Tabcorp has bob each way on gambling ads; Past words haunt Super Retail chair Sally Pitkin

Over the past 18 months, Tabcorp has signed off partnership contracts with the GWS Giants, Brisbane Broncos and Parramatta Eels. Picture: NewsWire / John Appleyard

Any week now the country is liable to receive an announcement from the Albanese government on what it plans to do with gambling advertising.

Whether that’s an outright ban or mandated reductions to ad-spending is what Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has been weighing up for two years and confidentially briefing stakeholders in recent days.

Tabcorp, whose boundless hypocrisy on this matter deserves a very special mention, emerged as an early champion of harder advertising restrictions, including ads that would normally be viewed on free-to-air television, on billboards, at sporting grounds and on team jerseys.

Here’s a sliver of their 2022 submission to a parliamentary inquiry examining the ills and impacts of online gambling. Tabcorp told the inquiry that gambling ads had reached record levels and that Australians had had enough. “It should only be seen in places where people go to gamble (eg, at pubs, clubs, or racetracks),” the company said.

That position, however, came with some caveats, and these, as one might imagine, were entirely self-serving. As well as pubs and racetracks, and occasionally on television, Tabcorp said advertising should be permitted to continue in TAB agencies or on Sky Racing TV and Radio, both of which are owned by Tabcorp and give the business a blatant ­advantage over its foreign ­competitors.

It’s not that anyone should feel sympathy for the multi­billion-dollar offshore bookies that rival Tabcorp, domiciled as they are in Ireland or the Isle of Man, and which employ fewer Australians and pay less tax. But this naive notion that Tabcorp is some righteous corporate citizen trying to minimise its own ad-exposure, for the good of Australians, is codswallop.

It might be the only gambling company imposing rules on itself around in-stadium advertising and jersey sponsorships, but these are bent at will.

Former Tabcorp CEO Adam Rytenskild. Picture: John Feder

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland.

Over the past 18 months, Tabcorp has signed off partnership contracts with the GWS Giants, Brisbane Broncos, Parramatta Eels and, in the case of the North Queensland Cowboys, their jerseys were emblazoned with the TAB logo “prominently on the sternum” throughout the 2023 season, despite that being exactly what the company sought to restrict two years ago. Tabcorp itself told the inquiry that aggressive advertising “impacts families and children, drives anti-gambling sentiment, and leads to a lack of trust in the industry”.

In fact, there’s very little in Tabcorp’s submission that makes sense anymore. It wanted the government to prioritise policy settings that favoured “betting in local retail venues rather than on mobile phones at home”.

And since then? Tabcorp has tipped $33m into online betting company Dabble, launched a TAB app, and set an ambitious goal last year to reach a digital revenue market share of 30 per cent, which the former CEO Adam Rytenskild committed himself to securing (“I’m personally driving the company to beat this target,” he said) ... before he was boned. He’s now taking Tabcorp to the Fair Work Commission for unfair dismissal.

And that’s to say nothing of Tabcorp’s number one recommendation to government, calling for a national betting regulator to be established. That idea lasted a whole of four months before the company flip-flopped and said it didn’t want a regulator anymore. “We want a nationally consistent framework for regulation, not necessarily a national regulator,” Rytenskild said last year.

A word to the wise

Years after she blew herself up at a government inquiry into Star Entertainment Group, the infamous words of Sally Pitkin, then a director of the casino operator, are coming back to haunt her as chair of Super Retail Group, which is currently ablaze with scandal.

Nothing like claims of screaming bosses and spitting at staff, or a steamy affair implicating the CEO, the details of which have been laid bare in a statement of claim lodged by Rebecca Farrell, a former chief legal officer who’s suing the billion-dollar retailer for unlawful dismissal.

Super Retail chair Sally Pitkin. Picture: Peter Wallis

Among its pages of extraordinary revelation is a morsel of note that sparkles with unwelcome nostalgia. It concerns an executive leadership offsite held in Noosa around November 2022 where Farrell allegedly complained to the boss, Anthony Heraghty, as well as the former head of HR, Jane Kelly (with whom Heraghty was allegedly having an affair) about the size of her role and the pressure she was facing.

“She (Farrell) was concerned that her excessive workload would cause her to ‘miss something’ and that Pitkin would blame her for being ‘silent or complicit’ in relation to any alleged breaches of the law by Super Retail,” the court documents state, “in the same way that Pitkin had, in her capacity as director of the Star Casino, described the general counsel of Star Casino to the Bell Inquiry.”

Remember? It was Pitkin who told the Star inquiry in 2022 that otherwise good people at the casino had developed “an indifference” to wrongdoing, and who said that compliance staff were “either silent, ignored or complicit” with officials who overlooked the rules. Bizarrely, Pitkin suggested that James Packer and Star’s competitive rivalry with Crown contributed to this “blinding” effect on her people, one of the most laughable contortions of abrogated responsibility to emerge during the hearings.

There’s also a superb irony in Farrell’s fear that she might be blamed by Pitkin – on whose watch the Star descended into a den of illegality and Chinese money laundering – for being silent or complicit in any breach of law.

Meanwhile, Kelly did end up leaving Super Retail Group last year, on December 15, but wasn’t far out the door when, according to court documents, she was rehired the same day as a consultant. Somehow Pitkin is alleged to have overlooked the many complaints that had already been lodged about Kelly; her job was to assist with boardroom recruitment for a new chair and non-executive directors.

In any case, the former boss of HR didn’t need to look far for Pitkin’s successor. In June the company announced Judith Swales as its incoming chair, to replace Pitkin from October 24. Swales was already a director.