u/stirringthemerde

Prominent gambling reform advocate Tim Costello has blasted the government’s new advertising rules for streaming services as being much worse than the status quo, accusing Labor of removing existing protections to favour sports betting companies at the expense of families.

Some Labor MPs are also concerned that the new laws for streamers represent a backwards step, after this masthead reported that Labor’s long-awaited gambling package will override the current advertising blackout for live sport streamed online between 5am and 8.30pm.

Tim Costello said the latest package from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Communications Minister Anika Wells was a backwards step on streaming – where a growing number of Australians watch sport.

Instead, Labor’s changes will allow digital platforms to start showing registered adult users unlimited gambling ads at half-time and quarter-time breaks unless they opt out – a move critics warn will flood streaming services with betting advertisements.

Costello, the chief advocate of the Gambling Reform Alliance, described the carve-out for streaming services as “the most generous gift to the sports betting companies I have ever seen”.

“What they have put up is much worse than the current state of non-action,” he told this masthead.

Streaming platforms to show unlimited gambling ads under Labor’s new laws

“They have removed the protections that were there, which will massively benefit foreign multibillion dollar sports betting companies and the streaming services. It is open slather to take over sports, groom our kids, and make sports and gambling cemented in our culture.”

Gambling reform has been a sensitive issue inside Labor since the late Labor MP Peta Murphy recommended a blanket advertising ban in her 2023 report. The government is dealing with competing demands from reform advocates as well as the media, sports and betting industries.

Former minister Michelle Rowland’s proposal to restrict television ads and totally ban online advertising was canned by the prime minister to avoid a messy fight with industry in the last term of parliament.

Wells’ proposal goes further than Rowland’s by banning the newer online keno and offshore lottery industries, and dealing with online influencers. But it contains looser restrictions than Rowland’s package for television and, in particular, streaming services.

Labor MP Mike Freelander, one of the government backbenchers who has spoken in favour of tougher gambling ad laws, said he had major concerns about the decision to remove the advertising blackout for streaming services and the move needed to be explored further.

Several other MPs in the Labor caucus who have pushed for gambling reform welcomed the government’s package, saying it was a good first step, although they would like to see stronger laws in future – including if this meant Wells’ laws were strengthened in negotiations with the Senate.

The Greens want the government to go further, and the Coalition is determining its position on the laws, which will be probed by a Senate inquiry over the winter break. Liberal backbenchers Simon Kennedy and Andrew Wallace are advocating internally for the opposition to take a tougher stance.

Former Liberal MP Keith Wolahan, who was a member of Murphy’s inquiry, said Labor’s reforms made some progress but fell well short of the committee’s recommendations.

“Any changes should reduce children’s exposure to gambling advertising, not simply shift it onto different platforms,” he told this masthead.

Costello said the package posed a significant problem given streaming services were the future of live sport. Nearly half of Australians already watch live sport through digital platforms.

Both Albanese and Wells have defended the package, saying it is stronger than current settings because it will require streamers showing gambling ads to give a clear and easy-to-access “opt out” option, and children could therefore be protected from seeing gambling ads at all times of the day.

“I think we’ve got the balance right,” Albanese said on Friday.

“There is a carve-out that anyone can choose from their devices. So, for example, if they’re streaming something online, people can exclude themselves from any gambling advertising, full stop.”

Costello said that argument was undermined by data from SBS On Demand, which already offers users an advertising opt out. The latest available figures, reported by Crikey in April, said 16,000 of the streaming service’s 12.9 million registered users had chosen to opt out of ads, including for gambling – about 0.12 per cent.

He wants the government to instead pursue an opt-in model, where people have to actively choose to receive gambling advertisements. Kennedy is also encouraging the Liberals to take that position.

At the very least, Costello said, the current advertising blackout on live sport streamed between 5am and 8.30pm should be reinstated. Under the new laws, the rules remain for television, although the start time has been delayed to 6am.

“[Reinstating the blackout] would be absolutely minimum. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s confusing, if the same game you’re watching has different rules [on different platforms]. That’s unacceptable,” Costello said.

“The world is moving to streaming, and so you need to tackle streaming if you want to set laws that aren’t outdated tomorrow, that are actually helping delink sports and gambling. That’s either a ban, or if you’re generous, an opt-in for the ads.”

