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Australians who want gambling advertising removed from their online feeds could soon have one place to shut it off, under a late addition to the Albanese government’s wagering reforms that shifts some of the burden away from users navigating individual platforms.
The proposed Wagering Advertising Opt-out Register would be administered by the Australian Communications and Media Authority and funded through a levy on licensed online wagering companies. Labor is pitching it as a single national mechanism, broadly resembling the logic of the Do Not Call Register, rather than requiring people to hunt through settings on streaming services, websites and social media accounts.
The change is significant because that individual opt-out system was one of the weaker points exposed during the Senate examination of the government’s legislation.
SBS supplied a particularly stark figure. Of roughly 15 million accounts for its on-demand streaming service, only about 130,000 had activated the option to stop seeing gambling advertising. Independent senator David Pocock pointed to the numbers in his response to the Senate inquiry, reinforcing doubts about whether an opt-out right achieves much when comparatively few people find and use it.
Labor is now trying to solve that problem without accepting the more sweeping alternatives being demanded from elsewhere in parliament: making gambling advertising opt-in rather than opt-out, or banning online wagering advertising altogether.
Labor rewrites its package as parliamentary deadline looms
The government is attempting to move its gambling reforms through parliament before the end of Thursday, with the changes spread across separate pieces of legislation. Labor senators have recommended passage, but the package has drawn sharp criticism from the Greens, Pocock and Coalition senators, albeit for different reasons.
Communications minister Anika Wells introduced a third bill on Monday containing the new register and several other changes prompted by evidence to the Senate inquiry and subsequent consultation.
Among them are tighter rules around gambling inducements, restrictions on direct marketing and social media advertising involving inducements for certain customers, limits on attempts to secure consent for such marketing, and prohibitions affecting some commission-based referral arrangements.
The government has focused particularly on the capacity of inducements to encourage gambling and worsen gambling-related harm. The new provisions represent an attempt to tighten an original package that was already under pressure before reaching the parliamentary finish line.
Under the register proposal, ACMA would establish and operate the system, while licensed interactive wagering providers would pay for its regulatory costs through a levy. Labor’s position is that the industry creating the regulatory workload should finance it rather than taxpayers.
A one-stop register with unanswered questions
What remains uncertain is how the system will function in practice.
Neither the legislation’s explanatory material nor Wells’ introduction of the bill sets out the mechanics needed to turn a national registration into the removal of gambling advertising across multiple online platforms. Government sources acknowledge the technical and administrative complexity is considerable, and important details are still being worked through.
That also leaves open whether the register can be operating by 1 January 2027, when many elements of Labor’s wagering reforms are scheduled to begin.
The late change exposes the difficult compromise behind the government’s broader advertising policy.
A landmark 2023 parliamentary inquiry led by the late Labor MP Peta Murphy recommended phasing in a comprehensive prohibition on online gambling advertising. Labor did not adopt that approach. Its original legislation instead constructed a triple-lock system: online gambling advertising would be limited to logged-in users, those users would need to be adults, and they would have access to an opt-out mechanism.
For gambling-harm advocates, that still placed too much responsibility on the person receiving the advertising. An option buried inside account or platform settings has limited value if users rarely discover it. The proposed national register is Labor’s answer to that criticism, but it retains the fundamental opt-out architecture.
Pocock says the reforms leave the sport-gambling link intact
Pocock argues the problem runs deeper. In his response to the Senate inquiry, he concluded that the legislation would fail to sever the relationship between sport and gambling and would not sufficiently reduce children’s exposure to wagering promotion.
He also challenged the government over whether the interests of wagering businesses and sporting organisations had been given greater weight than the public-health case for stronger restrictions.
The SBS figures formed part of that criticism. With only about 130,000 opt-outs among approximately 15 million on-demand accounts, the experience offers a real-world indication of how rarely consumers may actively disable gambling advertising when the responsibility is left to them.
Moving that choice into a single national register makes the process simpler. It does not change the underlying principle: gambling advertising remains permitted unless the user acts to stop receiving it.
Greens push for a full online advertising ban
The Greens have reached a similar conclusion about the legislation’s overall strength. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has indicated the party will not support the package in its current form.
The party continues to push for a complete prohibition on online gambling advertising, the creation of a national gambling regulator and a comprehensive ban on inducements.
Those demands go considerably further than Labor’s revised model. The government’s approach seeks to restrict who can receive gambling promotions and make refusal easier, rather than eliminating online wagering advertising altogether.
That distinction has become one of the central fault lines in the parliamentary fight.
Coalition support remains crucial
Coalition senators Sarah Henderson and Dean Smith approached the issue from another direction. Their contribution to the inquiry emphasised that most Australians who gamble do so responsibly and defended the role played by wagering and related industries.
Even so, they identified weaknesses in the government’s treatment of inducements and children’s exposure to gambling promotions. Their assessment was that Labor had had more than three years to develop its response and had still produced legislation that did not go far enough.
The Coalition’s final position is now crucial.
Government figures believe an agreement with opposition leader Angus Taylor is close following several meetings between Taylor and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese last week. The Coalition has not publicly guaranteed its support, however, and further government amendments are expected on Tuesday.
That leaves Labor trying to assemble a parliamentary deal while simultaneously rewriting parts of its own reform package.
Opt-out versus opt-in remains the unresolved fight
The national register may remove one of the most obvious practical flaws in the original system. Instead of asking millions of Australians to locate separate controls scattered across streaming services, websites and social platforms, it promises one point of withdrawal.
It is still a compromise. Labor has stopped short of the opt-in model sought by some MPs, under which people would have to actively choose to receive gambling advertising. It has also rejected, at least in this legislation, the complete online advertising ban recommended by the Murphy inquiry and sought by gambling-harm campaigners and the Greens.
The argument now before parliament is therefore no longer simply about whether Australians should have an easier way to escape gambling advertising. It is about why they should have to ask to escape it at all.
Source: theguardian.com
