THOMAS, Dr Samantha Louise, Private capacity

CHAIR: I invite you to make a brief opening statement before the committee proceeds to questions.

Dr Thomas : First of all I want to thank you for the invitation to testify here today. Particularly, I thank the secretariat, who I know do a tremendous amount of work to organise this. I just wanted to thank them, on the record, for organising this today.

As a public health academic I find it incredibly important to fully disclose my interests, both financial and not. So I would just like to run through who I currently receive grant funding from so that you are able to put my testimony in the context of that funding. I currently receive funding for research on a range of topics, including obesity, risk behaviour, elite athlete player behaviour and doping, and gambling. That funding comes from a range of different organisations. I am currently funded by the Victorian Department of Justice competitive grant scheme, the Australian Research Council Discovery Scheme, the Anti-Doping Research Program, and the AFL Research Board. I also receive some internal funding from Monash University Faculty of Business and Economics.

The point that I really want to highlight to the committee is based on my submission and is about the very important role of prevention. Public health academics know that behaviour is an incredibly complex thing. And we know that risk behaviour is even more complex and is based on a whole range of different factors—not just about individuals and biological mechanisms but also very influenced by cultures, norms and environments. There is a very clear interaction between cultures, norms, environments and individuals and why they value engaging with some products more than others. What we have seen, particularly in other conditions around prevention, is that it is absolutely critical that we take a very holistic perspective when we are looking at these issues, that we do not just look at this as an individual issue that is based on biological or genetic factors, that risk behaviour develops out of a whole range of different factors, including your family environment, your community and the environments that surround you. It is also, more broadly, about what society as a whole values.

One of the key problems that we see currently is that we have a huge emphasis on treatment and not on prevention. We really need to start to get the balance right with gambling. We see that one of the ways in which prevention of problem gambling is encouraged is through personal responsibility. Personal responsibility in a number of different issues is seen as extremely problematic in preventing risky patterns of behaviour. Personal responsibility creates a number of unintended consequences, both for individuals and for those of us who are trying to shift or nudge behaviour in the right direction.

One of the things I would like to highlight particularly is the role of stigma. We have seen very clearly in our current campaigns and messaging sets around gambling an emphasis on gambling responsibly. We have to start to unpack what that means for different individuals and why they engage in gambling in the first place. We have done a huge amount of research looking at things such as risk conceptualisation which starts to look at why people value engaging in gambling as a leisure activity. It is not until we fully understand that that we can start to properly map out preventive strategies. At the moment for gambling we are constantly trying to patch the road. We do that for a whole range of different issues. That approach puts the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, rather than the fence at the top. We also constantly try to catch up with all of those individuals who have tumbled into the risk category.

We cannot take a one-size-fits-all approach to gambling. Within gambling as an umbrella term there are a huge number of different types of products, and different types of individuals engage with those products in different ways. At the moment there is an incredibly heavy emphasis on poker-machine issues and help for poker-machine addicts. One thing we clearly see, particularly from our social marketing campaigns, is that many of our efforts to inform and communicate with people who may be at risk of or experiencing harm are around poker-machine use. They are a very specific type of individual and now, with the rise of things like sports and online betting, we are starting to see a number of different types of individuals who are coming into these moderate risk categories. In particular, we are focusing on young men.

At the moment we are seeing a concentration of effort in a certain area of gambling. What we need to do is to broaden that out to start to think about how we engage with and target different groups of individuals who may value engaging with different types of products in different ways. It is not until we really start to understand that that we will be able to really craft our prevention initiatives.

CHAIR: Thank you, Dr Thomas.

Senator DI NATALE: I am interested in looking at specific interventions. I asked the Australian Churches Gambling Taskforce about the regulation of online odds being promoted. In your view, would restricting the promotion of online odds—and I understand some work has already been done in that area and we are likely to see that happen soon—and odds being promoted by commentators during the game, odds being promoted through football tipping competitions, through football programs and so on have some part to play in ensuring that the relationship between sport and gambling is intertwined? What impact do you think that would have on kids who are engaging with sport today in terms of gambling behaviours in the future?

