The scope of the inquiry included directing that it examine (a) the effectiveness of existing consumer protections aimed at reducing online gambling harm; and (b) the effectiveness of current gambling advertising restrictions on limiting children’s exposure to gambling products and services (that is, the promotion of betting odds during live sport broadcasts), including consideration of the impact of advertising through social media, sponsorship or branding from online licensed gambling operators.

With hardly a skerrick of surprise, the inquiry in 2023 recommended to government that it should enact laws to demand a phased-in prohibition on gambling advertising: no more wall-to-wall Samuel L. Jackson, no more pithy Sportsbet adverts, and no more perfunctory but useless warnings to gamble responsibly.

What’s lost in this morass is the folly of the government controlling what people can be told, and the usurping of the freedom of free will. There’s a special flavour of nonsense that’s enveloped by the idea that the banning of sports-betting advertising might somehow make sports betting disappear, with the lemming-like influenced masses instead choosing to not gamble at all.

If gambling advertising is eradicated eventually, what’s next? No more incessant Dan Murphy’s ads in the half-time of Friday Night Football? Bunnings banished from advertising chainsaws in newspaper liftouts due to the manifest problems a chainsaw can cause if held in the wrong hands.

Academic research in this area will tell you – and these are my words – that there’s the purest form of idiocy that underpins any decision to play poker machines. Almost three-quarters of problem gamblers are in fact problem pokie players. Of the total cohort of problem gamblers in this country, only a small fraction have a specific issue with sports betting. Lotto is more of a problem.

Borrowing from the songwriter Tim Freedman, the pokies should all be exploded. There’s no more miserable sight than walking through an RSL club at 10am and observing scores of people hypnotically spinning their money into oblivion. Yet as much as regulators turn the thumbscrews on masking their existence, the pokies won’t disappear.

What’s missing is education about the mathematical impossibilities of winning on a poker machine. If the intent is to eradicate the risks associated with gambling addiction, where’s the education in schools and elsewhere, about the abject evils of sophisticated electronic devices that are rigged to pay back less than 90 per cent of the money injected? Why don’t schools teach a sub-curriculum in gambling to equip people to make their own choices?

There is a thing in life that governments forget about, which is vital: personal responsibility and free choice. These are dangerous times, if it’s thought fit that 99 per cent of unaffected people should be materially and adversely affected by driving sports betting underground to protect the other 1 per cent of “problem gamblers” from themselves. That’s especially correct when only a small proportion of “problem gamblers” actually have a “problem” with sports gambling.

Moreover, why would the absence of advertising make the problem go away at all? It’s so reported this week that some nefarious organisation that branded itself The Commission allegedly shipped a tonne and a half of cocaine around NSW just in the past few months. All without any advertising.

You reckon problem gamblers are likely to just disappear, if Caine disappears from our TV screens? It’s the rationale of the same Chicken Littles who were rambling around four years ago, begging authorities to lock down whole cities. And how’d that work out?

I agree with Racing NSW CEO Peter V’Landys without reservation or hesitation; the government’s musings about outlawing the promotion of sports betting companies is nanny-statism writ large.

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Any push by the federal government to ban or severely constrict gambling advertising is the construct of ideologues who believe they know best and who also think that they are best placed to decide what’s best for others.

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