My gambling addiction almost killed me. This government is trying to kill my hope, too.

The Albanese Government has ignored the Murphy report's key recommendations - and it'll cost lives.

“Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.”

In The Shawshank Redemption, protagonist Red (Morgan Freeman) believes hope causes disappointments and crushes spirits.

For three years, ever since I sat down at my laptop for a Microsoft Teams meeting with the late former Labor MP Peta Murphy and her colleagues, shaking with nerves and fear, I have lived with hope.

Hope, that by putting on record the lost decade of my life, taken from me by a gambling addiction, I was finally being listened to by our government.

Hope, that we were going to see a predatory, parasitic industry that causes industrial levels of social harm finally held accountable for the lives it has ruined.

Hope, that my addiction wasn’t going to just be another statistic - and I could use my years of pain to help other people.

And hope that all the families, workplaces and communities that have lost their loved ones to gambling addictions would feel some type of comfort that those lives would be honoured by a government taking gambling harm seriously.

Unfortunately, to some extent, Red was right. Last week, under the cover of a national energy crisis and an Easter long weekend, any hopes I had were replaced with an overwhelming feeling of disappointment and abandonment.

I was a nervous wreck the morning I gave my evidence.

I got an email out of the blue from a government department requesting my attendance at a parliamentary inquiry into online gambling harm - chaired by Peta Murphy.

I almost didn’t go.

I was incredibly nervous about putting my years of shame and all my frailties on the public record at such a big inquiry. I sat down the morning of the inquiry in a small room in my workplace pretending I was doing other work. I was shaking the whole time I gave my evidence - recounting how many times gambling companies had targeted me with inducements and advertising, even as I was trying to self-exclude every month.

I explained to Peta and her team that I had felt trapped by this industry. They would have been fully aware of my behaviour, yet kept bombarding me with everything they could to keep my addiction spiralling.

Peta did an amazing job that day to keep me calm - that I could tell she genuinely cared about what she was hearing and sincerely wanted change was extremely comforting. I left that meeting beaming with excitement and hope that I had done the right thing telling my story and was so confident the years I lost weren’t going to be for nothing. It was the catalyst for me to become an advocate with the Alliance for Gambling Reform.

Without Peta’s kindness that day, I wouldn’t be writing this.

Three months later, the inquiry, led by Peta, handed down the most comprehensive road map to date to tackle this predatory industry and hopefully save us from losing an entire generation to gambling addiction - the “You win some, you lose more” report.

Again, I was overwhelmed with that feeling of hope that we had finally turned the corner as a nation and our collective gambling addiction. We would hopefully shed our tag as the biggest per capita losers in the world. Peta’s inquiry had listened to us all and acknowledged exactly what we had told her. Gambling advertising and inducements were predatory and played a huge part in causing so many addictions, and the gambling industry was an unregulated mess - allowing them to act like cowboys and get away with whatever they wanted.

Ever since, it has felt like the Albanese government has tried to crush the hope I left with that day.

I have been made to feel like an absolute pariah. I’ve watched on for 3 years as this government continually appeared to refuse to acknowledge the existence of this report. I have been to countless meetings with members of parliament trying to advocate for the reforms it recommended.

I have listened to families and loved ones read suicide notes to MPs.

In all these meetings, I could probably count on one hand how many Labor MPs turned up - too scared to go against a Prime Minister who, behind the scenes, has reportedly been strong-arming his colleagues against urgently needed reform.

I have listened to the Prime Minister in Question Time continually use talking points from the gambling industry in defending their complete lack of action on gambling reform. He paints those who gave evidence at Peta’s inquiry as prohibitionist wowsers attacking the moral fibre of a country built on gambling culture. I was made to feel like my life was worthless - and that the government had turned its back on us all to protect gambling industry and its profits. I requested numerous meetings with the Prime Minister’s office or his Communications Minister’s office, the vast majority of which were rejected - all while we were fully aware they were meeting with the gambling industry regularly. Peta Murphy died in December 2023 of breast cancer - before she got to see meaningful action on the inquiry she worked tirelessly on.

After all this, I still had hope. Over the past three years, I’ve spent a huge amount of time trying to help dozens upon dozens of young Australians with their addictions and trying to help them find a path out of it. I’ve taken on this role due to the lack of action from this government. Every single person I have helped has told me very similar stories. They feel trapped by the gambling industry due to the way it was advertised to them, and the number of inducements they were bombarded with.

I have had people I have counselled commit suicide in that time. This government’s inaction on gambling reform has cost the lives of Australians - and further inaction will cost more lives.

Fast forward to last week’s announcement. As far as I’m aware, not one person who gave evidence was given notice that an announcement on gambling reform was going to be made at the National Press Club. The PM stood up and showed that Peta Murphy’s inquiry had, as I thought for so long, been completely disregarded by him and his government.

What we were given was a raft of weak, insipid measures that failed to get close to what Peta had stated were the main issues in her report. Peta’s roadmap from her inquiry stated gambling advertising needed to be phased out fully across three years, and what we got does not come close.

We are still going to see three ads per hour across the day on all television stations between 6am to 8.30pm. Would we be happy to see other hugely addictive adult products like cigarettes advertised three times an hour? No, we wouldn’t - so it beggars belief that this is what the government has come up with.

There is absolutely no mention of any ban on inducements anywhere in the announcements from this government. The harms caused by inducements such as bonus bets and deposit matches were clearly laid out in the Murphy report, and are not addressed at all in the government’s announcement.

Nor will we be getting a national regulator. In the UK, who don’t lose close to what we do to gambling, they have a whole department of full-time staff overseeing and regulating their gambling industry. Here in Australia, as so clearly explained by Steve Cannane in his piece for ABC’s Four Corners last year, we have a a few part-time state government employees in a back office in the Northern Territory tasked with overseeing a multi-billion-dollar industry - our federal government has decided that is fine.

Over the next few months, the government will spruik these reforms as “generational” and “the biggest in our history”. This is true - but is only true because no one has ever done anything before. The bar is on the ground.

These reforms are nowhere close to what we need. Anything short of a full gambling advertising ban, a ban on inducements and a national regulator, is going to be a failure to all Australians.

Even after their attempts to crush my hopes and spirits with these announcements, I still have some hope that we will get there. I still hope that we can honour Peta Murphy’s legacy and implement the inquiry’s recommendations fully. I still hope that Anthony Albanese will actually meet with the people harmed by this industry who spoke at the inquiry.

I still hope that down the road, I don’t have to sit through a footy game with my son and explain to him why we are still seeing ads from a company that almost took his dad away from him.

I still live with hope, and that is a dangerous thing