I did not vote Labor, but I had hopes for them.
Clear-eyed hopes. By their second term, Labor knew exactly what government demands. They knew the difference between a promise made in opposition and a decision made with power in their hands.
I still hoped they might mean it when they talked about ending the culture of secrecy and doing politics differently.
The Coalition earned the loss in 2022. Labor had since earned a second term. That gave them more than a mandate. It gave them a test of character.
Like every voter who is not rusted on, I was waiting for Labor to show me they had the courage to do the right thing when it cost them something.
Last week, the gambling advertising bill went into parliament.
And there was the answer.
The reforms offer a partial ban. Three ads an hour on daytime and evening television. A block during live sport between 6 am and 8.30 pm. Some limits on radio during the school run. Racing carved out. A start date of 1 January 2027, more than a thousand days after the government received the report that told it what needed to happen.
A report Labor commissioned.
You win some, you lose more, chaired by the late Peta Murphy, one of their own, made 31 recommendations and called clearly for a total ban, phased in over three years.
The government’s own advice says partial bans fail. They had the evidence in their hands. They had the case for full reform written for them. They had the moral argument laid out in plain sight.
And they chose the smaller path.
Anthony Albanese then defended the bill by saying it exceeds the Murphy recommendations.
It does nothing of the sort.
A government proud of its decision does not need a cover story.
The cover story is the admission.
Labor knows exactly how this looks. They know the gap between the evidence and the bill. They know the gap between the promise and the decision. They know the gap between what children and families need, and what the gambling industry can live with.
And they went ahead.
This is calculation dressed up as principle.
It would almost be easier if this were a simple grubby deal, a cheque here and a favour there. This is deeper than that. The dependency is built into the system.
The football codes run on gambling money. Commercial television runs on gambling advertising. A real ban would tear a hole in professional sport and free-to-air media at the same time.
Those are two rooms a government wants on side before an election.
That is the power this bill exposes. The easy reform, the popular reform, the evidence-backed reform, is the reform they stepped around because too many powerful interests had arranged themselves around the harm.
My disappointment sends me nowhere near One Nation. Anger that only wants to break things has no appeal to me. I have no interest in the politics of the wrecking ball.
But it will make me think very carefully about who gets my vote at the federal election.
The disappointment is larger than one bill.
Labor promised to be something different. They promised to be the party that had learned from the secrecy, arrogance and cynicism of the last government. They promised a different standard.
What this bill says to me is that the different standard applies when the cost is low.
Almost nothing worth doing comes without cost.
That is why this is more than a policy failure. It is a character question.
Character is revealed when the evidence is clear, when the harm is obvious, when the powerful rooms push back, and when a government has to decide whether it means what it said.
On gambling advertising, Labor has answered.
And yes other countries have had the courage
Italy banned gambling advertising outright in 2019. Belgium followed in 2023. Lithuania has gone further again. They have shown us what Labor could have/should have done.
The three ads an hour Labor is presenting as reform is the same number Lithuania allows only as a temporary step on the way to a full ban.
Lithuania also set aside four million euros to help broadcasters absorb the lost revenue.
None of those countries faced a softer lobby than ours. The sport and media money in Europe is bigger, not smaller.
They legislated anyway. Other countries had already shown the way. The evidence was there. The reform was available.
What was missing here was the will to act.
Further reading.
Shoutout to my readers who have the sharper point.
The dependency is no accident. It is the system.
The NRL is heading towards a broadcast deal worth more than $5 billion, the richest in Australian history. That money comes from wall-to-wall sport, sold to broadcasters and streamers in a market now soaked in gambling advertising.
When the codes, networks and streaming platforms all depend on the same river of revenue, a real gambling ad ban means taking on the business model of Australian sport and media at the same time.
This is the scale of what Labor stepped around.
Read the ABC article here
And then there is the SMH piece, which turns disappointment into alarm.
The streaming carve-out means Labor’s bill does more than fall short of a ban. It loosens the rules that already exist. The current blackout on gambling ads during live sport, the five minutes either side, and the quarter and half-time breaks, will be lifted for streaming services, where more than half of us now watch.
In its place, a betting ad can run at every break, at any hour, and the burden of stopping it is handed to the viewer. Register, prove your age, find the setting, opt out.
When 12.9 million people are registered with SBS On Demand and 16,000 have opted out, about one in a thousand, you can see exactly who that design serves.
Communications Minister Anika Wells calls it a triple lock. It locks the family in and the ads on, unless the parent does the job the government avoided.
That is no loophole in the reform. It is the reform. And it is the clearest answer yet to the question of whose interests were in the room.