It’s hard to overstate to people who don’t live in Australia just how ubiquitous gambling is here. It’s a local joke here that if rain droplets are falling down a window pane, there will be an Aussie willing to bet on the first to reach the bottom.
Punting is woven into the story of Australia, from the soldiers at Anzac Cove in the World War I playing two-up to pass the time to Phar Lap, the underdog horse that got the nation through the Great Depression. Aussies love sports, too, and their performance at the Paris Olympics — coming fourth in the medal tally despite having just twenty-five million people — attests to how central a role they play in the national narrative.
It’s no wonder, then, that sports betting is a big deal. For Americans basking in the liberalization of sports betting, Australia’s experience should be a cautionary tale.
Gambling isn’t just part of the culture in Australia; it’s completely unavoidable.
The saturation of advertising for gambling companies on TV is total, far beyond anywhere else in the world, to the point that there is now serious pushback on just how much content is chucked at the average person every day.
Watching the news? Reality TV? A nice nature documentary? Expect to be bombarded by such brands as Sportsbet, Ladbrokes, Neds, and TAB.
More than a million gambling ads are broadcast annually in Australia, across TV, radio, and the internet. Half of those are from just five companies.
Sports betting has recently been liberalized in the United States. Australia presents the nightmare scenario of what happens when the industry starts to hit its full potential.
The incessant nature of the commercials form part of what one might call the gambling-industrial complex. It is a status quo that benefits several key stakeholders in society at the expense of some of the most vulnerable.
Australians lose more on gambling than any other nation on Earth, around US$22 billion per year, or over a thousand dollars per person. That’s twice what it is per capita in the United States or United Kingdom.
The CEO of the Alliance for Gambling Reform, Martin Thomas, described it as “social harm on an industrial scale.” He’s not wrong.
A 2023 report by Labor MP Peta Murphy called on gambling advertising to be pulled from TV, and now a bill with that aim is now advancing through federal parliament.
It has terrified the nation’s two biggest sports leagues, the National Rugby League (NRL) and Australian Football League (AFL), which are highly leveraged on the money they get from sports betting. They run rugby league and Aussie rules football, respectively, with Australia roughly split along geographic lines: in New South Wales and Queensland NRL is king, while everywhere else AFL tends to dominate.
Both have made strong statements against reform, and there is a feeling that major scare campaigns are incoming once their seasons, set to end in the next two weeks, are out of the way.
The second part of this landscape is the media, which has much to lose from gambling reform. TV and print in Australia are controlled by two conglomerates: News Corp — Rupert Murdoch’s local outfit — and Nine Entertainment. Between them, they have all the big national and regional newspapers, the main pay TV platform, and one of the two big free-to-air TV networks.
Almost by default, they are also the two major funders and promoters of sports. The NRL, for example, is broadcast free by Nine and to subscribers by News Corp under its Fox brand.
Most print and online media coverage comes via the Sydney Morning Herald (owned by Nine), the Daily Telegraph in Sydney or the Courier-Mail in Brisbane (both News Corp). Radio is similarly split.
The sports leagues need the media for promotion and coverage, and they need the gambling companies for sponsorship because they pay far more than anyone else can or will.
The media needs the sports leagues as the only providers of time-sensitive appointment content that drives subscriptions and eyeballs to the channels, which the gambling companies pay a premium to advertise on. Bill Shorten, a former leader of the Labor Party, recently went as far as to claim that free-to-air broadcasters were in “diabolical trouble” and needed gambling cash “in order just to stay afloat.”
Unsurprisingly, the C-suites are very close.
Peter V’landys, chairperson of the Australian Rugby League Commission and the de facto boss of the rugby league in Australia, does his job while also being the CEO of Racing New South Wales, which runs horse racing and regulates all the bookies that want to operate in that market.
Gillon McLachlan, who until last year was the CEO of the AFL, now holds the top job at Tabcorp, Australia’s largest gambling company. The major sports organizations have responded to the antibetting ads bill by pleading poor to governments about how dependent they are on gambling revenue.
The NRL posted a US$40 million profit last year and the AFL even more, racking up US$112 million.
Still they insist that were the gaming revenue to run dry up, they would run out of cash to support children’s sports programs. The AFL was shameless about this, directly linking gambling money to the funding of Auskickits youth program. No blanket Ladbrokes ads; no footy for little kiddies. Better tell the children.
The NRL is yet to go that far, though V’landys did very much say the quiet part out loud when discussing the issue. He told the Age and Sydney Morning Herald that independent statistics showed just that 4 percent of problem gamblers in Australia reported that their issue was betting on sporting events. This sounded unproblematic until he mentioned, as a comparison, that 70 percent were on poker machines.
Poker machines are everywhere in the state of New South Wales: the only jurisdiction in the world with more is Nevada.
In other parts of Australia, you have to seek them out by going to a casino or a bookie, but in Sydney they are so prevalent that some pubs specifically advertise that they don’t have pokies.
Lots of pubs are dependent on addiction for their profits, but in New South Wales it’s gamblers, not alcoholics.
Pokies are the mechanism by which the junior rugby league is funded. Huge gambling dens known as “Leagues Clubs” fund junior sports by taking the losses from punters and funneling some of the money into youth programs. As a result, rugby is a cheap sport to play for kids, but only because someone else is subsiding the cost through their losses.
The rugby league prides itself on being the game of the working class — it is the only sport in the world founded by class struggle, in the North of England in the late nineteenth century — and is wildly popular in the most deprived parts of New South Wales and Queensland.
One could lay a map of rugby league heartlands and a map of problem gambling hotspots right on top of each other, and the Leagues Clubs would be at the very center of both.
Canterbury Leagues, linked to the Bulldogs club, is ironically named Rugby League Vegas after its gaudy architecture — even more ironic now, as the NRL played games in the real Vegas this year as part of a drive to expand the sport’s appeal to American sports bettors.
The “Dogs” came sixth in NRL standings this year, but their Leagues Club was fourth in the rankings of profit per poker machine in the whole state, raking in AU$61 million in a year — ten times what the club made on food and beverages over the same time period.
If you listen to the sports, then, this is really just a question of which type of problem gambler you want to fund your kid’s footy. That’s the way it has to happen.
Part of the origin of modern sports was the feeling that if you were going to bet on something, it was worth agreeing on the rules beforehand. That’s where horse racing, boxing, and cricket came from, to name just three examples.
But even if gambling and sports have always been linked, there’s still the question of whether betting should be just one part of sports that we accept on the margins and regulate, or if it is something we should actively promote and try to make as prominent as possible.
Do sports exist for gambling, like horse racing, or do they exist with gambling? That’s a live question at the moment in Australia. It’s one that America has to think about, because this genie is not easily put back in the bottle.
There was a time when sports leagues — and the media companies that broadcast and write about them — told you that cigarette advertising dollars were crucial to their existence. Now we know they weren’t.
In Australia, that argument is playing out again. Peter V’landys referred to the “nanny state” in his remarks on the proposed gambling reforms and said that the idea was “extreme ideology.” John Howard, conservative prime minister of Australia from 1996 to 2007, however, has come out in favor of changes, so they probably aren’t that over the top.
Current prime minister Anthony Albanese — himself a noted rugby league fan — told Parliament in early September that “the connection between sport and gambling needs to be broken because sport should be enjoyed for what it is.”
Now his government has the chance to do exactly that. According to polls, 70 percent of the Australian public agrees with him. Powerful interests in sports, gambling, and the legacy media don’t. At the moment, the odds are split on who will win.
