Australian gambling ad ban delayed as minister admits reforms not “ready to go”
Labor minister for sport Anika Wells says regulation changes need more “nuanced work”
Australia’s ban on gambling ads will be delayed until 2025, with the country’s minister for sport Anika Wells admitting the reforms are not yet “ready to go”.
The long-awaited changes have been in discussion for the past 18 months, after the late Labor MP Peta Murphy chaired a parliamentary committee which made 31 recommendations into gambling-related harm prevention.
As the amendments have not yet to come to fruition, it was decided that the recommended changes would come into effect after 2024.
With the news initially breaking via Sky News Australia on Sunday, 24 November, employment minister Murray Watt said there was not enough time remaining this year to pass the legislation, while Wells noted that it needed more “nuanced work”.
At a Parliament House press conference on Monday, she said: “I think as both a friend of Peta [Murphy] and the minister for sport, I’m in a good position to tell you that this wasn’t reform that was ready to go. And I say that as the sport minister.
“I’ve got concerns about how this is impacting sport integrity and how this is impacting our athletes, who are being targeted by people because of the development in this space.”
She added: “But also on the flip side, I’ve got national sporting organisations and professional codes that are worried about how this will impact the viability of their financial models.
“So, on both sides that I need to look at, I think it needs more nuanced work. And I’m looking forward to continuing to work with [communications] minister [Michelle] Rowland on the 31 recommendations of the Murphy Report.”
When pressed further by journalists on why the reforms were not yet ready and why the government could not just compensate the sporting codes and broadcasters, Wells reiterated that additional work must be carried out first.
She remarked: “I guess there has been a lot of consultation on this, but it wasn’t ready to go. More work is needed to be done.
“We hadn’t landed on a model where all different people and all different stakeholders from all different parts of the sporting sphere were able to accept it and able to, I guess, enact it as quickly as I think what you’re looking for.”
One of the main recommendations from Murphy’s You Win Some, You Lose Some report was a total blanket ban on ads.
The report was backed by not only the Australian Medical Association, but also a host of current and former Australian prime ministers.
In August, media reports claimed Anthony Albanese’s government was considering a cap system which would see just two gambling adverts per hour on each channel until 10pm as well as a total ban one hour before all live sport.
That plan, however, was met with fierce criticism from the Alliance for Gambling Reform pressure group.