Dr Thomas : That is a terrific question. We need to take a step back to take a step forward. We can look at the things that we have engaged in with kids, particularly around things like AFL. We grow up in environments where things like tipping are quite normalised in our family homes. We might engage in that with our parents and so on and so we have a cultural norm around these pseudo-types of gambling: picking your favourite player, valuing your favourite team, supporting or backing your favourite team. Sports betting and online gambling, particularly around wagering, have created a whole new layer of meaning around that. For example, it is certainly not unusual to see boys in their uniforms gambling online on Melbourne trains on the way to school. The mark for the idea that somehow this is normalising such behaviour has already been passed; this is already normalised for young people.

This comes from a whole range of different things. Advertising plays a very important role in that, although industry sometimes disputes that advertising has a huge role in the uptake of behaviour. Advertising resonates with norms and values, so it targets people. One of the really interesting things about online gambling is you have probably all seen the 'freaked_out' ad for one of the gambling companies in which a young man is walking into a betting venue and he sees the freaks in the TAB placing their bets. This encourages him to be cool and to bet online. We now have a new cultural cool being created around online gambling.

One of the interesting things about that is the way in which the industry has been able to shift people into different types of products. For example, we now see that the major sports gambling companies are not encouraging you to gamble online, rather they are encouraging you to download the app. This means you have a mobile device that is with you anywhere at any time in your pocket. Obviously it is easier for people like children or adolescents to hide this from their parents, because they are carrying it around with them. It is not on the internet on the computer in the family home anymore; it is a mobile device that is in your pocket everywhere you go.

We then have the sporting environment and many people in Australia have a huge culture for love of sport. I know my children fiercely support their AFL team. It is part of our family leisure activity and it is a wonderful event that we engage in as a family. You have this overlay of gambling, sports betting in particular, within environments which are valued and loved by people. If we look at the sporting environment and going to a game, it is a euphoric event for the family and something you enjoy doing together. And then you have the overlay of the advertising on that.

Interestingly, in a study that we recently published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, we looked at the amount of gambling advertising at AFL matches. We found that Live Odds is a very small proportion of the total advertising that occurs in those spaces. This is where we talk about environments being really important. At the stadium at that time no longer do you just see the odd commercial coming up on the big screen, you see it in the dynamic boarding and in the venues at the stadiums themselves, such as when you walk into the Etihad Stadium there are huge billboards that say, 'Bet Live'. You also have your favourite team that is now cobranded with a sports bet company logo. For example, our team is St Kilda which has clear Centrebet logos. In the huddles at quarter time a big Centrebet banner is brought out and held up behind the players. There is a merging between what is culturally loved and valued by our children and, in this example, by football fans and the spruiking en masse of a product on top of that.

It may not be problematic if it were for Toyotas, but when it is for a product that potentially is very risky for individuals then we have a problem. In terms of regulation we would like to see a number of different things. I should clarify a point made by the Australian Churches Gambling Taskforce around the fact that these relationships are created solely by the gambling companies and the sporting codes. We have to think more broadly than that. We have clear commercial relationships with broadcasters, with the owners of stadiums, with people who own the school boards at stadiums and with individual teams as well. So we cannot place all the emphasis on the sporting code itself. There is a much broader range of relationships with gambling and wagering in particular.

What we would clearly advocate for is somehow reducing that so we do not have this product being promoted in some quantity in a family friendly environment. These sporting matches are sold as being family friendly, as great places where you can take your kids for activity and for a fun and expensive time for your family. Certainly we are not advocating banning completely having a risky product spruiked within those matches, but at the moment the quantity is too much within those environments.

What we would like to see in broadcasts is a clear removal of gambling advertising from peak times when children are watching those activities. That may be not just in family friendly times. Kids may be watching sporting matches later in the evening or going to sporting matches later on. That applies in children right up to the legal age of betting and 16- and 17-year-olds—as we all know—will stay up far later than eight o'clock at night to watch a sporting event.

Senator DI NATALE: When we talk about advertising, in terms of the sporting coverage, you have ads that are placed through TV and other digital media that are directly advertising a product and then your sponsorship arrangements. Most of what you are talking about is essentially a sponsorship arrangement between a club and a betting agency or between, as you said, perhaps with venue operator and so on. They are very different approaches to how we would regulate that problem. Are you suggesting that we should act in terms of advertising and also limit sponsorship arrangements between betting agencies and sporting club venues and so on?

