CANBERRA — Three years ago, the late MP Peta Murphy handed the Australian government a report recommending a total ban on gambling advertising. This week, her successors in government finally put a bill before parliament, and neither side of the chamber that actually wanted reform was satisfied with what arrived.
Communications Minister Anika Wells introduced the Interactive Gambling Amendment legislation, capping television gambling advertisements at three per hour between 6am and 8.30pm, banning ads entirely during live sport broadcasts within that window, phasing out signage on stadiums and jerseys, restricting radio ads during school pickup hours, and moving online advertising to an opt-in model for logged-in adult users. Wells told reporters the differences between the exposure draft released in April and the final legislation were “minor,” adding that “delaying actual reform and actual implementation isn’t worth further consultation on a piece that has been very publicly and prolifically discussed for three years.”
Parliament disagreed with her on the timeline within a day. The Coalition and the Greens, who rarely coordinate on anything, joined forces to send the bill to a Senate inquiry rather than let it proceed straight to a vote, according to Australian Associated Press. Greens communications spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young said the government was “failing to do what the experts and their own report, the Murphy report, proposed,” and framed the referral as an attempt to fix legislation that, left alone, would leave Australia with “broken promises, and very little in the way of protecting people against the insidious dangers of online gambling.”
Independent MP Monique Ryan was blunter. She called the bill “a milksop” and said the government “listened more to the gambling industry, sports broadcasters and the sponsors than it has to what Australians want.” That the harshest criticism is coming from the crossbench and the minor parties, rather than from the opposition alone, is the detail that undercuts the minister’s framing of this as a fight between reformers and an obstructionist Coalition. The Coalition’s own communications spokeswoman, Melissa McIntosh, has separately criticized the government for stalling, meaning Labor is currently being attacked from both directions for the same bill.
What the bill does not do is where the real argument sits. The 2023 Murphy report, formally titled “You Win Some, You Lose More,” recommended a comprehensive phased-in ban on all gambling advertising across broadcast and digital media. The government’s package stops well short of that, and the justification it has offered is a substitution rather than a rejection: officials argue that newly announced social media age restrictions for under-16 users will do some of the work a full ad ban was meant to do, shielding younger audiences from betting promotion on the platforms where they spend the most time. Critics call that reasoning a convenient excuse to avoid a fight with sports broadcasters and wagering companies who fund significant advertising revenue into codes like the AFL and NRL.
The government has tried to frame the package as sweeping, and by some measures it is. Eastern Herald reported last month that the same reform push includes new payment-blocking powers letting the Australian Communications and Media Authority compel banks and payment processors to cut off unlicensed offshore operators, a companion measure to the advertising bill that addresses a different, longstanding enforcement gap. That earlier reporting found the offshore grey market still accounts for roughly 15 percent of Australian gambling activity even after more than 1,700 site blockings, evidence that supply-side enforcement alone has not solved the underlying problem the advertising bill is now being asked to address from a different angle.
Australia has been here before at the state level. Victoria passed its own carded-play and spin-rate reforms in 2024, an attempt to slow poker-machine losses through mandatory registration rather than advertising limits, and even that comparatively narrow measure required a delayed rollout after industry consultation pushed back the implementation timeline. The federal advertising bill is a larger target with more money behind the opposition to it, and the pattern of the state-level fight, announced reform followed by industry-driven delay, is one Wells is now explicitly trying to avoid repeating by pushing for a fast vote instead of a long committee process.
Whether a Senate inquiry meaningfully strengthens the bill or simply becomes the vehicle industry lobbyists use to erode it further is the open question hanging over the next several months. Wells has signaled she wants the reforms in place by January, which gives the inquiry only a narrow window to report before that deadline becomes politically difficult to meet without either abandoning the timeline or ramming the original text through anyway. Nobody in parliament, including the minister who introduced the bill, has said which of those two outcomes is more likely.
