This week I spoke in support of the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026. There’s no point pretending this bill is easy. Some believe the government has gone too far, others that we haven’t gone nearly far enough. But Parliament, ultimately, has to draw a line.

Where the line should sit

The question isn’t whether an adult should be allowed to have a bet. They should. The question is whether we’re comfortable with the place gambling has come to occupy in our children’s lives. I’m not. There’s a generation of Australian kids growing up at a time when the odds can feel almost as much a part of watching sport as the score. Sport shouldn’t be an introductory course into wagering. A kid watching the footy should be thinking about the mark, the goal and the tackle — not learning that every contest needs a price attached to it.

I don’t approach this as someone who thinks gambling should be prohibited. My family owned hotels. We had poker machines, we operated the TAB, we had Keno. Those businesses employ people and bring communities together. But freedom of choice doesn’t require us to give gambling companies unrestricted access to children.

What the bill does

From 1 January, wagering ads will be prohibited during live sport on television between 6 am and 8.30 pm, and banned on radio during school drop-off and pick-up. Advertising will be banned from sporting uniforms and venues. Athletes, celebrities and influencers won’t be able to promote wagering products, and the promotion of odds will be prohibited. Online, the starting point is that gambling advertising is banned, unless a user is logged in, verified as an adult and given a genuine ability to opt out.

The bill also strengthens action against illegal offshore operators, making it harder for them to reach Australians and be paid by them. It strengthens BetStop, which lets Australians exclude themselves from all licensed providers through one registration — more than 63,000 registrations had been made by early June. It bans online Keno, where under some products a person can lose as much as $1,000 every three minutes, and closes loopholes around foreign-match and fake trade promotion lotteries, which diverted more than $60 million from the charitable sector in 2024.

A lesson beyond gambling

There’s a broader lesson here for corporate Australia: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. Social licence isn’t permanent. It has to be earned and maintained, and once it’s lost, rebuilding it is much harder.

Some will argue we should go further, and that debate will continue. But the existence of an argument for going further isn’t an argument for doing nothing. Most importantly, this bill gives our kids more room to simply enjoy the game. The siren should mean the game is starting — not that it’s time to place a bet.

-Tom