Dr Thomas : That is an is interesting question. Sponsorship is not problematic in itself unless it leads to the promotion of a product in certain spaces.

Senator DI NATALE: You would not sponsor a team though if you could not get your product out there.

Dr Thomas : Exactly. So maybe the way to shift sponsorship, and what we value in terms of sponsorship, is to look at regulating advertising because if you cannot advertise your product in certain spaces, if you cannot reach your target audience, that sponsorship is not very valuable anymore.

One of the things that we have been working with particularly is something called fan identification theory. That basically is a marketing theory that people who really feel that they are a fan—not just people who watch sport but people who are fully engaged with a sporting team as a fan—are much more likely to uptake a sponsor's product than people who just watch it now and again or who do not watch it at all. For example, if you barrack for Collingwood, you may be more likely to eat McDonald's than Hungry Jack's.

Senator DI NATALE: Does that say something about Collingwood supporters?

Dr Thomas : I am not saying anything about Collingwood supporters at all. It is always a bad example to use Collingwood. One of the things that is really interesting—and that we saw very clearly with the tobacco industry—was that when you have a brand that is clearly identifiable with a sporting team, kids are more likely to be softened and receptive to that brand. That is partly because sport is seen as a very healthy community activity. When you are align an unhealthy product to a healthy product, that product softens. For example, when we asked kids what their favourite brand of tobacco was, it was always a brand that was aligned with their sporting team. In similar ways we need to start to think about that with potentially risky products and team or sports sponsorship.

We barrack for the Warriors and my kids have Warriors football jerseys which have Sky City, the casino, on the back. That creates a really interesting set of meanings and values for kids about what these products are and how they relate to their teams. Maybe instead of attacking the sponsorship we attack the advertising which then makes the sponsorship not so valuable. One of the things we clearly know from social marketing is that you have to offer an alternative to people. You cannot just say, 'Do not gamble.' You cannot have that as your major message. You have to give an alternative. We know that when we have risk behaviours we have to offer something that is of benefit for the individual to then move to. At the moment we do not have that alternative.

But, similarly, with sporting clubs and sporting codes, what would the alternative be? The main thing we are hearing is that gambling sponsorship or wagering sponsorship is a very important source of revenue for supporting teams. So how do we help sporting teams break out of that, just like we did for tobacco or alcohol, and shift into different forms of sporting partnerships or commercial relationships? We have started to see that with North Melbourne, which is a fantastic step forward. Maybe we need to be working with the sporting codes to see that happen.

Mr FRYDENBERG: Dr Thomas, thank you very much for your submission and for your evidence. We have talked a lot about the detrimental impact of particular advertising around gambling, particularly sporting gambling. I just want to turn now to the type of advertising we need that you have mentioned in your submission, which is about how we prevent gambling risk. If we are going to be advocating a new form of constructive advertising to turn people away from gambling, what would that look like, in your view?

Dr Thomas : That is a great question. At the moment most of our social marketing campaigns are based around gamblers' help—seeking help if you have a problem. We need to start to see some preventative messages and preventative campaigns. What we would say very clearly is that those campaigns should not target the individual but probably would be better targeted at the risks associated with the product or the industry. One of the problems that we have when we target the individual is that we create stigma. We create stereotypes around what risky behaviour might look like or what a problem with that product might look like. For example, we have created a whole range of stereotypes abound what a problem gambler looks like—that they are someone who has lost their house, they are in jail, their relationship has broken up and they have not taken responsibility for making correct choices with the product. In many ways we have created this unintended consequence which is stigmatising people and discouraging them from seeking help early.

I would say that we need to segment our campaigns to reach different groups. We need, for example, prevention campaigns that clearly target men who engage in sports betting and talk about some of the risks associated with that product. In many cases we also need to think very clearly about the education of young people. We have seen that clearly in other public health issues such as alcohol, sexual behaviour and so on. We need to start pre gambling to create better prevention messages for young people.

