Everyone with a smartphone walks around with the entire internet in their pocket, but thanks to the gambling industry that also means there's a casino in everyone's pocket as well. Australians love a punt, but the house always wins.

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We're the world's biggest gamblers per capita, and the biggest losers, losing more than $32 billion in bets last year. Yes, the gambling reforms announced by the Albanese government are important, but they are roughly the equivalent of throwing a bucket of water on a bushfire.

Australia Institute research shows the $32 billion Australian households lost to gambling is more than Aussies spend on their electricity and gas bills ($29.5 billion) or alcohol ($26.8 billion). That's more than $30 billion a year in profit going to gambling companies. Thirty billions dollars a year that's not being spent in the economy at local businesses down the main street of your city or town, that's not being spent on food, rent or the basic necessities of life. Can we really afford that, in this economy?

These massive gambling losses are often framed as the tragic but unavoidable cost of doing business, rather than the inevitable consequence of a predatory gambling industry untroubled by regulation.

The Whitlams once sang about blowing up the pokies (a timeless classic no less relevant today), but it's online gambling that has exploded in recent years.

Gambling and sport have always gone together, but the saturation of online gambling ads has infected sport like a disease. Remember when you could watch sports without seeing a thousand sports betting ads? Those days are long gone. In 2022, academics found 12 to 17 year olds reported being "inundated" with gambling ads. It's so insidious, research shows Australian teenagers are more likely to have gambled in the past year than to have played any of the most popular sports. Let that sink in for a minute. The almost 1 million teenagers (12 to 19 year olds) who gambled in the past year is........

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