Sam Hawley: You might not really even notice it, but on any given day, you will be bombarded by gambling ads on TV, online, on billboards. One study showed a million ads appeared on free-to-air TV and radio in a single year. Parliamentary Committee is pushing for a full ban to protect younger generations from the dangers of gambling. Today, investigative journalist and occasional Radio National Breakfast host, Steve Cannane, on how a powerful industry is negotiating with the government to stop that happening. I’m Sam Hawley on Gadigal land in Sydney. This is ABC News Daily. Steve, Australians are some of the biggest gamblers in the world, we know that. Why are we so into it, do you think?

Steve Cannane: Well, I think it’s fair to say that since settlement, it’s been a part of our culture. The convicts and the settlers used to gamble with cards and dice, and we’ve always had a strong outdoors and sporting culture, and that tends to lend itself to betting and to gambling. Plus, what makes us different from other countries is we’ve allowed poker machines into clubs and pubs in a way that other nations have not. And if you look at the figures, Australians lose an estimated $25 billion a year from gambling. And that is the highest per head of population in the world. And the majority of that is lost through poker machines, but certainly sports betting has been growing in recent years.

Sam Hawley: So much money, and we know it’s so incredibly addictive. So we’re talking about this again now, Steve, because of renewed debate about the findings of a parliamentary inquiry into this, which was handed down about a year ago. Just remind me about that inquiry.

Steve Cannane: It was a really comprehensive inquiry. It was chaired by Peta Murphy, who was a much-loved member of the parliament. She was a Labor MP. Sadly, she died last year of breast cancer after the report came out. But earlier in the year when she released that inquiry report, which was called You Win Some, You Lose More, she said that Australians are the biggest losers in the world when it comes to gambling. We have a culture where sport and gambling are intrinsically linked. So they listened to everybody, and they came down with this list of 31 recommendations. And one of the recommendations was this phased in ban of all advertising. That’s something that Peta Murphy said at the time was grooming children, this gambling advertising, grooming children and young people to gamble.

Sam Hawley: Okay. So one of the key recommendations out of this inquiry, a really significant inquiry, is to basically eventually ban all ads for gambling.

Steve Cannane: That’s right. That’s really the key recommendation that’s being debated at the moment. And the plan behind that was that they would bring in a phased ban, and it would be recommended that they would bring it in within three years. And that would then give the sporting codes and the broadcasters time to find alternative sponsors. And if you think of how Labor has treated the issue of smoking, they brought in plain packaging for cigarettes. Now, that was a world first at the time, and the government had to really take on the tobacco lobby, not just domestically, but internationally. So you can see at the moment that Labor is not treating this like a public health issue.

Sam Hawley: During the inquiry, there was a lot of impassioned testimony wasn’t there. Tell me about John, because he thinks, you know, this is urgent. We need to act now.

Steve Cannane: Yeah. John, who’s, we’re not using his last name because he asked us not to, and he lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. He lost about $115,000 to one betting company, Bluebet, in nine hours.

Sam Hawley: Oh my gosh.

John, gambling victim: So in June, 2017, I thought, you know, I might have a go at this and open up my first online betting account. And within four weeks, I’d managed to gamble away all of my redundancy, $170,000, all gone within about four weeks.

Steve Cannane: He also said that he got drunk one day, and the betting ads came on and he saw them and he just started gambling and he started losing lots of money. Now there are questions being asked in his case about, okay, so were the betting agencies at the time asking for proof of income? Can you afford to gamble this amount of money?

John, gambling victim: I think at the moment, the whole online gambling system is broken in regards to offering the vulnerable punters levels of safety and avoiding gambling harm. Because from my experience, these gambling companies are just there to try and extract every cent out of you.

Sam Hawley: So Steve, now let’s look at what the government is actually doing, because it says it is working to change things. At first, this was all just discussions behind closed doors, wasn’t it? It was actually pretty secretive.

Steve Cannane: It was incredibly secretive. And we kept hearing from the government that they were talking to the stakeholders. By that, what we’re really talking about is the sporting codes, so the AFL and the NRL, the betting agencies, and also the commercial TV networks, because they rely on gambling advertising. When they were meeting, these groups were forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. Now, you don’t normally hear of this in government. And when I interviewed one of the stakeholders, they said, well, we can’t talk about this because we’ve signed an NDA. So it was incredibly secretive. But also, the public health experts that I was speaking to were saying, hang on, we’re not being consulted. Why is it only the industry is being consulted? I think you could describe it as highly secretive and highly selective in who they spoke to.

Sam Hawley: And then once the government ministers started talking, it became clear pretty quickly, didn’t it, that it wouldn’t be arguing for a full ban on gambling ads. As the committee had wanted.

Steve Cannane: Yeah, that’s right. It came out initially in the papers, suggesting that Labor was going to bring in a partial ban and that they would have two ads an hour up until 10pm that they would get rid of ads during children’s TV. Now, when they say children’s TV, they’re talking about that slot in the afternoon. They’re not talking about, for example, MasterChef, which kids still watch, because those slots will still have gambling ads in them. And also I think part of the suggestion was that you would have a ban during sport and an hour before and an hour after sport. I think you got a really good sense of what the government’s position on this was when Bill Shorten spoke out both on Q&A and on Radio National Breakfast about what he thought were the risks if you brought in a blanket ban on gambling advertising. He was worried that if you got rid of the gambling ads and had a blanket ban, that would see the demise of particularly regional TV, journalism in these areas.

Bill Shorten, Minister for Government Services: So, you know, it’s to say to some of the extreme, you know, the zealot anti-gamblers, I understand what you’re saying. I can agree with a fair bit of what you’re saying, but I’m also saying, please stop and think about the view that we don’t want all our news coming from Facebook. They’re not paying for Australian content now. And if you want more misinformation, then let’s kill off regional media. Let’s kill off free-to-air.