Social marketing campaigns should be targeted. They should be segmented. We should work out what that message needs to say. It may not be a message about taking personal responsibility with gambling. It may be something that is more around the benefits of engaging in different types of activities. The best social marketing campaigns will take something that has already been reformed. For example, it may be that we offer tax incentives for pubs to offer live music if they do not have pokie machines within the pubs. And then the social marketing campaign comes on top of that to encourage people to change their behaviour and to move away from the venue which has the pokie machines and move into the venue that has the live music and still offers all the same benefits that the pokie venue may have. It may also be something around value—so what you get for $100 in a pokie machine venue and what you might get for $100 somewhere else. But in order to really appropriately craft those campaigns, we need to work out what it is the community values about these activities in the first place.

Ms BRODTMANN: Given that gambling is so normalised in Australia—you start off with a footy tipping competition when you are a little—how do you get a message through when the norms and values are essentially accepting of that behaviour?

Dr Thomas : That is a terrific question. We see that with a lot of different issues such as alcohol and obesity, with food-purchasing patterns and so on. First of all, you are looking at different types of individuals and their ideas of what they value about this. It is no coincidence that a lot of these issues are based in poorer, low socioeconomic communities. How do we work with communities to shift them into different forms of leisure activity? In terms of your question about what that message is, we are doing a project at the moment where we are looking at how kids understand the marketing campaigns that are done by the sports betting industry about their product. Once we have an idea about what kids understand these campaigns to mean—there can be explicit and implicit messages within those campaigns—we can then start to work with their families as a group to shift to different types of behaviours. So we can nudge them in the right direction and start to shift those cultural norms.

At the moment we do not quite know what we are going to find. We may find, for example, that kids see this as a normal part of being a footy fan. If that is the case then we need to somehow dispel that myth and shift them to: 'If you really value your team, you don't punt on them; you purchase a membership, for example, or you use that $100 to buy a jersey or other merchandise.' That is what we are not quite sure about. That is why the research of underlying culture is really important to work out how we are going to nudge people in the right direction. I think looking at adolescents is really important. We have not really got a clear handle on how young people are engaging with these problems. That is crucial for preventing problems later on.

Ms BRODTMANN: Do children and adolescents actually see tipping as gambling?

Dr Thomas : That is a great question. I know the Responsible Gambling Advocacy Centre have done a lot of research around this and have listened to the community about this. I think that is where we are giving a very confused message about what gambling is and what role it plays in supporting your team. Something that we used to do quite innocently as kids—and many people still do very innocently in their workplaces—now has this new layer on top of it because we have a very formal product that you can consume and engage in that is seen as very cool. For young people this is not just about tipping; this is about engaging with technology. That nexus between individual behaviour and technology is really important. You can do it with your mates. You can put $5 on. Your older brother might give you access to his account and so on. It is a masculine, cool activity to engage in. Just like we did with alcohol and tobacco, where the industries created these 'cool' messages around these products, we have to now work out how we get peers to lead each other into different forms of activity.

Senator XENOPHON: I want to go to the issue of conflicts of interest. You indicated what sort of work you did. When we heard from Professor Brzezinski, for instance, yesterday in Sydney he said, 'There is not the sources of funding. Sometimes the only funding you can get'—I am trying to paraphrase him fairly—'is from industry.' How do we get around that? How do you make sure that the funding is at arm's length from industry and, indeed, other interest groups who might have a strong view one way or the other? How do we deal with that?

Dr Thomas : It is an issue that has been tackled across a range of different products. Tobacco is a clear example of that. Perhaps the issue is not so much about your relationship with industry as about the transparency of that relationship. In my experience there is a lot of funding for gambling research from government, national competitive grant schemes, the ARC and the NHMRC, which are clearly good places to find what we would call independent research. I think, though, that there needs to be far more transparency around researchers and their relationships with industry or, for example, their relationships with other groups who may have an interest. That may be the anti-gambling lobby group, for example, or government. So conflicts of interest happen. They are not just financial. But what is really important is that there is transparency around those issues.

