A clear public demand for gambling reform is colliding with a growing belief that governments listen to industry before voters, writes Wayne Hawkins.
THE POLLING is unambiguous. Surveys conducted by the Australia Institute show 77% of Australians support a ban on gambling advertisements, with 76% supporting a total ban phased in over three years.
Parents watching the football with their children do not want a betting odds update between the second and third quarter. They have said so, clearly and repeatedly. The Government has heard them. And then, with remarkable consistency, it has responded to someone else.
What follows is not a story about gambling. It is a story about the distance between what citizens want and what governments deliver — and what fills that distance.
We have seen this playbook before
In the mid-20th Century, the tobacco industry faced a problem. The science linking cigarettes to cancer was becoming impossible to ignore. So the industry did not fight the science directly. Instead, it manufactured doubt.
Internal documents made public through litigation showed that by the 1950s, tobacco executives knew without question that their products caused cancer. They funded fringe researchers, maintained a roster of credentialled dissenters and ensured mainstream media could always find a voice to say “the jury is still out”.
A 1972 Tobacco Institute memorandum summarised the strategy with chilling clarity: ‘creating doubt about the health charge without actually denying it.’ The goal was never to win the argument — it was to delay losing it.
The gambling industry is running the same play. This industry disinformation playbook – perfected by tobacco and since adopted by fossil fuels, using the same PR firms and researchers – follows a familiar sequence: demand for “more evidence”; a pivot to “responsible gambling” messaging funded by the industry itself; the commissioning of research focused on individual behaviour rather than product design; and a warning that reform will devastate sport funding.
That last manoeuvre is particularly elegant. By embedding themselves as primary sponsors of Australian sport – Sportsbet, Ladbrokes, TAB plastered across jerseys and boundary fences – wagering companies have made themselves structurally difficult to remove. An advertising ban stops being a public health measure and becomes an attack on cricket, on the AFL, on the local club.
Reuters analysis found that Australia’s parliamentarians accepted $245,000 in free tickets to sporting events at the very moment they were supposedly deliberating an advertising ban. The Prime Minister alone received $29,000 in tickets. The tobacco industry used farmers and retail workers in the same way. The product changes. The architecture does not.
The product has evolved — the harm has accelerated
There is one meaningful difference between tobacco and gambling today: the delivery mechanism has become dramatically more efficient. The pokies in the pub required you to leave home. The TAB required you to walk somewhere. The smartphone requires nothing. Sportsbet is open at 2 AM. It knows your betting history, your loss thresholds and the moments you are most likely to chase a loss. The algorithm is not neutral. It is optimised.
Consider the scale. Australians placed bets totalling $244 billion in 2022–23, losing $31.5 billion — the highest per-capita gambling losses in the world. This is not an individual failing at scale. It is a product design outcome at scale. Addiction science has moved well beyond the question of willpower. The public, to its credit, has largely grasped this. Which is why the polls say what they say.
The gap is the message
The Albanese Government’s response to the Murphy Review was instructive. The late MP Peta Murphy’s Inquiry – a unanimously-supported review backed by Labor, Liberal and Independent members alike – produced 31 recommendations, including a total ban on online gambling advertising.
The Government’s April 2026 response: a cap of three gambling advertisements per hour; restrictions on broadcast hours during live sport; a ban on celebrity and athlete endorsements; and limits on social media targeting. The industry exhaled.
This is not a policy failure in the conventional sense. The bureaucracy did not get the modelling wrong. Ministers were not confused about the evidence. The public had spoken with unusual clarity and the Government produced a response calibrated primarily to what the industry could tolerate. That is a different kind of failure — and citizens, even those who cannot name the mechanism, understand the difference.
When government receives a clear democratic signal and visibly responds to industry pressure instead, it does not just fail on the immediate issue. It confirms a story. And the story is: your preferences do not register here.
Trust is not lost in dramatic moments
We tend to think of institutional trust as something that collapses in crises — a corruption scandal, a policy catastrophe, a moment of visible dishonesty. But the more corrosive erosion is quieter than that. It happens in accumulated moments of ordinary disappointment. The gambling ad during the children’s game. The Inquiry that recommended action and produced delay. The announcement dressed as reform that satisfied the industry more than the public.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found Australia’s overall Trust Index at 49 — in distrust territory. Sixty-two per cent of Australians feel moderately or highly aggrieved, believing that government and business serve the select few, that the system favours the rich, and that the rich are getting richer while regular people struggle. Sixty-four per cent worry government leaders are lying to them. Only 17% believe the next generation will be better off. This is not scepticism. This is structural estrangement.
The gambling advertising debate is a small, vivid example of something much larger. A majority wants something. The evidence supports them. The Government knows. And then nothing much happens. People register this. They may not frame it in terms of regulatory capture or industry lobbying architecture. But they feel the shape of it — the sense that the levers they thought were connected to something are not.
And then they wonder about One Nation
Senator Pauline Hanson does not win votes by being credible on policy. One Nation does not rise because it has better answers to the gambling question, or the housing question, or what Australians should do when wages stagnate while corporate profits compound. It rises because it is the loudest voice saying the system is broken and the mainstream parties are complicit in breaking it.
And the numbers are now stark: One Nation polled 6.4% at the May 2025 Federal Election and has since surged to between 11 and 17% in polling, challenging the Greens as Australia’s third-largest party. A DemosAU MRP model projects One Nation winning 12 House of Representatives seats at the next election. The most recent Roy Morgan polling has One Nation leading Labor on primary votes for the first time.
And then the system keeps proving it right.
Every watered-down reform is recruitment material. Not because One Nation offers a coherent alternative – it does not – but because legitimate grievance needs somewhere to go. When the conventional parties fail to convert clear public preference into policy, they do not hold the centre. They vacate it. And something else moves in.
This is the tragedy the major parties seem unable to see about their own situation. The gambling advertising debate is not an isolated issue. It is one more data point in a pattern that citizens are reading – whether consciously or not – as evidence that representative democracy has a representation problem.
The answer to that is not better communication. It is not rebranding. It is doing the thing the public asked for, when the public asked for it, rather than when the industry agreed to permit it.
The ask was not complex
Australians were not asking for a revolution. They were asking for the betting odds to stop appearing on screen while their children watched football. It is a modest request. It has majority support. The evidence for harm is substantial. And the Government, advised by an expert Inquiry that unanimously recommended a full ban, produced a partial response shaped significantly by industry tolerance.
The tobacco industry bought itself decades by manufacturing uncertainty. The gambling industry does not need decades. It just needs enough delay to outlast the political cycle. And in a system where the cost of inaction is distributed across millions of families while the benefit of delay is concentrated in a handful of companies with significant political access, the incentives are clear.
The public is not confused about this. It may not use the language of regulatory capture. But it knows, in the way that people know things they’ve experienced repeatedly, that the game is not quite level. And each time a government confirms that knowledge through its actions – or its failures to act – it takes another small piece of the foundation that democracies depend on.
Trust, once eroded, does not return easily. And the parties that eroded it should not be surprised when the beneficiary is not them.
Wayne Hawkins is the owner of Crisp N Sweet bakery and café in Claremont, Tasmania, and an independent candidate for the federal seat of Clark at the 2028 Election.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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