Murphy’s law: will Peta’s colleagues gamble on her brave legacy?

Australians probably think of their politicians as people who talk too much and never listen, because that is how they look so often in the daily combat of morning radio, television news and question time. But sometimes the best contribution a politician can make is to give others a voice. And that is what Peta Murphy did in a career in parliament that was cut too short.

Murphy, who died on Monday, made sure to let others speak when she chaired a public inquiry into the social damage from problem gambling. She became a strong advocate for change and it motivated her to come to parliament last week even when she was in the final stages of a terrible, debilitating cancer.

Peta Murphy in February. Diagnosed with cancer at 37, she died on Monday, aged 50.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

In one hearing last December, for instance, Murphy introduced Anna Bardsley, a former bookkeeper who lost a decade of her life to gambling addiction. “It took years to rewire my brain to reclaim me and the life I should have been living,” Bardsley said. “But the urge to gamble is still triggered by advertising images, sounds and pop-ups.”

Murphy also introduced Ken Wolfe, a policeman who lost his job because of his eagerness to have a punt. “I was in the abyss,” he said. “I was telling lies; I was manipulating family and friends.” Testimony like that reminded everyone that the inquiry was not about policy theory – it was about real life and real pain.

Parliament honoured Murphy on Wednesday with speeches, tears and memories about her work as a barrister, political adviser, advocate for the Australian Labor Party and the member for Dunkley in south-east Melbourne. This column only reflects one part of her life – one big change she fought for.

But it is also about the challenge for Labor in acting on her legacy. Everything depends on whether Anthony Albanese and federal cabinet act in the coming months on the inquiry she chaired at the House of Representatives social policy committee.

Peta Murphy at Auskick in Frankston in April last year.Credit: Australian Financial Review

Something incredibly rare happened in that inquiry: Murphy led a unanimous finding in favour of very difficult change. She worked across the parliament with Nationals deputy chair Pat Conaghan, Liberal Keith Wolahan, independent Kate Chaney and others including her Labor colleagues.

The most difficult recommendation was a ban on gambling advertising. “Saturation advertising ensures our future losses,” Murphy wrote in the committee report released in June. “Gambling advertising is grooming children and young people to gamble and encourages riskier behaviour. The torrent of advertising is inescapable.”

The committee called for an advertising ban in four stages over three years. It would start with a ban on gambling ads during news and current affairs, as well as a ban on social media and the internet, and on radio during school drop-off and pick-up times.

The second phase would extend the bans around sporting events so there would be no advertising for an hour before or after the game. The third phase would stop all broadcast advertising of online gambling between the hours of 6am to 10pm. Finally, at the end of the third year, there would be a prohibition on all online gambling advertising and sponsorship.

This was and remains highly ambitious. Sporting codes such as the AFL and NRL oppose it because it restricts the money they collect. Media companies oppose it because it limits their revenue and makes it more challenging to cover the cost of news. (This is an issue for Nine Entertainment, the owner of this masthead and my employer.)

But a few key facts help explain why this is on the agenda. The first is the sheer scale of the gambling now under way – $25 billion of it every year. The second is the rapid growth. Online gambling has swollen from $5.6 billion in 2019 to $9.6 billion in 2022, according to the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

Now the industry is mounting a powerful resistance to change. One recent leak, from a supporter of the advertising ban who got into a gambling conference in Melbourne in September, suggests the industry believes the government will go weak on reform.

“Feedback from government is that we probably don’t have too much to worry about there,” one executive said about the advertising ban, according to the leaker’s notes. This has alarmed Tim Costello, a friend of Peta Murphy and the chief advocate at the Alliance for Gambling Reform. It has also worried Zoe Daniel, the independent member for Goldstein, who has a private member’s bill to ban gambling advertising.

Will the government bend to pressure? Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has not endorsed the committee findings and has spoken instead about harm minimisation. “I’ve made it clear that the status quo cannot continue and we will have more to say on this in due course,” Rowland told the National Press Club last month. When pressed, she emphasised the need to protect children.

Murphy, however, had a simple message. “Partial bans on gambling advertising do not work,” she wrote. She wanted a total ban. When Costello asked her on Monday of last week if the gambling reform law should be called the Peta Murphy Bill, she texted back: “Go for it.” That was one week before she died.

I texted Murphy last week to ask whether she would talk about the case for the advertising ban. She called back to say she would think about it. Intensely loyal to the Labor Party, and very close to Albanese, she did not want to say anything that caused trouble for the prime minister. She prepared some comments but did not send them.

Only on Thursday morning did her comments come to light when her husband, Rod Glover, sent them through. Here they are. They are dated November 30.

“Australians lose more on gambling than any other country in the world and the harm caused by this is increasing,” Murphy wrote. “The evidence is clear – families hate the amount of sports betting their kids are exposed to, we are all worried about its impacts on people and families, and the science justifies these concerns.

“My committee worked hard to deliver a multi-partisan report. We knew that this was about the sort of community we want to be. It is above politics as usual. Our recommendations were carefully considered and deliberately measured. We recommended a staged three-year implementation of an advertising ban because we recognise this isn’t an easy or quick fix.

“We want government to get this right. But it needs to be done.”

Murphy lived with cancer from the age of 37 and died at 50, far too soon. One reason she worked so hard through her illness, when others would have stopped, was because she was on a mission to tackle the social damage from gambling.

She listened to others. Will federal cabinet listen to her?

David Crowe is chief political correspondent.

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