One of the things that I think is really interesting in gambling and where we could learn from other areas, particularly in public health, is this idea that you declare your interest pretty systematically. As you saw, I declared all of mine at the beginning. That should just be a natural, common practice for all researchers. All researchers should just naturally declare their interest. I think also that editors of journals have a responsibility to declare their interests. In publishing we have seen in other issues that it is extremely important that the editors of journals fully declare, because obviously at the end of the day they have a say about what and what does not go into the journals. So we need more transparency. I would argue that we need an international code of conduct for gambling researchers, where it just becomes commonplace to declare our interests so that it is a natural thing that we do. Then people like you and the community and so on can weigh up the evidence that we have presented in the light of those interests. I think at the moment we have a lot of shades of grey and it is all a bit murky around who funds who and who does not and what that means and so on. So clearer transparency will help that.

Senator XENOPHON: Now, in 100 words or less—

Dr Thomas : I am a sociologist; that is very difficult for me to do.

Senator XENOPHON: Okay, 120 words or less. One of the dilemmas that has been identified by the Productivity Commission and others is that only about 10 per cent of people who actually have a gambling problem get treatment for that problem. So there is a huge unmet need, if you like. One of the issues that has been put to us is that a lot of people feel stigmatised about their gambling addiction, more so in some cases than someone who might have an illicit drug problem. They feel more stigmatised about having a gambling problem. How do we nudge, I think to use one of your phrases, that 10 per cent of people to 50, 60, 70 per cent of people or higher to get help? 120 words!

Dr Thomas : I think the main barrier is stigma. So, if we seriously want to encourage help-seeking behaviour, not just from problem gamblers but from the huge number of individuals who may have moderate-risk gambling behaviours, who may bounce in and out of that category, we have to tackle stigma. That needs to happen at a whole bunch of different levels. We need to learn a lot from mental health and from other highly stigmatised conditions. We may need to think about running antistigma campaigns in gambling. We also need to encourage a clearer community discussion around the issue of stigma which takes the emphasis off individual irresponsibility and puts it onto the problems with the industry and the products.

Senator XENOPHON: That was about 150, but thank you.

CHAIR: Dr Thomas, there has been much discussion so far, not just in this session but in any number of other sessions, about changing the culture of problem gamblers or changing the culture of gamblers generally. There has not been a lot of discussion about the culture of the poker machine industry and how we might change the culture of the industry. I would characterise the industry as deeply selfish and dishonest. How would you characterise the culture of the poker machine industry and how might we go about changing it? We can drive reform in that way as well.

Dr Thomas : I think there are two parts to this equation. The part that is always missed is social responsibility, which you describe as industry responsibility. What we have unintentionally done is stigmatised the individual and not the industry. So we have stigmatised the individual for doing the wrong thing rather than the industry practices. In other public health issues, such as food marketing, tobacco and alcohol, we have created a huge amount of public pressure for the industry to start to change its practices. And that happens in a range of different ways. It comes from good research evidence, which shows problems with products. It shows burden of disease data. But also it is ensuring that we have clear, transparent information about products and what they do and the potential risks and harms associated with that. So I would say that clearer evidence is needed. One of the things I think was most valuable in the tobacco industry was when tobacco industry corporate documents were made available for researchers so that we could clearly look at their marketing strategies and we could clearly see when they were targeting different groups. For example, we could clearly see when they were targeting young people. We can start to use regulation to create more clarity and transparency in the industry so that people like me can start to look at that in more detail, and then we will start to see a cultural shift. But they do not do it willingly, obviously.

CHAIR: Interestingly, a previous witness—I think one of the members of the Churches Gambling Taskforce—raised the issue of legislating duty of care and making the industry legally responsible for people's misadventures if they are shown not to have intervened when it was obvious that they should have intervened. That could possibly force them to clean up their act, knowing there could be legal action taken against them. What is your view on that?

Dr Thomas : I am not an expert on this area and I can only talk to you as a public health academic and what we have seen in other issues. I think the public and the community are pretty smart; they do not like to feel as if they have been taken advantage of. I think that transparency around things like marketing strategies, strategies around products—online companies or pokie machines; and, don't forget, we have to think about all of these quite differently—may be incredibly important in informing the community, who then starts to put pressure on governments, for example, for a change. It is a very complex issue and we need to start looking at what has happened in other areas—for example, tobacco, alcohol and so on—to create a new range of norms for the community, but also to create alternatives for them. There is no point in a town having a pokie venue as the only place of entertainment, the only place where people can go. We have got to create alternatives for communities. Then, with that layering on the top of exposing practices and so on, people shift naturally into different forms of activity and forms of entertainment. We have got to offer the community alternatives as well, otherwise we leave people with nowhere to go and that behaviour is very difficult to shift.

