• The biggest losers

    Wayne Peake     |      May 29, 2025

    Gambling has played a major role in Australian culture, but the sums lost to on-course betting have long been dwarfed poker machines and now online sports betting.

  • Gambling on change

    Charles Livingstone     |      May 26, 2025

    The newly re-elected Labor Government should bite the bullet of reform and curb the rise of heavily promoted online sports betting and ubiquity of poker machines to protect the Australian people it professes to care about, rather than pander to gambling industry lobby groups.

  • Pokie madness

    Charles Livingstone     |      May 11, 2025

    Poker machines line the walls of clubs and pubs – and the coffers of governments and venues – but there are ways to tame this gambling gorilla.

  • Heads you lose

    Sarah Marinos     |      March 18, 2025

    Mobile phone gambling apps and incessant gambling advertising at sporting events on TV are driving a worrying increase in problem gambling in Australia.

  • Sausages and cauldrons: Making law and policy in 21st Century Australia

    David Rowe     |      December 2, 2024

    The divergent fates of proposed federal legislation to restrict social media use by children and online gambling adverts for everyone highlight the complex interplay of public concern, political convenience and vested interest lobbying which shapes policy making in contemporary Australia.

  • The biggest game in town

    Open Forum     |      October 26, 2024

    The global health impact of commercial gambling is worse than previously understood and stronger regulatory controls are needed, according to a new Lancet Public Health Commission report.

  • Gambling fast and slow

    Matthew Rockloff     |      October 21, 2024

    Just as there is ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ thinking, so there are ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ ways to gamble and, unsurprisingly, it’s the adrenaline hits delivered by poker machines and sports betting which are most likely to lead gamblers into trouble.

  • Gambling’s not a game

    Elizabeth Baldwin     |      September 7, 2024

    The gambling industry reaps billions of dollars from Australians every year without any regard for the social harm or individual misery it leaves in its wake.

  • Rigging the odds against gambling reform

    Ross Gordon     |      August 18, 2024

    Gambling, like tobacco and alcohol before it, causes massive social harm, so why is the government so reluctant to ban gambling advertising?

  • Addressing Australia’s gambling problem

    Patrick Whyte     |      October 28, 2023

    A QUT researcher has called for stronger government policy to regulate the online gambling environment, restrict marketing, establish behaviour change programs and provide better support for people with a gambling problem.

  • Cracking down on gambling

    Charles Livingstone     |      July 1, 2023

    Proposals to limit the power and reach of the gambling lobby are long overdue, given the harm it wreaks on individuals, families and society as a whole.

  • Give gambling ads the boot from sport

    Charles Livingstone     |      May 20, 2023

    Society gained from removing tobacco advertising from our TV screens and billboards and we should treat the pernicious and ubiquitous gambling adverts which have infected sport just the same.