By Paul Sakkal
The widower of Labor MP Peta Murphy has made an emotional plea for the government to outlaw gambling advertisements, declaring his late wife would not stomach the argument that reform was too hard because of lost revenue for media companies and sports.
Dozens of prominent Australians, including senior Liberals John Howard and Jeff Kennett, last week urged Labor to rethink its plans to put a cap on how many ads can run on TV rather than the blanket ban proposed by Murphy in an influential bipartisan inquiry before her death last year.
Former MP Peta Murphy and Rod Glover during the 2022 election campaign.Credit: Facebook
Rod Glover, a policy adviser in Labor circles who has been friends with Anthony Albanese for years, implored ministers to give weight to Murphy’s detailed recommendations in a cabinet meeting set for Monday at which the proposals are expected to be debated.
It was the backbencher’s life ambition to join the cabinet, Glover said, and her last political mission before dying in December was to end the “normalisation of the idea that gambling and sport go together”.
“This is the closest thing that she’ll ever get to being in cabinet. So she won’t be in the room, but for the people in the room, I hope that they’re imagining she is,” Glover said in his first interview speaking about Murphy’s campaign.
“They know where she stood on this. Her report was not an ambit claim. Her main argument is really simple: in a really hard trade-off, you’ve got to put people first and think about what kind of future you want to create.”
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during question time in February.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Glover said his wife spent her final years working on a thorough set of policy proposals that won the support of Coalition members of the committee.
“This is her final game, if you like,” he said of Murphy, a competitive softball and squash player earlier in her life, “and that game plays out in cabinet on Monday and in what happens over the coming weeks. And the question will be whether her team can carry it over the line.”
The government is facing pressure from different directions on gambling advertisement reform, the prevalence of which during live sport has provoked community frustration.
While Labor wants to reduce the harm caused by gambling addiction, it has also faced an intense behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign from rugby league and AFL chiefs Peter V’landys and Andrew Dillon, and from media companies, including Nine Entertainment, owner of this masthead, who make hundreds of millions of dollars in ad revenue.
Independent MPs, Greens and advocates such as the Alliance for Gambling Reform have given scant regard to the financial trade-off, and smashed Labor after this masthead revealed Communications Minister Michelle Rowland would not legislate a blanket ban, but instead propose a two-per-hour ad cap on TV and a ban on most digital platforms.
Glover admitted the financial implications of banning ads made it a “wicked” political problem for the prime minister, but argued the leaked details of Rowland’s proposal failed to reflect community attitudes or expert opinion. He added there may need to be compensation for lost revenue.
The former adviser to Kevin Rudd did not decide to speak out lightly. He has close relationships with Albanese, Albanese’s chief of staff Tim Gartrell and senior Labor MPs, but has rarely been a public commentator.
Glover was effectively told by senior Labor figures that he could have succeeded Murphy as the MP for the Melbourne seat of Dunkley after she died, but he decided not to contest the byelection.
Coalition home affairs spokesman James Paterson is one of many MPs who have been involved in leadership courses offered by the McKinnon Institute run by Glover (right).Credit: Eamon Gallagher
The economist heads up the McKinnon Institute, which runs training programs that about a quarter of federal MPs, including ministers, have attended.
Glover suggested Rowland had not conducted the year-long consultation process on gambling reform in an open manner that gave equal weight to all stakeholders, contrasting this with Murphy’s parliamentary inquiry.
“There is no question that whichever way you go here, there will be a section of the community that will come hard against you,” Glover said.
“The question in that context is: which side of history are you on? The question is: what does your action tell you about your character? Tell you about your leadership, tell you about your willingness to take on difficult debates in the knowledge that it can hurt you politically.”
“What [Murphy] would not want coming out of the cabinet conversation is people telling her it was too hard. She knows what hard is, she knows what courage is, and she would not cop the line that it was just too hard.”
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