CHAIR: I would have hoped that state and territory gambling regulators would be shining a light on some of these things that, I think we agree, need to be publicised. That then raises the whole issue of the effectiveness of state and territory gambling regulators. In my home state of Tasmania the Gaming Commission is part of the Treasury and so it is seen as a money issue, not as a public health issue. Given that chain of command, it has a particular range of interests, and probably not as broad a range of interests as you have touched on.

Dr Thomas : Shifting away from that treatment model, there are now a number of us who have public health backgrounds. We are working, for example, with commercial data sets to start to look at trends. One of the things we are doing at the moment is looking at Nielsen advertising data to look at patterns and trends of sports betting advertising within certain time slots. Once we have that data and we can make that data available to the public, we will be able to see that there are certain trends or that there might be certain concentrations of advertising in time slots when a lot of kids are watching, for example. Then I think the community responds pretty well to that. We know the community is very concerned about gambling advertising. The Responsible Gambling Advocacy Centre will talk to you a lot about this and we have seen it in our own research as well. We are looking at industry annual reports to see how they are targeting certain groups of communities. We need certain communities and the marketing strategies they are using to soften different groups to products. I think the evidence base is growing. This is a research discipline that is still in its infancy, particularly for public health researchers, but we are coming and we are starting to get that good, clear evidence base which I hope will be really important for policy and reform.

CHAIR: Do we need a national gambling research organisation?

Dr Thomas : It is interesting, because we do not have a Cancer Council for gambling or a Breast Cancer Foundation for gambling. We do already have organisations such as the National Preventative Health Taskforce and it may be important to work with those types of groups which are already set up to include gambling as part of a broader remit in terms of prevention. They have obesity, cancer and something else. I think, as researchers, we need to lobby hard to have gambling included on the agenda. I do not know whether we need a whole separate task force or organisation for gambling because many of the issues that we have seen in gambling are very similar to other issues and are probably interrelated in many ways. I guess at the core of this are issues around social class and health inequalities. So we really have to start to work together to think about those issues as well.

CHAIR: You will not know the exact number, but are there many researchers in academic institutions around the country who are spending much time on gambling issues?

Dr Thomas : I think it is growing and that is a good thing. I have only been working in this area for two or three years, but I bring my skills and experiences from other health conditions into this. I think it is still heavily concentrated in psychiatry and psychology and addiction frameworks. But those of us in public health are starting to notice it and that is really a lot to do with the work of this committee, issues that have been raised around gambling. This has been raised as a clear issue by people like you, Mr Wilkie, and it encourages people like me to start to show an interest in this area. I have two PhD students who are working in this area. We are starting to see the capacity grow and that is a really important and positive thing.

CHAIR: No doubt.

Ms BRODTMANN: Just going back to the apps that you mentioned that are now becoming available. I imagine that you need to sign some sort of disclaimer that you are 18 and over. What is your experience of the usage of those? Have you found that there are younger people using those? Is it the big brother thing? Getting the big brother to go down and get the Bacardi?

Dr Thomas : Yes, like we all used to do, or to make the fake licence for you. I think apps are really interesting because they are always changing as well. There is always a new cool thing to engage in with apps. It is not unusual to see adolescents already engaging with these gambling products. We do not really know how they are doing that, whether it is through an old friend at school who may be 18 and have an account. We need to do a lot more work around how kids are engaging with these products—and that is some of the work that we are doing at the moment—and why they value engaging with these products. In public health you can do a great job with things like tobacco. Most kids these days think smoking is pretty uncool but it shifts them into other forms of risky behaviour. It may shift them into something different. Kids are great risk takers and are not very good at seeing what the long-term consequences of their risky behaviours might be.

W really need to do a lot more research around why and how kids are engaging with apps and then we need to create some policy and legislation around that. That might be the duty of care issue that you are talking about. If kids are gaining access to these products, there need to be some rules and regulations and policies because clearly it is illegal for kids to be gambling before they are 18, but we know most kids do.

CHAIR: Thank you very much for your time. That was a particularly helpful session. We are grateful for the time you have given the committee.