An inquiry regarding the impacts of online gambling on Australian residents has been recently rolled out, following a referral from the Honorable Amanda Rishworth MP, the Minister for Social Services of Australia.
A couple of weeks ago, the research was officially launched to check the impact that digital gambling has on local people, considering the increased online gambling participation rates.
The chair of the House of Representatives’ standing committee on social policy and legal affairs, Peta Murphy MP, has noted that the ongoing inquiry will provide a new point of view on online gambling. Currently, the committee is seeking submissions on the aforementioned inquiry in regard to online gambling and the impacts it has on compulsive gamblers. The study is expected to help Australian lawmakers understand whether the existing regulations, laws, education, customer protection, and support programs are good enough to reduce the harm inflicted on local gamblers.
Ms Murphy shared that the members of the social policy and legal affairs committee were concerned about the increasing accessibility of online gambling platforms and the strong role such websites started to play in Australian people’s lives. Furthermore, the committee members wanted to see what the exposure of children and young people to gambling advertising was and how this might contribute to further increases in problem gambling rates in the country.
A Range of Issues Related to Online Gambling to Be Taken into Account by Researchers
According to reports from the Department of Social Services, online gambling is the fastest growing type of gambling in the territory of Australia. A survey that was held earlier in 2022 revealed that one in ten Australian residents had gambled online in the last six months at the time when the survey was held.
The latest inquiry, which was officially launched on September 15th, 2022, and will run until November 11th, 2022, is set to prove the definition of “gambling service” given by the Interactive Gambling Act 2001, the restrictions on gambling advertising, the illegal online gambling services in the country, the current licensing and regulatory regimes in Australia, the existing customer protection measures, programmes addressing online problem gambling and related gambling-related harm, as well as the effectiveness of the counselling and support services that are being offered across the country.
As mentioned above, the interested parties will be able to make their submissions to the ongoing online gambling inquiry until November 11th, 2022.
Apart from the concern regarding the growing online gambling participation and, respectively, online problem gambling rates in Australia, land-based poker machines, also known as pokies, have remained a massive concern for local lawmakers. The machines, which have been one of the most popular forms of gambling among Australian residents, have cost local people millions of dollars in losses not only in the 2021/2022 financial year but also in the ones before that and have been considered one of the forms of gambling that had the most detrimental impact on people, especially ones who found it hard to control their gambling.
- Author
Daniel Williams