Steve Cannane: Now, I’m not sure what Bill Shorten was relying on for those figures. He’s never actually told us what the evidence is that suddenly that industry would all fall apart. We do know that Andrew Hughes, who’s an academic who wrote some analysis for the Conversation website, he estimated that sports betting advertising made up about 7% of Channel 7’s annual revenue. Now, 7% is still a lot, but the question becomes, well, what is the evidence that if they phased it out and they got rid of it over a three-year period that they wouldn’t then find other advertisers? I’ve not seen the evidence either side of the argument to show what exactly would happen.

Sam Hawley: And the gambling companies themselves, they have a bit of a different perspective. I don’t think they’re particularly worried about commercial television. What are they arguing?

Steve Cannane: We spoke to Kai Cantwell on Radio National Breakfast. He’s the CEO of Responsible Wagering Australia, and they represent five of the largest sports betting companies in Australia. And he was particularly opposed to an online ban on gambling advertising. And what he was saying was that if you brought something like that in, you would then see an increase of illegal offshore providers and Australians gambling with those offshore providers.

Kai Cantwell, Responsible Wagering Australia CEO: The risk of blanket bans in advertising in the wagering space is that we run the risk of driving Australian consumers into the illegal offshore providers, which are rife online already. And they offer no consumer protections, no economic benefits for Australian punters or Australian broadly, and no jobs.

Steve Cannane: And he pointed to other countries like Norway and New Zealand jurisdictions where he believed when they brought in bans, then suddenly it just drove people to illegal offshore betting.

Kai Cantwell, Responsible Wagering Australia CEO: In Norway, for example, the illegal offshore market is now 66% of the entire market. In Sweden, 59%. In Spain, 20%. In Italy, 23%. And this is a result of directly over-regulation in the wagering space.

Steve Cannane: After that interview, I emailed his office and asked for a source for that Norway study. His office never got back to me about that. So we spoke to Stein Langberget, who worked for the state monopoly, because in Norway, it’s a state monopoly that runs gambling. It’s not private enterprise. And he said that it was only 6% of the market there was offshore. And he said they had decided themselves as the state-run monopoly to stop marketing publicly and stop advertising on TV because they believed it was harming children. And so they took that decision themselves.

Sam Hawley: And you also had a look in Ireland, where there is a ban on ads between 5 in the morning and 9pm at night. So a considerable amount of time. Tell me about Stewart Kenny, who you spoke to on Radio National Breakfast.

Steve Cannane: Stewart Kenny is a fascinating character. He is a co-founder of Paddy Power, which is one of the global giants in sports betting. He loves to gamble. He says he still loves to punt. And he was a marketing man, an advertising man. And he says he’s concerned that the role they had played in getting particularly young people interested in gambling.

Stewart Kenny, co-founder of Paddy Power: I’m not anti-gambling. I love gambling. I gamble all the time. Don’t get me wrong. I think there is a place for responsible gambling industry in society. But there needs to be curbs on it.

Steve Cannane: He actually quit that organisation because he had arguments internally about their advertisements. And I put to him that argument that was put by Kai Cantwell, that, oh yeah, well, it’ll all move offshore if you have an advertising ban on online. And he said to me, well, you know, I used to argue the same thing.

Stewart Kenny, co-founder of Paddy Power: I look, I use that argument all the time. There is nothing that backs up that point. People will not lend their debit cards, their bank card to people they don’t know in foreign jurisdictions that have no controls. This is a load of baloney. I use it all the time…

Steve Cannane: And he said, you’ve got a decision. He said, you can have a partial ban. That will advantage the bookmakers. Or you can have a full ban and that will advantage the children.

Sam Hawley: Yeah. So there are people like Stewart who are really, really sceptical about the benefits of some sort of cap or some sort of partial ban because the next generation will still be at risk.

Steve Cannane: That’s right. And in fact, Stewart Kenny was convinced by academic research out of Australia done by Samantha Thomas, Professor Samantha Thomas at Deakin University, that looked at the effect that gambling advertising was having in normalising betting to children. So they’re turning on the TV to watch their favourite sport and then they’re seeing betting ads and they’re seeing odds offered. And so they then associate that as being part of the sport. So often they know the odds like they know the scores. He wants something done to prevent children, as he sees, being groomed by the betting agencies.

Sam Hawley: All right. Well, let’s return to the situation here then. What do you think the will do? Do you think it really will push ahead with this sort of partial ban that many people are pretty concerned about?

Steve Cannane: I think they will push ahead with a partial ban. They have three very powerful lobby groups on their case to stop them bringing in a blanket ban. They’ve got the sporting codes, the NRL and the AFL. They’ve got the media companies. Now, no government wants to upset a company in the run up to an election. And they have the gambling industry and they are having conversations behind closed doors. And who knows what they’re saying? We do know there are people in the Labor caucus. Mike Freelander is one of them who are arguing about the government taking a tougher line, but it’s got to go to cabinet. Once cabinet make that decision, well, the caucus is meant to swing behind it. But there is no doubt there is internal tensions within the Labor Party about what is the right thing to do. So even though this parliamentary committee has made 31 strong recommendations, chaired by the late Labor MP, Peta Murphy, and many of her friends are saying, you know, it would be an insult to her political legacy if the government didn’t pass these recommendations. I don’t think that they are going to do that.

Sam Hawley: Steve Cannane is an investigative journalist and occasional presenter on ABC’s Radio National Breakfast. This episode was produced by Kara Jensen-MacKinnon. Audio production by Sam Dunn. Our supervising producer is David Coady. I’m Sam Hawley. Thanks for listening.