Monique Ryan
Kooyong · Independent · Australia
“I second this motion and commend the member for Curtin's motion to refer the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 to the House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. This should not be a controversial request.”
“What about the clinicians, the researchers, the public health experts and the community organisations who have spent years documenting the devastating impact of gambling addiction? Some of them have been given days to review this complex legislation and provide feedback on it to a very limited extent.”
“After this sort of delay, the government has no excuses for not getting this legislation right. But it's rushing to introduce legislation that has been denied input from the public.”
“They're special relationships, the glue that holds us together. For Emily, Matt and Lucy, Noah and Maia, Millie and Rory—I know you share those special relationships and I know that they'll continue. I know that Rich knew that too. Parkrun is something we all do together. It's really symbolic of Rich.”
“We were fortunate to have people in our lives who gave us a sense of what was possible—doctors, engineers, teachers and scientists. We learnt the importance and the wonder of learning and science. There was always plenty of sport. We participated in everything, but particularly footy.”
“The government has not responded to that recommendation appropriately. Its proposals fall well short of that. There are ongoing and serious questions about the extent to which this legislation will provide any support or any protections for children and for vulnerable Australians.”
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“The government has argued that this has driven plan inflation, noting that plans grow by an average of 20 per cent following those reassessments—which suggests that the plans were inadequate in the first instance. Restricting access to reassessment where a person's needs have actually changed, genuinely changed—where they've had a medical deterioration or a breakdown in their current supports—won't reduce their need. It will just reduce the opportunity to have that need recognised and supported. The consequences of that will, again, be borne by the participants. While the eligibility assessment tool that the government is planning to develop does not yet exist, the support needs assessment tool, the I-CAN, is scheduled to roll out from April 2027. It's planned that the I-CAN will generate plan budgets automatically.”
“The law requires that participant safety be considered, but it's hard to see how broad cuts across entire support categories could be implemented without serious risk to individuals. The original NDIS guaranteed funding for supports which are assessed as reasonable and necessary for that person, but this bill replaces individual rights with ministerial discretion across entire support categories. It is a profound shift in the philosophy of the scheme. The bill also significantly tightens the conditions under which participants can request unscheduled plan assessments—reviews outside the normal cycle. Currently, one in five NDIS plans undergoes an unscheduled reassessment every year.”
“Demanding permanence as a condition of support sets a threshold which might, at times, be difficult to meet. The bill also limits support to those whose impairments independently meet the eligibility threshold. The combined or overlapping impact of concurrent conditions, or comorbidities, on daily functioning will no longer be considered. That's not how disability works. It's not how human beings work. It is, however, how a cost containment approach to disability works. The bill grants the minister a significant new power to set percentage reductions in funding for entire categories of support, across all participants in those categories, without appropriate parliamentary oversight.”
“A person with limited income might be unable to afford treatments that aren't funded by Medicare. Treatments available elsewhere in the world may not yet be affordable in Australia. There is a profound and unresolved circularity here. The bill proposes to deny access to support until treatment has been exhausted without acknowledging that the capacity to access treatment may itself depend on having NDIS support. The permanence threshold also uses the word 'alleviate', which sets a very low bar. Even a modest improvement in function—a small gain in mobility or a slight reduction in pain—could be used to argue that an impairment is not permanent, which could render an individual ineligible for supports. Many conditions, including many forms of psychosocial disability, are permanent but fluctuating or episodic.”
“It is an extraordinary thing to ask of this House, and it violates the recommendations of the independent review in 2023. Among the most concerning provisions in this bill is the new definition of permanent disability, for eligibility purposes. Under this bill, an impairment will only be considered permanent if 'all appropriate treatment' options have been exhausted, no further treatment is likely to 'materially improve, reverse or alleviate' the impairment and the impairment is likely to be lifelong. So applicants have to have tried all treatments commonly available, regardless of whether or not they can afford them or whether they're accessible where they live. A person in rural or regional Australia might be unable to access the specialist treatment that is, theoretically, available in a capital city.”
“The scheme was always meant to be limited to those with substantially reduced functional capacity, but, over time, eligibility shifted to a diagnosis gateway because defining permanence and capacity is hard in the absence of a specific diagnosis. A move to mandatory independent assessments of a person's functional capacity was trialled and failed horribly in 2021. The government is now proposing to revisit that horrible failure. It's asking parliament to legislate a fundamental change to eligibility in one of our most important social schemes and to authorise the removal of 160,000 people from the scheme before it has decided what the threshold for functional capacity will be, how it will be measured and who will be affected, on the basis of undetermined criteria and a non-existent assessment tool.”
“The solution is clear: the NDIS should be reserved, as was always intended, for children with permanent and significant disability. We should carve early childhood interventions out of the NDIS. We should deliver them as properly funded, separately commissioned programs. The government's Thriving Kids program will move in that direction, but it doesn't cover school aged children aged nine and above and not all states have even come on board with it. A safety net, which some states will decline to deliver, is a gap through which vulnerable children and families will fall. The centrepiece of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 is a shift from diagnosis based eligibility to functional capacity assessment.”
