate Chaney was one of many gambling reformers calling for courageous leadership on the issue. ‘It’s a fantastic opportunity for Albanese to show he can lead with strength and prioritise the public interest over vested interests,’ she said. ‘We did it with tobacco and there’s no reason we can’t do it with gambling.’25 Chaney’s was just one voice among a growing chorus calling for Albanese to enact an advertising ban.

  As Charles Livingstone had told the Murphy Inquiry, tobacco had once been a prominent advertiser in the major football codes in Australia, and in motor racing and cricket and everywhere else:

  It’s not so long ago that the NRL trophy was known as the Winfield Cup. The Fitzroy footy club was sponsored by Winfield. There was a Benson & Hedges Cup in cricket and so on … The codes themselves finally came to the view that it was a good idea not to be associated with such products.26

  Over the years, Australian governments have introduced some of the strictest anti-smoking measures anywhere in the world. There is a total ban on any messaging that aims to persuade people to smoke. This is complemented by plain packaging laws, the banning of logos and branding on packets of cigarettes, and the introduction of graphic health warnings. By a large margin, community opinion favoured a similar approach to gambling advertising and promotion.

  Livingstone argued that the sky was unlikely to fall in for the sporting codes if gambling advertising revenue was withdrawn: ‘although gambling advertising is easy money for the broadcasters, there are plenty of other people out there who want to advertise and, I suspect, would be prepared to pay quite high premiums for the audience which is delivered by AFL or NRL games [and] cricket matches’.27 Livingstone’s assessment is borne out by the figures. While the gambling industry spends a total of $300 million a year on advertising, this is estimated to be less than one-tenth of retail advertising; in other words, it would not be a difficult amount to replace.28

  Months slipped by following the release of the Murphy Inquiry’s report in June 2023, and campaigners for reform, including Chaney and Tim Costello, began to fear the government lacked the courage to take on the vested interests around gambling. But Albanese’s failure to respond in a timely manner was part of a larger critique of his government’s record.

  In September 2024, the prime minister received a gut-punch from one of Labor’s own. Bill Kelty, a trade union stalwart from the Hawke–Keating era, seemed to capture the political zeitgeist, at least among progressive voters, when he described the Albanese government as ‘mired in mediocracy’. He said: ‘We need a Labor Party agenda in which the big issues are confronted.’29 Kelty didn’t mention gambling, but the Murphy Inquiry had made it crystal-clear that it was a ‘big issue’ that demanded structural reform. As Jenny Ware, a Liberal Party member of the committee, said, gambling had become ‘a national social and health epidemic’.30

  So why didn’t Albanese grab hold of the bipartisan support for the committee’s recommendations on gambling and introduce a reform package? He must have known that there was overwhelming public support so why the endless drift?

  Like prime ministers before him, Albanese has eschewed any commitment to broader gambling reform. And he lacks a coherent view of the problems of Big Gambling, having issued a number of contradictory statements. He has described gambling advertising during sport as ‘reprehensible’ but has played down the problems it creates. He once showed his complete lack of understanding of the link between adverting and gambling harm by saying that ‘the problem isn’t advertising, the problem is gambling’.31 In January 2023, prior to the release of the Murphy Inquiry’s report, he refused to consider a nationwide shakeup of the sector, insisting that whether there were too many poker machines was a matter for the states.32 Of course, the states and the Commonwealth cooperate on many social and infrastructure issues.

  Albanese is a man of traditional Labor values but he is also unafraid to embrace the virtues of wealth and individual aspiration.33 Despite his youthful image as a left-leaning firebrand, Albanese has evolved into a cautious pragmatist. He’s been schooled in machine party politics, which is largely transactional in nature. Most agree that he’s a decent person and has managed to avoid the swelling ego that is so characteristic of recent prime ministers. His high-school nickname of ‘Albo’ is still with him, and is used affectionately across the country.

  But there is also something inexplicable about Albanese’s inability to grasp the urgency of gambling reform. His backstory is well known: he was the son of a struggling single mother, and they had often lived dirt poor in public housing. But his experience of privation doesn’t extend to an understanding of the often ruinous impact of gambling. Albanese could hardly have ignored the stories plastered across the media over recent years about the harm gambling causes working people, the very people he represents.

