Doing nothing, not much, or just not enough
If you follow the shifts in the consensus of opinion within the political commentariat, you may have noticed that a new narrative is developing around the Albanese government. From peaking at an acceptable level of mediocrity well before the Voice referendum, the downward trajectory in recent months has taken them from ‘cautious’, to ‘timid’, and now to just plain ‘disappointing’.
Some may feel this is unfair, given what has actually been quite a busy government. However, while the voters who got rid of the Morrison government may not have expected all that much, they appear to have wanted more than busy-ness.
Perhaps the key to this are the areas where the Albanese government has acknowledged bad policy should be addressed, and in some cases even set up reviews to determine how this should be done, but then either doing nothing, not much or just not enough.
Regulating gambling advertising… a bit
The current example is the government’s buckling to the commercial television industry over restrictions upon gambling advertising. The parliamentary enquiry into gambling advertising, led by the late Peta Murphy, made a strong recommendation that gambling advertising on television should be phased out completely over a period of three years. The restrictions the government is now proposing fall well short of that — both in terms of the limitations they introduce and their likely effect.
There is a large body of evidence which reveals the social harm created by gambling, and in particular the acceleration of the potential for social harm to come from online gambling. There has been a massive increase in gambling advertising on television in recent years. (Between April 2022 and May 2023, there were more than a million gambling ads broadcast on Australian television.) Among the consequences of this is the consolidation of the connection between gambling and the consumption of sport on television. So there are strong reasons why government would want to act in the community’s interests to call a halt to this, as they had done previously with tobacco advertising.
That was before the commercial broadcasters got involved. Their argument that the industry would fall over if it wasn’t supported by gambling advertising appears to have won the day. We even had Bill Shorten on Q&A parroting that argument when asked to defend the government’s position.
It is obviously nonsense to claim that the future of commercial television in Australia is entirely dependent on advertising from just one industry. The future certainly does look challenging, but there are many more challenges involved in this than the industry’s reliance on sponsorship from the gambling companies. We can acknowledge that phasing out gambling advertising will make life even more difficult for commercial television, but it is not unreasonable to argue that the clear benefits for the nation’s social and economic wellbeing more than outweigh the possible consequences to the industry.
More fundamentally, we might have hoped that our government had the courage to stand up to an industry lobby that claims their business model depends on strategies which unquestionably harm individuals and communities, while driving up the costs of healthcare and social welfare. That business model, too, provides the context for the grooming of younger audiences which guarantees these forms of social harm will continue, perhaps even accelerate, into the future.
It is fair to ask, as some members of the government are now doing, what is the justification for prioritizing the commercial objectives of this industry over the wellbeing of the nation’s citizens?
There’s more where that came from
Regrettably, the failure on gambling advertising is only the latest disappointment. Further examples include the running sore that is the indexation of HECS and its unconscionable impoverishment of a generation, and the refusal to address the consequences of the Coalition’s Job-Ready Graduates funding scheme which has increased the cost of an arts degree to $50,000. Then there is the continual deferral of addressing the level of JobSeeker payments despite the clear evidence of the COVID supplement that this would be one way to make a real dent in the levels of poverty and homelessness that now plague our society. There is also the depressing cycle of equivocation around approvals for proposals from the fossil fuels industry and what looks like a sweetheart deal with the gas industry. And so on.
Worst of all, this has become a government that is prone to behave as if it has something to hide. We have seen how badly it has dealt with internal dissent, we have seen how much irritation has been expressed when challenges from the Greens or the independents gain some traction, and we have seen a disturbing tendency to adopt a ‘there’s nothing to see here’ defense when pressed on important national issues such as the implications of AUKUS.
The disappointment is there and it is warranted. The upcoming election will tell us just how widely and deeply it is felt.
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