Gambling is a public health crisis. Australians lose more money to gambling than any other nation on earth, per capita. Between March 2025 and March 2026, $36 billion was lost. Another way to put it is that a predatory industry manipulated people out of $36 billion in the space of just one year. The links between gambling and a plethora of issues, including harmful impacts on physical and mental health, relationships, work and education, are well established.
That an industry can prey on some of the most vulnerable people in society should be a national scandal.
Let’s place this public health crisis in context.
Gambling companies sponsor major sporting events and are thus allowed prime-time advertising spots on TV. Their brands are plastered on players’ jerseys and stadiums, and they operate round-the-clock pokie rooms with almost no oversight or regulation. They are allowed to saturate advertising space on TV and online because the government refuses to implement even the most basic reforms, including those recommended by its own review.
The slimy gambling industry is a big donor to both political parties; Labor received $4.4 million between 2020-21 and 2024-25. At its recent national conference, the party allowed one of the big donors, hospitality and pokies giant Endeavor Group, to sponsor a party fundraiser on the side.
The gambling epidemic affects the poorest people the most. Existing issues such as financial stress, caused by an impossible housing and cost of living crisis, unemployment or mental health issues converge to make people more susceptible to taking gambling risks.
It’s no surprise that western Sydney is the centre of the gambling crisis. In October 2023, the Centre for Western Sydney published a research paper, “Luck of the draw? Inside western Sydney’s gambling harm epidemic”, which found that almost $9 million is lost to gambling in Sydney’s west every day. A third of the total gambling losses in Sydney happen in just three local government areas: Fairfield, Canterbury-Bankstown and Cumberland.
Almost everyone knows someone who’s been affected by gambling. Gambling companies engineer highly addictive technology to incite vulnerable individuals to gamble what little money they might have.
The pokie machine, an instrument of ruthless profiteering, is designed to entice a player to keep betting. Lights, sounds and big, flashy dollar signs promise an eventual jackpot to keep players mesmerised. The “feature”, also known as a “bonus play”, frequently pops up to keep them going.
Importantly, the machine will never play a “losing sound”, even if a player is consistently losing. The visual and aural stimuli from a pokie machine trigger dopamine release in the brain at a rate of two to three hits per second, something that would normally occur only once per day. The intermittent rewards, however tiny, keep the player hooked. The unique jingles from a pokie machine end on a rising note, the effect being that it’s signalling an impending win.
Gambling companies have gone so far as to design pokie machines for a target audience, for example, using baby blue to target women and darker colours such as black and red to target young men.
If it wasn’t infuriating enough that gambling companies prey on the poorest, working-class communities, this will be: in 2023-24, five of the largest online gambling companies extracted $5.4 billion from vulnerable punters, but paid $0.1 billion in company tax, with three of them paying nothing at all.
And gambling companies are hardly popular at the dinner table. In polling conducted by the Australia Institute, 81 percent of respondents supported banning gambling ads on social media and online, and 87 percent supported banning gambling ads during prime-time TV hours for families and children.
So why does Labor allow this to continue?
The donations are one thing. But more fundamentally, Labor is committed to a system that puts business profits above people. Labor doesn’t deserve the votes of working-class people in western Sydney. The party’s attitude to the gambling industry is just more proof of that.