  Driving Albanese’s mindset is his political identity, forged in the tradition of a tribal Labor warrior. His hard-left factional alignment might suggest that the young Albanese was motivated by traditional left-wing social justice causes, but there’s no evidence that he was. In fact, those familiar with the bitter factional disputes of the New South Wales Labor Party in the late 1970s and the 1980s attest that the ‘hard left was driven almost purely by personal rivalry, ambition, and outright contempt for the party’s rank-and-file’.34 Its rival, the so-called ‘soft left’, was driven by more traditional Labor social justice ideals. Albanese was schooled in an inane factional game, the intensity of which during the late 1970s occasionally escalated into actual violence between left faction members. When the hard left won its battle with its rival, Albanese’s first act as faction leader was to call a truce with the right.35 Albanese the pragmatist emerged even before he entered parliament in 1996.

  According to The Australian Financial Review’s international editor, James Curran, Albanese ‘has never been a big picture politician. Pushing and shoving his faction into line has been his metier.’ The prime minister was defined, according to Curran, ‘by situation politics: he operates in the moment’.36 And in line with this view, Albanese’s government did some good things on Labor’s traditional focus areas of health, education and childcare, but shied away from tackling powerful vested interests or intractable social and environmental problems.

  When questioned about the lack of a substantial reform agenda during his first term of government, Albanese invoked the need for Labor to be a long-term government – the suggestion being that boldness could somehow compromise this political objective. According to The Age’s Sean Kelly, it was a deliberate strategy for the government to avoid fights.37 Others agree. Writing in The Guardian, Paul Daley sums up Albanese’s radar-like survival instinct: ‘He is gimlet-eyed to political threat, internal and external. This can sometimes render him overly cautious – although he can also rely too heavily on his own instinct and as a result have a cloth ear when it comes to anticipating likely public reaction.’38

  Albanese, of course, rejects the assertion of timidity, but well-placed commentators who mount this assessment of the government’s tentativeness see that it is reflected in his laggard response to the Murphy Inquiry and to gambling reform more generally. The public overwhelmingly wants reform, but that means the politicians must take on powerful vested interests.

  Then there’s Albanese’s disconnect from gambling as a social and health problem. Tim Costello engaged with the prime minister about his views on gambling harm. He painted Albanese’s thinking on the issue as elusive and circular. According to Costello, Albanese began by saying that as he’s not a gambler, he can’t understand gambling addiction. Then he pulled out the very arguments that were interrogated and debunked at the Murphy Inquiry. Costello’s impression was that the PM hadn’t read the Murphy Inquiry’s report.39

  In his discussion with Costello, Albanese referred to gambling reformers as prohibitionists and claimed that ‘they’re out there everywhere’. It sounded vaguely paranoid. When Costello asked Albanese to name one of these so-called prohibitionists, he declined. But he fell back on a familiar retort: that he ‘doesn’t want to stop people having a flutter’.

  At one point in the conversation, Costello raised the issue of the Randwick Labor Club, with its bank of poker machines, and the PM responded by saying, ‘Oh yeah, it’s in my electorate, it’s a great club. I love it.’ When Costello responded by saying that the Australian Labor Party was the only Western political party with ties to gambling, the PM ducked the question: ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

  Albanese’s response to Costello’s questioning offers a telling reminder about Labor’s longstanding connections to the poker machines and clubs industry. Albo has imbibed this culture and is aware of the power the industry exerts in Labor’s heartland. Thus, he’s philosophically opposed to a strict regulatory approach to gambling. He’s drawn a distinction between the tobacco and gambling industries. Unlike the former, he has argued, there’s no problem with the occasional punt – the challenge is getting the balance right in order to prevent problem gambling.40 But Albanese hasn’t said what a ‘balanced’ response looks like.

