Australia: Push to outlaw betting ads as big players take billions from punters

It comes as Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) research published Monday revealed 78 per cent of Australians were now seeing gambling ads weekly, with 41 per cent exposed four times or more. About half of at-risk people responded by placing more bets, the survey of 1765 people found.

Tim Costello, spokesperson at the Alliance for Gambling Reform, said the AIFS data demonstrates the urgency of a federal ban on gambling advertising, with Australians losing an estimated $25 billion on legal gambling every year.

This represented the highest per capita betting loss amount in the entire world, Mr Costello said.

“The millions spent in advertising last year by sports betting companies isn’t because it doesn’t work,” he told The New Daily. “It dramatically works.” “Our online gambling ads are 20 per cent higher than any other nation.”

The Albanese government on Monday failed to respond to calls to outlaw betting ads specifically, but has begun an inquiry examining reforms for online gambling.

Gambling gold rush

There has been a surge in online betting after COVID-19 with Australia’s two largest bookies – Sportsbet and TAB – spending millions of dollars in additional marketing.

According to internal Sportsbet figures, the gross revenue from Australia’s sports betting market has almost doubled to $8.4 billion a year between 2017 and 2022.

Sportsbet, owned by UK-based Flutter Entertainment, recently boasted to investors that it controls 48 per cent of this rapidly growing market amid huge advertising campaigns designed to lure in Aussie punters.

That strategy has seen Sportsbet partner with celebrities like NBA superstar Shaquille O’Neil – a campaign that has brought a number of complaints to the marketing watchdog.

Sportsbet used to scrutiny

Sportsbet routinely falls foul of light industry regulations, and has broken rules against racial vilification and sexism since 2019, Ad Standards records show.

In fact, just a year before former prime minister Julia Gillard delivered her now famous misogyny speech in Parliament, Sportsbet ran an ad depicting Ms Gillard lying across the lap of former Greens leader Bob Brown, and about to be spanked.

SportsBet spent £134 million ($246 million) on marketing in 2022 all told, a 12 per cent increase on 2021, according to Flutter Entertainment’s accounts.

The effort helped drive a record 1.3 million “monthly average players” in the final three months of 2022, with operating profits for the year rising to £361 million ($664million), accounts show.

TAB Corp, meanwhile, spent $106.5 million on advertising and promotions in 2021-22, up from $100 million in the prior year – $65.4 million was spent in the last six months of 2022 alone.

Most recently, the company posted a $51 million profit for the six months ending December 31.

‘Urgent’ need for change

Advocates argue the sports betting gold rush underlines the need for an outright ban on such advertising, with AIFS director Sharman Stone saying the need for change is “urgent”. AIFS found 64 per cent of Australians it surveyed support outlawing the ads.

“This reflects a high-level of awareness in Australian society that gambling is a significant cause of harm, which must be addressed,” Dr Stone said.

When asked to comment on calls to ban gambling ads, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland’s office pointed TND to her interview on ABC radio on Monday.

Ms Rowland didn’t commit to a ban in that interview, but did say that the government has a mandate to minimise gambling harm and that an ongoing Parliamentary inquiry was looking “very closely” at reforms. “We actually have this week tougher restrictions on gambling advertising being implemented, as well as enhanced training,” Ms Rowland said.

“This is a national consumer protection framework that was begun years ago, which wasn’t progressed quickly enough and which even in the first year of this Government, we have picked up and we are executing.”

Ms Rowland came under fire earlier this year when it was revealed she accepted a large donation from Sportsbet while sitting on the opposition benches.

Mr Costello said Australia would not be alone in banning gambling ads, with other nations such as Belgium, Italy and Spain already taking the plunge and excising the industry from their airwaves.

He fears an ongoing government inquiry into the gambling industry will be sandbagged by vested interests, with major sports codes including the AFL and NFL already arguing that gambling ads play an “important role in the funding of sport in Australia”. “These betting companies now literally own our sports,” Mr Costello said.

Independent MP Zoe Daniel, who supports a ban on sports betting ads on TV, suggested on Monday afternoon that lost revenue could be made up in taxes. “As far as revenue is concerned, there is an argument that if you take that revenue out that it may negatively affect sport,” Ms Daniel said.

“I’m not so concerned about the big leagues, they will manage to find that revenue elsewhere but it can filter down to other areas of sport.

“One way of mitigating that is to say, ‘I’ll be taxing these gambling companies appropriately’.”