“It is constraining eligibility and participant budgets to force the economies that the market failed to generate and that governments have failed to legislate. This scheme should never have absorbed early childhood intervention. It was never designed to deliver that well. About 170,000 children received early intervention supports from the NDIS in 2025. Those supports are often delivered poorly, at costs that are higher than they need to be and in a way that has driven an avalanche of diagnoses without improving outcomes for children. The number of adults on the NDIS is only marginally higher than was expected when the scheme was planned. The number of children is more than double, and this is the central driver of the scheme's growth.”
“It's my view that the cost trajectory of the NDIS has been driven, overall, by the structural design flaws that were visible from the outset and which have been ignored by successive governments. They are design flaws that are real and that were foreseeable. The scheme has always been uncapped. It's been left to a quasi-market in which the consumer has no incentive to economise. Without transparent information and sufficient competition, the self-correcting forces of market theory have never materialised. The budget-setting processes have compounded this. Plans have inflated year on year through a system that is subjective, that is inconsistent and that is poorly connected to individual need. The government is now resorting to the most blunt cost-containment instrument available.”
“For hundreds of thousands of Australians, the NDIS has been transformative. It has not just provided services. It has also provided dignity, autonomy and participation in this country. I do support a sustainable NDIS, and the scheme has grown excessively. It will cost more than $56 billion next financial year, while covering only 760,000 Australians. It's clear that its unchecked growth has already begun to undermine the social licence of the scheme and that reform is necessary. The question before the House is whether this reform is necessary, and it's my position that it is not. It is not fair and it is not reasonable. The people who will bear the cost of this unfair reform are not the government; they're the vulnerable Australians who rely on this scheme to live.”
“The opposition leader has said that this wouldn't remove a single protection from anyone, but inserting a binary biological definition of sex into the act would fundamentally alter how protections are interpreted and applied. As a doctor, I know that gender identity is a complex area of medicine. Sex and gender exist on a spectrum. They're informed by genetics, hormones, anatomy and lived experience. Legally, it is also complex. Protections built up carefully over decades through legislation and case law should not be and cannot be unwound without real human cost. We should be guided by evidence, not by a political reaction to a single court ruling. The Australian Human Rights Commission welcomed the Federal Court's decision and said that it provided important clarity.”
“Another constituent told me that they feel 'increasingly vulnerable within the current political climate'. The transgender community want to live their lives peacefully without fear for their safety or their dignity, whether they are trying to access health care or just trying to be in public spaces. These are people, not political talking points. Like every Australian, they seek equal rights and protections under the law. Many transgender people in my community want us to protect the Sex Discrimination Act, which is why it's concerning that the Leader of the Opposition has vowed that he would lead a coalition government which would seek to amend the Sex Discrimination Act and to insert a definition of biological sex—in other words, a definition of male and female.”
“I support the full Federal Court's recent landmark ruling affirming that the Sex Discrimination Act protects against unlawful discrimination based on gender identity. That protection exists for good reason. Transgender Australians face disproportionate rates of discrimination, harassment and harm. I've heard from a number of constituents that, in 2026, trans people in our community feel increasingly vulnerable, fearful and saddened by the current rhetoric around trans rights rhetoric, which is sadly worsened by some of our colleagues. I'll read out part of an email that I recently received from a constituent in Kooyong: Every morning I wake up to see our rights rolled back across the world or a headline about a trans person being killed and it's scary. It is a frightening time for people in their LGBTQIA+ community.”
“So I ask the government to take action on immediate fixes in aged care by doing the following: firstly, by setting a binding date for price caps on aged-care services; secondly, by committing to indexation so that Support at Home packages keep pace with the real cost of care; and, thirdly, by ensuring genuine human oversight of the integrated assessment tool.”
“The sector has welcomed the backflip, but that should never have been necessary. The basics of ageing with dignity should have been protected from the outset. The episode reflects reform that was not adequately tested against the lived reality of the people who it was meant to serve. The people waiting in our aged care system built this country. They paid taxes for decades on the understanding that when they need care, it would be there for them. We are not holding up our end of the bargain.”
“From November last year to March of this year, there have been 834 requests for review, many of which are a result of decisions by that algorithm. The previous financial year saw just 170 requests for review. I'm hearing from constituents with progressive conditions, constituents with dementia or motor neurone disease, that they're being assessed as needing less care by this algorithm. Thankfully, the Human Rights Commission has endorsed a Commonwealth Ombudsman review of the tool. It's absolutely critical that automated decision-making remains reviewable by a person, not just by an algorithm. Just six months after the Support at Home program commenced, the government was forced to abandon co-payments for showering, dressing and continence care after some recipients had to forego aspects of basic hygiene and care.”
“The result was that low-means residents became financially unviable for providers. Providers are warning and telling us that the system is becoming unsustainable, not because they don't want to care for disadvantaged Australians but because they can't afford to. The federal budget's $1.1 billion restructure of the accommodation supplement is a step forward, but it still falls short of the indexed market price cap for many residents. The industry already estimates that we have a shortfall of about 10,000 beds. For older Australians waiting today, having money stuck in the contingency reserve provides no surety. Then there's the integrated assessment tool, the algorithm that the government uses to determine what care people receive under Support at Home.”
