For Australian PM Anthony Albanese, the parliamentary winter break surely can’t come fast enough. Not just a chance for “Airbus Albo” to jet off yet again to sunnier climes, but a desperate chance to try and escape the louring political storm clouds breaking over his head.
Apparently hoping to crash through rather than crash, Albanese has chosen to dig in behind his Chief Mean Girl, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, over misleading parliament. The opposition is far from giving up the best ammo in its arsenal, though.
But that’s far from the only unpleasant weather in Canberra. The “Voice” referendum, on which Albanese has staked so much political capital, is fast collapsing.
And Labor faces an embarrassing parliamentary defeat that will expose its indebtedness to the gambling industry.
The opposition will this week try to expose Labor when it introduces a bill to the Senate to create an hour-long buffer between sports broadcasts and gambling advertisements, a policy Opposition Leader Peter Dutton personally pushed for inside the Coalition and judges as popular.
An old friend now resident in the US, was astonished, on a recent return visit, by the sheer avalanche of gambling ads on television. I rarely watch free-to-air tv any more, but on the rare occasions I do, nearly every ad break seems to lean heavily on gambling ads.
Labor seem surprisingly reluctant to do anything meaningful about it. Aside from vaguely floating a cap on marketing spending, with the gambling industry’s approval anyway.
Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman said Labor had done very little to clamp down on the gambling sector since its election, noting its move to ban the use of credit cards in gambling had been supported by the industry for years […]
“Watching live sport is a crucial part of Australian sport and is one of the few occasions when families actually come together.”
“They should be able to enjoy those memories without having awkward discussions with their kids about what a multi is and why a player is paying $7 to score the first goal.”
Under current rules, gambling ads must stop five minutes before a sports match, except after 8.30pm when they are permitted. But gambling companies are still permitted to have company representatives – often well-known past players – spruik odds within matches.
Even when he is trying to promote his “Voice” referendum, Albanese imported an American sportsman who is also a paid spokesman for the gambling industry in Australia.
Public polling shows gambling ads are unpopular and Dutton used the period in which the government was waiting on the committee’s recommendations to move ahead of the government and spruik his interest in protecting the sanctity of sport and watching matches with family members.
The Age
So, why is Labor so beholden to the gambling industry?
Organisations and individuals linked to the gambling industry have poured at least $18 million in political donations into the states and territories in recent years, an ABC investigation can reveal. This is compared with $50 million disclosed at the Commonwealth level in the decade to 2019-20.
More than three-quarters of the $18 million flowed to the ALP and its investment vehicle, the 1973 Foundation Pty Ltd.
ABC Australia
Certainly, the Coalition receives gambling industry money as well — but it’s a pittance compared to what the industry shovels into Labor’s maw, especially in states like NSW and Queensland, where the poker machine dominates the popular Leagues clubs.
In both states, the gambling industry donates four times as much to the ALP as the Liberals. In Canberra, the seat of government, though, Labor receives an astonishing 400 times as much money from gambling as the Liberals.
At this rate, it looks like the only entity pouring more money into Labor than the gambling industry is the Chinese Communist Party.