Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President. I’m very pleased to indicate I will be supporting this motion, and I hope other members of the Council do also. In many ways, it’s just common sense backed by evidence, where a society that understands cigarettes are lethal and highly addictive and we banned cigarette advertising from televisions in this country more than 30 years ago. Gambling products can be extremely addictive, and they can be lethal. We have got the most addictive electronic gaming machines anywhere in the world, here in Australia and in Tasmania. All of us have met or represented people who have lost everything because of their addiction to poker machines and we have had to endure government ministers and members over a long period of time saying this is a matter of personal responsibility. It is such a shameful cop-out of a response, when we know that gambling advertisers, the whole corporate gambling sector, multi-tendrilled as it is, targets people who are vulnerable; it targets them when they are at their most vulnerable; targets children through the normalisation of gambling through promotions and advertising in places that children and young people go to.
There is research. It is 2012 research, undertaken by Monash University. The title of it is Sports Betting Marketing During Sporting Events – A Stadium and Broadcast Census of Australian Football League Matches. This paper was written before some of those extraordinary leaps in technology that we have seen ‑ technology which is now routinely put in places like stadia to accelerate the extraction of people from their income. This research by Samantha Thomas, Sophie Lewis, Jenny Duong and Colin McLeod found in 2012 ‑ researchers also suggested up to 80 per cent of adolescents will have engaged in gambling by the time they are 18, with up to 8 per cent categorised as problem gamblers and up to 15 per cent at risk of developing problem gambling behaviours. We have to be very careful, of course, when we use a term like ‘problem’ gambler, because again that kind of places a level of individual responsibility on that person, which is completely unfair. It is gambling addiction, and the paper says:
Researchers have also clearly shown that patterns of risky and problem gambling have significant broader impacts on the well-being of families and communities.
It goes on to say that current gambling prevention models focus on individuals taking:
Personal responsibility for their gambling behaviours. This includes individuals knowing their limits and recognising and accessing help services if they feel they have a problem. However, as has been recognised in other public health issues an emphasis on personal responsibility may potentially hamper the introduction of socially responsible initiatives that take into account the broader welfare of the community.
The paper notes that sports betting is a rapidly growing segment of the gambling market. Alongside this has been an increase in the amount of marketing for sports betting products. That paper, towards the end, in its discussion and implications section says:
A diverse range of marketing platforms were used to market sports betting products and services.
This is over a period of time when they assessed gambling product advertisement at AFL matches:
Which reflects the coming together of commercial relationships between a variety of different agencies.
The use of these multiple platforms such as static and dynamic signage, school board advertising, logos, shirts, sponsorships, animated sponsored goal replays, et cetera, particularly at stadiums, meant that there was rarely a time during the match when audiences were not exposed to some form of marketing for sports betting.
This finding raises an important point about the impact of saturation marketing strategies in which audiences, in this case individuals who attend sporting matches or watch sports on television, are unable to avoid some types of marketing. As observed in other public health issues such as tobacco, marketing strategies based on saturation techniques are particularly problematic because of the ways in which individuals can never avoid seeing or receiving messages. Furthermore, marketing for sports betting, particularly on dynamic signage, was inherently transferred to different spaces, such as family homes, through television broadcasts.
As shown in other areas such as tobacco, these types of marketing may be particularly influential in softening children to products.
There’s another quite worrying short paper that’s been produced by one of the big four consultancies, Deloitte. This is this paper reads to me like a direct pitch to the gambling industry, sports betting industries, but also to sports clubs because it promotes the use of all‑pervasive technologies within facilities like stadia in order to extract maximum data from patrons, persuade patrons in their choices of where they spend that money in the venue, and then there’s a data record and tracking that follows through for that patron.
This paper, which is called the Stadium As A Platform – A New Model For Integrating Venue Technology Into Sports Businesses, says:
Increases in computing power and the shift to mobile and cloud computing as a dominant paradigm have fundamentally reshaped commerce. Today’s smartphone owner carries a device with processing power that would have required a computer the size of a stadium 50 years ago.
These trends are increasingly converging with bits and atoms coming together. The sports industry is moving towards a new model in which the stadium is a technological and commercial platform. This change subverts the traditional way of thinking about the stadium experience. It’s no longer enough to only consider the role of sight lines, seat width and the price of beer.
