At last, a much-needed crackdown on sports gambling ads

April 4, 2026 — 4:00am

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I confess no little satisfaction.

For two-and-a-half yonks your humble correspondent has been ranting – yes, on and on and onnnnn – about the horrors of wall-to-wall sports gambling ads, plastered over every moving part of sports, from the coverage, to the jerseys, to the names of the stadiums.

It has been a bonanza for the sports organisations, and the media that carry the ads, and a catastrophe for the community.

This week, finally, the Albanese government has announced that they are at last bloody well going to do something about it.

Listening to sweet reason, they have come to the conclusion that while too much sport might indeed never be enough, a million gambling ads broadcast every year on Australian free-to-air TV and radio is way too much, as is punters losing over – count it – $30 billion a year, according to a report by Equity Economics, in gambling.

NRL, AFL brace for impact of gambling advertising reforms

So, from July, gambling ads will be capped at a maximum of three per hour between 6am and 8:30pm; there’ll be no gambling ads during live sports broadcasts in those hours; on radio gambling ads will be banned during school drop-off (8am–9am) and pick-up (3pm–4pm); online gambling ads are banned unless the user is verified as over 18; and there’ll be no more celebrities in gambling ads, while all those wretched ads aimed specifically at sports fans saying you can “beat the odds,” are also banned.

Oh, uniforms and sports venues can no longer be branded with gambling ads.

Excellent! Now we can all get some sleep, and hopefully the shocking damage done by these ads which rip money out of the demographic that can least afford it, will be lessened.

Well, now, you will see the backlash, particularly from the NRL, which will scream like before that they’ve been done down, that “we’ll all be rooned”.

You’re right – we can look upon such squeals with some acid amusement, particularly Peter V’landys’ blandishments that this is, and I quote, “nanny state ideology”. For what else can they say, after ravaging their own fans for so long, with so little control?

But step into the next booth to look, with a little more specificity, at the arguments they’ll put up, and what nonsense they are. We’ve been through them before, but mark the responses off on your bingo card, together with the answers to their nonsense.

Dismantling the pro-gambling ad arguments

“We are not children,” they’ll say, “and we should be able to make up our own minds whether or not we gamble.”

Answer: Yes, but the children are children. And as Senator David Pocock noted in an a couple of years ago, “When three out of four young people now think betting is just a normal part of enjoying sport, [when] as a country that loses the most per capita in the........

© Brisbane Times