Other politics
1000 days of inaction on gambling
For three years the Albanese government has ignored recommendations on gambling reform. While the Coalition “opposition” fails to hold the government to account, independents are sustaining pressure on the government.
The pathetic gathering of populists and fiscal conservatives who call themselves “the opposition” are letting the Albanese government get away with bad public policy in many areas, including gambling.
Fortunately there are voices calling the government to account on gambling, particularly among independent Members of Parliament.
Tuesday marked the 1000th day that the government has sat on the report You win, some, you lose more, the findings of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, recommending restrictions on online gambling, particularly sports gambling.
In the time that has passed the Chair of the Committee, Peta Murphy, has died, the government has been re-elected, and more evidence has accumulated about the harm of sports betting. Australians remain, by a long shot, the world’s biggest losers from gambling: last year, according to research conducted by the Australia Institute, Australians lost $35 billion in gambling: that’s about $1600 per adult, skewed towards the third or so of the population who are heavy gamblers, concentrated among lower-income earners.
The committee comprised members from the Liberal and Labor parties, and independent MP Kate Chaney. All agreed with the committee’s 31 recommendations, but to date the government has implemented none of them. The government’s response so far is that it is “still considering its response”.
Chaney is introducing a bill specifically regarding recommendation #26, “a comprehensive ban on all forms of advertising for online gambling, to be introduced in four phases, over three years. You can hear Chaney (once again) putting the case for that ban in a short Radio National interview: 1000 days on from Peta Murphy's landmark gambling report.
She points out that it would be easy for the government to implement that recommendation, in view of the strong public support for a ban and the extent of harm suffered, particularly by young people enticed into sports betting. That support is widespread: listed on the Alliance for Gambling Reform website are the names of organizations that have signed an open letter calling for urgent action on gambling reform. To quote from their list, they include:
Unions NSW and the Victorian Trades Hall Council, ACOSS, the Salvation Army (Richmond), Mission Australia, GetUp, the Public Health Association of Australia, Australian Preventative Health Association, the Menzies School of Health Research and the NSW Council of Churches.
Will Chaney’s bill succeed? She believes it will be kicked into the long grass, but she will persevere.
The Australia Institute calls out the government for its inaction, stating: “the only thing standing in the way of gambling reform is government cowardice”. It is in thrall to the joint gambling and sports lobby. As Tim Costello writes in the Saturday Paper – A thousand days of inaction on gambling reform:
… there are massive deals between the sports betting companies with the AFL and NRL. The codes have effectively become betting companies. They are using sport, and the young people who play it and support it, to expand the gambling market.
Costello calls it as he sees it, without the distorted lens of the sport-obsessed. This is an industry run by thugs enriching themselves by exploiting the vulnerability of those who don’t understand the simple arithmetic of gambling and those who are subject to addiction. Similarly it has used people’s enjoyment of spectator sport to wrest money out of cash-strapped governments to finance stadiums, for which there is no arguable case in public finance. The sporting-gambling lobby in Australia has become what the gun lobby is in the USA.
One would reasonably believe that the coalition of parties claiming to form the “opposition” in a Westminster-fashioned system would jump on the government for its neglect on gambling, particularly in view of the strong public support for reform. The only likely explanation is that they too are similarly captured by the AFL-VFL-gambling axis.
The Westminster two-party system has let us down. We need more people like Chaney and her colleagues to keep this government in check.
Are we happy?
The World Happiness Report has some worrying findings about the wellbeing of young people, particularly in countries like Australia, but its findings should be interpreted with a degree of scepticism.
There has been some media reporting on Australia’s slipping rank on happiness compared with other countries.
The World Happiness Report, published last week, ranks Australia at #15 out of all 147 countries surveyed, and our score by their composite measure described as “life evaluation” has been falling for the last ten years.
Unsurprisingly the Nordic countries – Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway feature in the top ten. But so too do two poor countries, Costa Rica and Mexico, both beset with violent crime and high inequality of income. Canadians are ranked as less happy than people from the United States. El Salvador and Singapore lie next to each other in happiness. There’s something strange about these rankings. We need much more explanation before we take them too seriously.
As a general comment on this type of survey, scores are dependent on the way questions involving subjective interpretations are framed, in different languages and different cultures. For example there is a question “Are you satisfied or dissatisfied with your freedom to choose what you do with your life?”, on which Vietnam comes out in top place, followed by Cambodia. People are asked to give a “yes” or “no” response when asked whether they experienced negative emotions on the previous day. Is a Colombian’s “negative emotion” the same as a New Zealander’s “negative emotion”?
Then there is the question of assigning weights to these responses in order to calculate a composite score of “life satisfaction”.
For these reasons a survey based on a set of such questions can throw up fairly meaningless scores and rankings for comparison between countries. But provided the questions are consistent year after year, such surveys can reveal some informative time series.
One finding is that in Western Europe and the English-speaking world, young people are much less happy than they were 15 years ago. In these countries the authors find a correlation between social media use and unhappiness.
Researchers are warned that correlation does not necessarily imply causation. Does use of social media cause unhappiness? Do already unhappy young people use social media more than happy people? Is there some exogenous factor influencing both happiness and social media use? Why is it that in some other countries no such correlation is found?
The survey is useful in keeping active the issue of harm associated with social media, but it makes little headway on policies to deal with that harm.