The political bit

A Tasmanian government bill to ban greyhound racing is on hold in the Legislative Council.

The Labor opposition opposes it, and the government is not confident it will be supported by enough upper house independents to pass.

"The future of the greyhound racing industry is very uncertain," Ms O'Connor said.

Premier Jeremy Rockliff described the videos as "horrific" and "challenging to look at".

"The only thing standing between banning greyhound racing and not is [Labor MP] Dean Winter and the Labor party," he said.

"I urge all Labor members of the parliamentary team to look at that footage and tell Tasmanians why they will not support a phase out and ban of greyhound racing."

Asked about the videos, Labor leader Josh Willie said he had not seen them but described all animal welfare incidents as "serious".

"We need to make sure there is transparency in the industry," he said.

Mr Willie said Labor continued to support the greyhound racing industry.

Vulnerable Queenslanders could be waiting longer for social housing after the state’s department failed to act on all recommendations from the auditor-general, according to a new report.

The Queensland Audit Office found the department had only fully implemented four of the eight recommendations from its previous report handed down in 2023, which flagged the department had not managed the social housing register effectively and was not building enough.

The Menso Southbank in Cordelia Street, South Brisbane, was named as a social housing site by the previous government.Tony Moore

According to the auditor-general, the housing department had only partially taken steps to confirm applicants remained eligible for housing, consistently reviewed applications and consistently performed pre-allocation checks.

The department was still not applying a consistent approach when it came to priority allocation, the audit found.

“While the department assessed it had fully implemented all our recommendations, we found that gaps remain for four of the eight recommendations,” Auditor-General Rachel Vagg said in her conclusion.

“The department has taken steps to increase housing supply and improve its management of social
housing. However, in an environment of increasing demand, the social housing register will continue to grow, and the department will increasingly find it challenging to effectively service those in need.”

More than half the people on the waitlist were homeless or at risk of homelessness.Jesse Marlow

The audit also made five further recommendations, which the department has agreed to.

Those include the department will strengthen its internal performance testing, change how it manages applicants in transitional housing, strengthen its oversight of community housing providers, alter its approach to when existing tenants housing needs change, and update its modelling for demand.

At the end of last year, there were 32,848 applicants for social housing in Queensland, with the department admitting reduced staffing had contributed to the jump in applications.

More than half of those applicants were either homeless or at risk of homelessness, with an average wait time of 28 months.

According to figures from the department from March this year, were 26,500 people on the waitlist.

The auditor-general found the department had gone backwards when it came to reviewing priority allocations, with 66 per cent overdue for review, and 11 per cent overdue by more than a year.

The number of applications deemed priority allocations on the register between June and December 2025 dropped from 2160 to just 150, a decrease of 93 per cent.

“During this period, the department increased its review of existing priority allocations and identified many applications were no longer eligible for priority status,” the auditor-general said.

In response to the audit, Housing Minister Sam O’Connor said the waitlist dropping from by roughly 5000 people showed the department was headed in the right direction.

“There is significant work to do following a decade where social housing delivery did not keep pace with our state’s growth. With net growth of just 509 social homes on average per year between 2015-16 to 2023-24,” he wrote.

This week, the government announced it would invest an extra $100 million of the next four years in the state’s budget, with the goal of building 2000 new social and community homes each year.

Reasons for decision

https://www.hcourt.gov.au/cases-and-judgments/judgments/judgments-1998-current/abdel-hady-v-commonwealth-australia

The hard-won pay deal for Victorian teachers has highlighted shortfalls in how public schools are funded and staffed, so why is the state government forgoing $2.4 billion in much-needed money for the poorest schools? By Julie Hare.

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It was the election of Dan Andrews as premier in 2014 that turned the cars on Victorian roads into mobile advertisements for his pitch: The Education State.

As opposition leader, Andrews had made education policy central to Labor’s positioning as the party of opportunity, equality and prosperity. He invoked the reforms of former prime ministers Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke – and his education minister John Dawkins – and Julia Gillard.

Two months before he was elected premier, Andrews told a gathering of Labor luminaries, alongside the rank and file: “From preschool to postgrad, a Labor government will be there for you every step of the way. We won’t just fix schools, we’ll help them do more,” he said.