  I pressed Costello on what he thinks lies behind Albanese’s disinclination to engage with the issue of gambling harm. He thinks the PM ‘is so marinated in clubs and pokies culture that he literally does not see the social harm caused by gambling’. It’s a cultural thing with Albanese, he believes, as it is with many of the apologists for Big Gambling.41

  When I interviewed Costello again several months later, his critique of Albanese’s failure to lead on gambling reform had become even sharper. He began slowly, his deep voice forming his words deliberately. ‘Of all the prime ministers I’ve known,’ he said, ‘and I’ve known all of them since Menzies, Albanese is the most gambling-captured prime minister I’ve ever seen.’42 He meant this in both a political and a policy sense. By his own declaration, the prime minister has no personal interest in gambling.43 But, as I’ve stressed throughout, I find Albanese’s views on gambling perplexing – shifting from recognising that there is an issue to address to deflecting its extent and urgency. Whether critics are right and he is overly influenced by the gambling lobby remains one of the mysteries of his prime ministership.

  So the months of policy drift following the delivery of the Murphy Inquiry’s recommendations were driven at least in part by Albanese’s personal disinclination to take on the gambling industry. There was a cocktail of reasons behind the government’s silence. But by early 2025, one reason began to trump all others: a federal election was looming. Albanese, according to several observers, believed that a fight with the vested interests involved in gambling presented too much of a threat in an election year. As Kate Chaney explained: ‘The consultation after the report was released centred around the powerful groups which stood to lose money and very little on the other side of the equation. It was a good indicator of where the power lay.’ Of particular concern, said Chaney, was the reluctance of either of the major parties to take on the TV stations in an election year. ‘It’s completely what it comes down to,’ she concluded.44

  The football codes were also in uproar over the committee’s call for an advertising ban. The head of the NRL, Peter V’Landys, was especially bombastic in trying to torpedo the measure. He publicly criticised the call as ‘nanny state ideology’ and repeated the gambling industry mantra that ‘less than 1 per cent of Australians will ever have an issue with problem gambling’.45

  Together, the heavyweights of free-to-air TV and the football codes went all-out to lobby the Albanese government to prevent an ad ban. In fact, these two sectors did most of the heavy lifting to publicly criticise the proposal. According to Charles Livingstone, ‘Gambling companies don’t have to do much because they know that all the other players in the commercial gambling ecosystem will go into bat for them.’46

  And there were no bigger players than the combined forces of the Murdoch empire, the Seven and Nine networks and the two big football codes. Their interests neatly converged. Behind the scenes, lobbyists representing Murdoch and Stokes were thought to be pressing the government to resist a ban. Together, they reap more than $150 million from gambling advertising revenue each year.47

  The footy heavyweights were sent out to try to publicly quash the call for an ad ban. V’Landys and Andrew Dillon, the newly appointed CEO of the AFL, had fronted the Murphy Inquiry and pushed the line that a ban would damage the funding of local sport by their respective codes. It was an unashamed appeal to their grassroots supporters. But, as Kate Chaney explained, there was ‘no depth to their arguments’; that is, they offered no evidence to support their claim of the likely damage to grassroots sports.48

  In failing to strongly support the Murphy Inquiry’s recommendations, Albanese opened the door to a lobbying campaign to resist the proposed ad ban. Documents obtained under freedom-of-information laws and tabled in federal parliament by independent MP Zoe Daniel showed the disturbing imbalance in the negotiations led by Michelle Rowland. She and/or her office had met with gambling executives an astonishing 66 times in the six months following the release of the Murphy report. The public never knew the details of what was discussed at these meetings.

  It was further revealed that the minister had insisted that these executives sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) before she would meet with them. In other words, secrecy would prevail. Included in the secretive discussions were executives from the big television networks, social media and wagering companies, and the two big football codes. In other words, Rowland was holding behind-closed-door negotiations with the entire ecosystem that has become dependent on gambling.49 Rowland insisted that gambling reform advocates sign the same NDAs before they could be included in government briefings. Tim Costello rejected the stipulation, explaining: ‘I’ve been working in gambling reform for 30 years … never once have I been asked to sign an NDA.’ Why ban such campaigners from discussing these briefings?