Teams need to engage their fans and event-goers to encourage them to shape their own experience. While the platform concept requires an organisational and operational mind shift for teams and stadium operators, teams that embrace it in stadium design, construction and operation will be on the vanguard of offering their fans the best experience in the stadiums of the future.
It describes the modern stadium as a:
… technological marvel, with thousands of access points and hundreds of miles of networking cable installed in a large and complex building footprint.
It details that there are Wi-Fi access points and distributed antenna, networked hardware and beacon technology to enable location-based service to fans and stadium operations staff. It talks about ‘connected immersive display hardware’ that can turn all parts of the arena into interactive screens.
It details venue-wide enterprise resource planning systems to integrate in-stadium functions like operations, facilities, retail point-of-sale, customer service, ticketing and social media. It details elements like data ingestion, processing, output and visualisation systems that can integrate stadium and game data, package it into fan-friendly formats and display across a range of devices.
It also talks about systems integration solutions that enable stadium technology to integrate with its surrounding environment, including broadcast systems, nearby retail, dining and municipal transit systems. The last pitch at the end is the one that certainly gave me chills. The conclusion from Deloitte is,
Reimagining the modern stadium as a technology and business platform has significant implications for the sports and entertainment industry. Stadiums are more connected than ever before, and so are the fans that work walk through the turnstile. This hyperconnectivity can be the foundation for creating new transactions, growing new businesses, and unlocking new revenue streams.
Adopting a platform mentality when it comes to technology means designing a stadium’s infrastructure to allow fans and partners to create new applications using data generated through stadium systems. Adopting a platform mentality in business means thinking about how value can be created through new experiences in the stadium whether directly from the team or from others, and capturing that value in a commercially beneficial way for the team.
Again, this is about extracting money from people who attend sporting events and using multi‑layered technologies in order to influence the way people move, think, eat, travel. It’s pervasive and the effect of it is likely to be pernicious if it is not heavily regulated. We can’t allow a gambling advertising free‑for‑all in this country, and, as this motion suggests we call on the government to do, we can’t allow gambling advertising in public venues, like any one of our existing stadia, which kids go along to – up at York Park, for example – watch the footy and are exposed to gambling advertising.
We can do better as a society because as a society we know here in Tasmania – certainly everyone in this place should know – that we have allowed electronic gaming machines and the companies that promote and profit from them to write the rules. We had the expiry of the gaming deed that was a real opportunity to save people’s lives and livelihoods, and we watched this government roll over to the gambling industry. Then there was a promise that they would deliver genuine harm minimisation that included, for example, mandatory precommitment cards. The government has now walked away from that.
The industry said, how about a little bit of facial recognition and the government said, yeah, sounds good. Well, we haven’t heard much more about that yet either. That said, there is no evidence that that technology will prevent people from losing heavily at any one of our now many pokies venues around the state, but great news: the Treasurer and minister responsible, minister Abetz, said in our Legislative Council Estimates last week that the state will introduce gaming care officers.
The industry has come to government with a proposal to have gaming care officers in venues around the state, but as I understand it, there will only be four of them at the many venues which now have EGMs, and so what is this about, and where is the evidence for this brain burp of an idea? Well, it’s the industry again calling the shots and that is why, at a bare minimum, we should be insisting that there’s no advertising of gambling products in publicly owned venues in Tasmania. The closing to the honourable member for Nelson’s motion is that:
(a) the government is called on to introduce, within one year of this resolution, a complete ban on gambling advertising and sponsorship at all state‑owned or state‑funded venues, including the proposed Macquarie Point stadium, and on players uniforms; and
(b) table a progress report, within six months of this resolution, on the implementation of the removal of gambling advertising from existing venues.
This is not a radical motion. This is not a motion that members should be uncomfortable with. In some ways, in terms of mitigating the harm caused by gambling advertising, it’s the bare minimum and it’s something over which government has control. If the government were serious about making sure children and young people are not exposed to gambling products at a young age, and certainly not saturated with them, which is where we’re at now, then it would be doing this anyway. I’m very thankful to the member for Nelson for putting this motion forward. I hope it is successful, because if we did that, it would make a real difference.