Of his single-term predecessors, he said, “The Liberals abandoned our schools, they rolled up master plans and wound up construction work, and across Victoria, classrooms are crowded, facilities are failing, kids aren’t comfortable, and kids aren’t safe.”

Twelve years on, and well into the third term of a Labor government, it’s not just the kids who aren’t comfortable or safe. As of last week, their teachers were among the lowest paid in the country – with salaries ranging from $79,589 to $129,554. Victorian teachers report appallingly low levels of satisfaction, with two in three saying they will leave the profession within the next five years.

“This has been in the making for 10 years,” says Kos Samaras, former Victorian Labor Party adviser and founder of polling and strategy firm RedBridge Group.

“This is the story of the transition between the Andrews and the Allan administrations, and then having to play catch-up.

“If in 2014 the newly minted Andrews Labor government actually tried to ensure that teachers’ pay was in line with the rest of the country, then would we be having this discussion right now? No.”

On March 24, Victorian public school teachers, teachers’ assistants and principals went on strike for the first time in 13 years. An estimated 35,000 were angry enough to take to the streets of Melbourne in protest.

An AEU survey ... found among more than 10,000 public school teachers ... 86 per cent spent their own money on classroom supplies, with an average annual outlay of $988 per teacher.

The strike was ostensibly about pay. One placard was succinct: “Give Vic teachers more $$”.

After a full year of protracted negotiations, the state government had offered just 17 per cent over four years – half of what the union had been pushing for.

This month brought the threat of rolling half-day strikes, which were suspended after reports that the education minister, Ben Carroll, had upped the state’s offer.

An in-principle agreement was finally reached on Friday for pay rises of between 28.3 and 32.4 per cent over four years for school teachers, assistant principals and principals – increases that would bring them in line with their NSW counterparts. 

The deal is also expected to include measures to ease workloads, which have contributed greatly to the despondent mood in the industry. Victorian public school teachers average 12.4 hours of unpaid overtime per week, while principals average 17.5 hours.

“A pay rise is just the beginning of recognising what teachers do,” says Professor Lucas Walsh, professor of education policy and practice at Monash University.

“Theirs is also invisible labour,” he says, describing the complex classrooms and residualisation, where poorer children and kids with special needs are concentrated in public schools. Moreover, he says, “personal out-of-pocket contributions are routinely exploited by governments of all political stripes”.

“All that has become normalised,” Walsh says.

There is plenty of data to support Walsh’s point. An Australian Education Union (AEU) survey of more than 10,000 public school teachers across the country conducted at the end of last year showed that 86 per cent spent their own money on classroom supplies, with an average annual outlay of $988 per teacher.

Nationally, this amounts to $177 million annually – money saved by state and territory governments.

“We’re not talking about nice-to-haves or personal touches,” said AEU federal president Correna Haythorpe at the time of the survey’s release. “Teachers are paying for basic items like stationery, books, classroom equipment, and materials to support individual students.”

And an 2025 report for the AEU conducted by four Monash University academics, led by Fiona Longmuir, delivered a damning assessment of conditions in Victoria’s public schools.

“Longstanding shortfalls in how public schools are funded, staffed, and supported have led to uncompetitive wages, excessive workloads causing burnout, and a lack of professional recognition, with these factors identified as some of the reasons why many public school staff don’t intend to stay in the system long-term,” the report reads.

Unsurprisingly, only 30 per cent of 8000 teachers surveyed for the report said they intended to remain in that workforce until retirement. Seventy per cent cited poor student behaviour and violence as reasons for intending to leave the profession, while more than 30 per cent pointed to parent or carer behaviour, including threats and rudeness, as factors driving them out of their chosen profession.

The Victorian auditor-general wrote a terse report about workplace-related violence in schools last year. It noted that while the Education Department goes to some lengths to coach staff on how to address inappropriate and threatening behaviours from students and parents, there are significant gaps in how it handles these problems.

“The department does not record or report incident numbers completely. This means that it does not have a clear overall picture of work-related violence resulting from student behaviour,” the report said, adding that it does not “comprehensively review its policies or systematically collect lessons learned from how it responds to incidents”Perhaps the most egregious failing of the Victorian government with regard to its publicly educated students and their staff is that it has not fully signed on to a landmark federal government funding agreement that will drive billions of extra dollars into the system.

