Some questions, Jeremy Cordeaux argued on this week’s Court of Public Opinion, don’t require a debate — only the will to act. Banning gambling advertising is one, and the government’s refusal to do it left him plainly furious.
Testimony In Tears
The catalyst was a Senate hearing where a witness, barely holding back tears, described how gambling had wrecked his life. It was as direct an account of the industry’s damage as you could hear — and it drove Jeremy to his central demand: why does this Labor government keep supporting and enabling the very people who ruin lives?
He offered no comfortable answer, but he wasn’t afraid to ask the blunt questions. Are they compromised? On the take? He said he’d dearly like to know whether serious political donations had flowed from the gambling industry into party accounts — anyone’s accounts.
Years Of Sitting On It
What deepened his anger was the wasted roadmap. The way forward, he noted, already existed in the late Senator Peta Murphy’s report — a clear set of recommendations placed in the government’s hands.
Rather than adopt them, Jeremy said, Labor sat on the report for years and then followed the advice of the very interests the report had condemned. A considered plan for reform, shelved in favour of the industry’s wishes — to him, that was the heart of the failure.
No Deals, No Half-Measures
Jeremy’s solution was absolute. No tinkering at the edges. Ban the advertising and promotion of gambling across radio, television and — crucially — online, and outlaw the inducements the Senate had heard about.
He dismissed the language of compromise, of “giving ground,” of leaving the door ajar for a deal with the Greens. What, he asked, is there to negotiate? The matter is open and shut: pick up the Murphy report and implement it. Politics may be billed as the art of compromise, but here, he insisted, you simply do what’s right.
A Wasted Open Goal
The part that most frustrated him was the missed opportunity. Here was a chance for a government to seize the moral high ground with nearly the whole Parliament, and the community, behind it. The reform is popular, the evidence overwhelming, the harm beyond dispute.
And still, he said, they won’t act — preferring mealy-mouthed concessions to decisive reform. That, to Jeremy, marked the government as not only weak but hypocritical: swift to attack others for shielding vested interests, yet unwilling to move when the vested interest is one of its own.
The Simplest Test
Jeremy’s guiding rule needed only three words: do no harm. A government serious about that principle, he argued, would end gambling advertising outright and never look back.
That it refuses is, for Jeremy, a story about courage and priorities — and one more reason, he suggested, that plain-speaking outsiders keep winning ground while the major parties dither.
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