Extract from The New Daily
Opinion
The report from the House of Representatives committee looking into online gambling opens with these words: “Australians spend the most in the world, per capita, on legal forms of gambling, losing $25 billion every year.”
It’s appalling, as everyone agrees, and it’s a tax on the poor, but they don’t say what it should be. To get it back to something like the global average, that figure would have to halve.
Any national strategy for gambling harm reduction should have a clear and specific aim to reduce those losses, plus a plan for replacing the tax and marketing revenue that the harm generates by taxing the poor.
The rest is waffle.
How about: We aim to get that $25 billion down to $15 billion over 10 years. Or to $20 billion in five years.
The committee’s report is good, but there’s a lot of waffle in it, and for some reason it didn’t adopt the recommendations of Jake Minear.
True win/loss position
Jake is the chairman of a Perth mobile phone business, and in his personal submission to the inquiry, he recommended that every time an online gambler opens their app, it should show them their true win/loss position … since they started, over the past 12 months, past month and past week.
He provided a screen shot (right) of how it might look (and as a tech guy, Jake knows it can be done).
As he says: “How could we argue that they should not have the information at hand, to make informed decisions? It would be like a banking app not providing the customer their account balance!”
Seems like a very good idea to me, and should have happened long ago, but the otherwise excellent bipartisan report from the committee headed by Labor MP Peta Murphy didn’t mention the idea or adopt it.
In chapter four of the report, the committee did refer to the “activity statements” currently required by the National Consumer Protection Framework for Online Wagering in Australia (NCPF). Measure seven of that code says: “While a customer has an active betting account, an interactive wagering service provider must provide an activity statement to the customer via email, on a monthly basis.”
A monthly email going into the spam folder is a long way from being confronted by how much money you’ve lost every time you open the app, and in any case, Financial Counselling Australia (FCA) says that compliance even with that is a mess.
The Murphy committee’s report states: “FCA noted that there’s uncertainty about which government is responsible for compliance (of measure seven), that some online wagering service providers (WSPs) have ‘deviated from best practice’ and also they don’t have to report whether a customer has opened the email.”
They conclude: “Customers have no way of knowing how their gambling compares to other customers, and whether their gambling is risky or unsafe.”
So why not give them a way of knowing?
Jake Minear also suggests that the apps be required to give users the ability to set controls, to enter, and effectively lock in, the limits they want to set per week, month or year. So, hypothetically, the user could easily say: “I want to set a maximum betting exposure of $50 per week, for the next six months.”
Minimum bet limits?
On the question of setting limits, the committee rather meekly recommends that “the Australian government consult with industry and people who gamble to determine minimum bet limits for online wagering for inclusion in national regulation”. Minimum?
Sportsbet asserted in its submission that mandatory bet limits encourage illegal offshore gambling.
When the committee asked for evidence of that, Sportsbet said Norway now has a black market that accounts for 66 per cent of all gambling in that country; that there was a 9 per cent increase in illegal gambling in Denmark after it restricted inducements and introduced mandatory deposit limit; and of all gamblers surveyed in Sweden who reached the mandatory deposit limit of about $700 per week, about one-third said they continued to bet online with unlicensed providers.
They would say that, wouldn’t they?
The reports notes that although the NCPF establishes a voluntary opt-out pre-commitment scheme, a lot of people do voluntarily opt out, and the WSP systems allow “nonsense limits”, like $1 million a day.
Apart from the failure to pick up Jake Minear’s obvious idea of making sure people know how much they’re losing, it’s a good report and the best recommendation is the proposed ban on all forms of advertising for online gambling in four phases over three years.
It also recommends prohibiting inducements and commissions to staff and third parties, all good ideas.
Another good recommendation is for a comprehensive national strategy on online gambling harm reduction, partly to remove the jurisdiction shopping that has the Northern Territory licensing most of the online bookies because it charges the lowest fees and has the “lightest touch” regulation.
That is definitely well overdue: Forecast 2023-24 Northern Territory tax revenue of $21 million from bookmakers is a joke when the combined revenues of foreign-owned Sportsbet, Ladbrokes and Bet 365 alone will exceed $3 billion.
A tax on the poor
The basic problem with Australia’s addiction to gambling is that it’s a tax on the poor, and the people who run the country – governments, and all the major religions, the Catholic church, the AFL, the NRL and cricket – are in on the joke and have a conflict of interest.
The Victorian government is budgeting for $2.6 billion from gambling taxes this financial year, 7.4 per cent of total tax revenue; New South Wales is budgeting $3.5 billion, or 8.8 per cent of the total; and Queensland, $2 billion, or 9.2 per cent of the total tax revenue.
The Catholic church still has its name on the door of some of the biggest NSW pokies clubs (Campbelltown Catholic Club and Liverpool Catholic Club), while the ALP has a direct conflict of interest, taking about $30 million a year from gamblers at its five pokies venues owned by the Canberra Labor Club and the Randwick Labor Club. And then there’s the RSL, of course.
And millions of dollars from online gambling finds its way into the two main football codes and cricket through licensing fees and broadcast rights that are largely funded by the colossal marketing budgets of the WSPs.
Former Victorian gambling minister Tony Robinson once described the NRL as “a franchise of the pokies industry”.
If Australia’s deeply conflicted governments do manage to get Australia’s gambling losses down, then the NRL, AFL, cricket, Catholic church, ALP, RSL and the state governments will all have to tap someone else for the money, or make do with less.
Good.
Alan Kohler is founder of Eureka Report and finance presenter on ABC news. He writes twice a week for The New Daily
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