Known as the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, it is the Albanese government’s plan finally to fund all public school students across the country to the Schooling Resource Standard, lifting the Commonwealth’s contribution from 20 per cent to 25 per cent. The SRS is the estimate of the minimum required to provide a high-quality education for every student in Australia, based on recommendations from the landmark Review of Funding for Schooling commissioned by the Gillard government and led by David Gonski. Since that review, in 2011, funding has fallen short of the SRS benchmark for all public schools in the country, bar a few in the ACT. Even under the new agreement, those funds won’t be delivered in full until 2034, contingent on the states reaching set targets.

In 2026, the amount to be dispersed from the Commonwealth is $14,467 for primary and $18,180 for secondary students, with additional funding flowing to those schools with high concentrations of poor and disadvantaged students.

While all other states and territories have agreed to the arrangements until the 2034 expiry date, Victoria signed up for only two years, leaving it under the previous funding framework and so forgoing an estimated $2.4 billion in much-needed money for the poorest schools.

Professor Glenn Savage, an expert in state and federal funding for schools at the University of Melbourne, says Victoria’s withholding is undermining the public school system. “That is just terrible. For Australia to be so far off as a nation in fully funding its public schools is a problem in itself. But then to have Victoria, the second-largest education system in the country, to not have a date at which it commits to fully signing the agreement is dreadful,” Savage says.

With all the broader issues affecting the teacher workforce, Savage says Victoria is “a tinderbox of concern”.

“When we talk about the full funding of schools, it’s not just what is the minimum needed to run them, but also to attend to equity challenges and so forth. Victoria’s just persistently been a long way off,” he says.

“It’s a wicked cycle where the underfunding of schools clearly contributes to conditions within those schools that make the everyday work environment of teachers very difficult. Sure, it’s pay and conditions, but it’s more than that.”

Education Minister Ben Carroll’s office did not respond to questions.

Over the six weeks leading up to May 9, GetUp spent $600,000 campaigning against One Nation in the Farrer byelection. Then we lost, badly.

We knew from the start that the odds were against us. Still, as I watched the results come through on Saturday night last week, I was shocked by the size of the swing.

The GetUp campaign in Farrer was deliberately ambitious. We got involved in the byelection because we believe that the rise of One Nation and the politics it represents pose a unique and unprecedented threat, and that if we want to stop them we have to start that fight in the places they are strongest. We pushed messages into the electorate at enormous scale, spending more in a single seat than we have done in GetUp’s 20-year history.

More than $200,000 was invested in Facebook, Instagram and YouTube advertising alone – far exceeding the $10,148 spent by the official campaign for One Nation’s candidate, David Farley, over the same period. We committed a further $160,000 to television advertising across both free-to-air and catch-up streaming services. These advertisements focused on issues that consistently resonated in testing: local hospital funding, cost-of-living pressures, and Pauline Hanson’s ideological and political alignment with Donald Trump.

We sent text messages to more than 100,000 voters, conducted repeated focus groups and message testing, and erected billboards that drew public criticism from Barnaby Joyce.

Every aspect of the campaign was grounded in verifiable facts and informed by polling. We deliberately avoided hyperbole and centred our case on issues with direct relevance to voters’ lives. Our messaging demonstrated that One Nation’s parliamentary record was frequently at odds with its populist rhetoric. We saturated the electorate with these arguments, tracked measurable shifts in attitudes in polling and focus groups, and outspent One Nation itself by at least a factor of 10 to one.

Just a month out from byelection day, the best available polling showed One Nation’s primary vote lead shrinking to less than one point ahead of the community independent, Michelle Milthorpe. In the end, the gap was over 10 points – not even close. It was a landmark victory for Pauline Hanson.  As we consider the wash-up, there are some important lessons forGetUp, and others who would see One Nation defeated.

One Nation’s central appeal is not ideological, it is emotional, and its message is devastatingly simple: the people in charge have forgotten you for too long, and we are willing to fight for you. For too many voters that promise carried more weight than any fact we could put in front of them.

The first is that advertising works, but not enough. More than two in five voters who said they were considering voting for One Nation said they were less likely to support the party after seeing our ads.

