Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Another parliamentary year has passed and yet still, Australia leads the global league table for wasting the most on gambling.
That's right, Australians are the biggest losers. How do we maintain this shameful Number One rating, year-in, year-out? In a word, advertising.
Gormless, mind-deadening and chillingly effective.
Of course, online betting companies insist it is all harmless fun and that advertising itself compels nobody. That is true, but ask yourself, who'd spend untold millions on something with no return-on-investment? Make no mistake, it works.
Why is this unquestioned? As near as I can tell, online bookmakers effectively run huge, legalised Ponzi schemes where a supply of credulous new losers is required to make the show profitable.
You might expect that a social-democratic government with a stonking majority and the guts to confront social media companies, would also restrict a pernicious industry that preys on the young, monetises our culture, and tears at our social fabric.
But no. An estimated one million gambling ads run in this country annually, despoiling sports while enriching big betting firms and the dominant football associations, all as they blab on about the virtues of sport, fitness and participation.
This disreputable avalanche swamps virtually every event, in every way. Its blokey beer-belching presentations drag down the tone but drag up profits via an uninterrupted stream of credulous new marks - mostly boys and young men.
The late Peta Murphy, a beloved Labor MP who headed up the parliamentary inquiry into online gambling and its advertising, could not have been clearer.
In You win some, you lose more, she wrote: "Australians outspend the citizens of every other country on online gambling. This is wreaking havoc in our communities. Saturation advertising ensures our future losses. Only online wagering service providers (WSPs), major sporting organisations and media gain from the status quo.
"A phased, comprehensive ban on all gambling advertising on all media - broadcast and online, that leaves no room for circumvention, is needed."
Usually I abhor the term "loser". It normalises the cold-hearted instincts of a greedy materialistic America - a place where even the President throws the insult around like confetti.
Australia, while hardly perfect, has always been more evolved than that, our sense of community more developed and organic. We look at America's preventable epidemic of school shootings and wonder why it cannot see the obvious fix.
It is a cultural blind-spot with catastrophic consequences.
But here is a harsh truth: ubiquitous online betting has become one of ours - the galloping social destroyer we refuse to acknowledge.
It literally exists to create new losers and its uses their own money to fund it.
Its business model works even during a cost-of-living crunch because, as a cohort, its customers are losers and the online companies are the winners.
In a rational world, that simple, devastating fact would be enough, but humans are more complex than that. Our capacity for sunny optimism and the chance of minor glory can outgun logic itself. We know the house always wins yet some will still bet their own house that it doesn't, this time.
Let's be crystal clear. The Albanese government has sat on the Murphy report for two years refusing to ban a practice that has kids in primary school discussing football matches from the standpoint of the odds on offer. Kids have become more conversant with he "same-game-multi" than the finer points of team strategy or athletic skill.
In recent days, Labor MPs have finally started agitating for material action. Paediatrician-turned backbench MP Mike Freelander has stated that if MPs were given a conscience or "free" vote across all parties, the Parliament may well pass an advertising ban.
This has been backed by the moderate Liberal MP Simon Kennedy and by former Albanese cabinet minister Ed Husic, the latter telling Nine's papers that "gambling risks being a running sore for the government". In fact, it already is. But this is about something more way more important than the Albanese government's short-term political fortunes.
Husic agrees with Freelander that a cross-parliamentary free vote would secure some level of reform to advertising rules.
It is telling that the ban being sought would not ban gambling itself. This crucial distinction is too easily missed - and deliberately conflated - by those indignantly defending the quintessentially "Australian" right to the odd flutter on the horses.
This being so, it is mystifying that Labor continues to cavil. It suggests it is undecided (or worse) on whether to allow transnational bookies to market gambling directly to the children, gambling addicts, the feeble of mind, and the plain desperate.
In a time of falling trust and rising populism, Australia is better placed than most countries because of our widely respected civic-democratic architecture - compulsory preferential voting and the highly regarded Australian Electoral Commission. Whether known or not at the time, these worthy innovations have turned out to be prudent investments in Australia's future robustness and social confidence.
However, we don't even need Nostradamus-like vision to see that limiting the rate of growth in gambling would be a similar investment in both individual and community health.
The damage from not acting is already apparent.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.