The most potent message in our ads was the simplest: when voters were shown Hanson’s closeness to Trump, support for One Nation dropped. The same thing happened when people were reminded of the party’s economic record. Support dropped when they were told One Nation had voted to cut aged pensions, childcare support and GP subsidies, that the party supported tax breaks for the country’s largest corporations and backed cuts to public health and hospitals.

In short, our campaigning demonstrated effectively to voters that the party’s record was at odds with its rhetoric.

These findings were encouraging – and still are, given their relevance elsewhere – but the result also exposes a harder truth: in a new political era, defined less by policy than by identity and grievance, facts alone are not sufficient to change results.

One Nation’s central appeal is not ideological, it is emotional, and its message is devastatingly simple: the people in charge have forgotten you for too long, and we are willing to fight for you. For too many voters that promise carried more weight than any fact we could put in front of them.

The rich irony of the Farrer byelection is that One Nation’s campaign was funded and run by the very elites the party claims to be against. That was clear from the start,  when their winning candidate boasted that the party’s new supporters were not just “the mum and dad in the streets”, but also from “Toorak and Woollahra”. That was before Gina Rinehart gave Hanson a private plane as a gift and helped to organise $2 million in donations for the party.

I don’t think for a second that One Nation has a plan to fix any of the country’s real problems. The voters of Farrer don’t believe anyone else does, either. If we want to stop losing and start winning, we have to change that.

After growing up in Australia, I’ve spent much of my adult life in Sweden. There, I watched in real time as the Sweden Democrats – Sweden’s own right-wing populist party – grew from a fringe actor to the kingmakers in a right-wing coalition government. I watched the centre left and the centre right – the parties that governed Sweden and built one of the most prosperous and equal countries on Earth for the last century – haemorrhage support.

I heard the generic Swedish answer in countless conversations with progressives: that Sweden Democrats voters were racists, ill-informed, under-educated and manipulated by social media and the tabloid press. It was an attractive story. It was also an excuse, and it was largely wrong.

The truth was that the country’s mainstream parties, not least the Social Democrats, had lost an economic story to tell. The postwar settlement had been quietly dismantled – privatisation by privatisation, reform by reform – and the party that built the settlement had become the party defending its demise.

By the time most people noticed, the far-right Sweden Democrats had already claimed the language of community, fairness and protection. The economic emptiness of their agenda, which on close inspection was every bit as servile to the economic elite as those they claimed to oppose, didn’t matter.

Pauline Hanson’s success is nothing new – only new to Australia. She’s the local franchise owner of a larger global enterprise, cashing in on a business model that’s clearly working.

As Hanson was winning Farrer, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK was gaining more than a thousand council seats across the United Kingdom, effectively wiping out Labour in the working-class heartlands it had held for generations. Prime Minister Keir Starmer swept to power promising working people that Labour was on their side – two years later, they feel abandoned.

The resentment and anger these international forces have capitalised on exists here, too, and we need to address it.

What does that look like in practice? It’s naming the actors who benefit when Australians are doing it tough: supermarkets; energy giants; and private corporations that profit from public contracts while service costs blow out. It’s proposing bold, serious policy and meaning it. It’s being brave enough to use political capital on the hard stuff. For a campaign group such as GetUp, it also means being willing to say uncomfortable things to people we consider allies. It means being honest about what we don’t know – because if we had all the answers, One Nation wouldn’t have won in Farrer. It means continuing to fight in electorates like it, even when the odds are against us.

If this week’s budget was the Albanese government’s opportunity to make this shift, then it was at best a start. Its move to address the inequalities created by the capital gains tax discount and negative gearing is the right thing to do. Yet the government fumbled badly when it walked away from a 25 per cent tax on gas exports. It is on policies such as this one – where a correctly perceived injustice between big corporations and ordinary people is generating fury across the political spectrum – that Labor must get it right.

None of this means we’ll stop holding Pauline Hanson and One Nation to account. A party that takes huge donations from billionaires with vested interests, borrows Donald Trump’s politics of division and then markets itself as a voice for the battlers is fair game. We will keep saying so.

Last Saturday wasn’t a protest vote, it was a verdict. If the major parties – and frankly, movements like ours – aren’t prepared to reckon with that, there are plenty more results like Farrer to come.

Paul Ferris is interim chief executive of GetUp.