“Some are dying while they wait. The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety described this failure as cruel and discriminatory. The same royal commission recommended that home support waitlists should be cleared immediately by increasing the number of packages available and that packages should be allocated to new entrants within one month of assessment. This has not happened. Around 3,300 older Australians are now stranded in public hospitals—a 35 per cent increase in six months—because there are no aged-care places or Support at Home packages available to them. There are issues with residential care as well. In January last year, the government raised the market price cap on aged-care beds from $550,000 to $750,000 without increasing the accommodation supplement.”
“Every quarter, the government is now obliged to report on the state of its new aged-care system. This was supposed to happen on 28 April. Instead, the government withheld that report for two weeks, dropping it while journalists and the crossbench were in the budget lock-up. The government stealthily and sneakily, I would say, released a report which showed that Australians are now waiting an average of 12 months to access aged care—12 months for a place in a residential home and 12 months for support at home. More than 48,000 older Australians are waiting to even get on the waiting list in addition to more than 230,000 waiting for an assessment or a Support at Home package. Budget estimates will likely reveal that these waiting lists have now blown out even more. Older people are going without the support that they need.”
“But here we are a decade later with a budget that shows the PRRT revenue declining and a government that refuses to act. We could generate tens of billions of dollars in tax revenue if we took a fair share of our natural resources. A fair share levy could generate up to $13 billion a year; a 25 per cent tax on gas, $17 billion a year. Eighty-seven per cent of Australians believe that they deserve a better return from the sale of our gas exports. Only three per cent disagree. A government which is serious about energy sovereignty would have used this budget to reform the tax settings on our national resources. It did not do that. Australians deserve better. They deserve a parliament with the courage to actually make our collective wealth work for all Australians, not just for Santos, for Shell and for INPEX.”
“The idea of a domestic reservation scheme has genuine merit. But I speak for most Australians when I say that we remain disappointed with the government that has done nothing to claw back windfall profits currently flowing to foreign multinationals and to overseas investors. We're not satisfied with a government that refuses to fix the fundamental architecture of how we tax our oil and gas exports. We're not satisfied with a government that has let tens of billions of dollars go to multinationals for our finite resources while failing to adequately support the students, the renters, the young couples, the unhoused, the unemployed and older Australians. The ATO itself has labelled the oil and gas sector systemic non-payers of tax. Back in 2016, Treasury warned that companies could defer their PRRT liability indefinitely.”
“In 2029-30, even with inflation, Australia will collect less PRRT than we do now. At a time when global energy markets are in turmoil, when Australian families are being squeezed by rising energy bills and another RBA rate rise, the tax take from our natural resources is declining. In 2029-30, students and graduates will pay more in HECS indexation than multinational corporations will pay in PRRT on oil and gas. On a total HECS decade, by the end of this decade, it will be $60 billion. This is a national scandal. In the middle of a global energy crisis, Australian gas companies are pocketing extraordinary windfall profits, generated not by their ingenuity or their investment but because of geopolitical instability and war elsewhere. I support measures that protect Australian households from gas price volatility.”
“It's not clear that 20 per cent of a shrinking uncontracted pool will greatly move the needle on prices. The member also commended the government on its efforts to grow our fuel reserves. These are the same fuel reserves that, even after the additional measures taken by the government this year, will continue to fall well below the IEA's 90-day mandate. While the government looks to pat itself on the back on its energy security measures, just weeks ago it handed down a budget that once again let the gas industry off the hook. In the most recent budget, revenue from the petroleum resource rent tax is forecast to fall—not rise but fall. Since MYEFO, receipts from the PRRT have been revised up $1.6 billion over five years. But, overall, the trajectory for the PRRT is down.”
“This motion commends the government's plan to secure Australia's energy sovereignty. From 1 July 2027, LNG exporters will be required to supply 20 per cent of their export volumes to domestic customers. Western Australia has had a domestic reservation for decades. It's only time that we have the same on the east coast. The member for Leichhardt has moved that Australia's gas reservation scheme 'will put strong downward pressure on domestic gas prices'. But the fact is that this gas reservation scheme won't come into effect for over 13 months and all export contracts signed before December 2025 are grandfathered, meaning that the reservation will only target spot and uncontracted volumes, which will limit how much gas can reasonably and realistically be captured under it.”
“I sincerely thank Dr Farr and his wife, and I thank and acknowledge other Iranian Australians for their contribution to our country. In Kooyong alone. I'm fortunate to represent more than 1,050 individuals who have Persian heritage. Around 800 were actually born in Iran and speak Farsi at home. When public speakers like the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition label entire nations and entire peoples as bad, they divide, they discriminate, they demean us all, they legitimise prejudice and they entrench hate. That hate damages the very fabric of Australia's proud multicultural society. I put it to the House that there are no bad countries but there are, sadly, bad politicians who act in bad faith.”
“I acknowledge that "bad people" can come from any nation, and Iran is no exception. We share the frustration when individuals linked to the regime—such as the children of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf or senior IRGC commanders—are granted visas to Australia. However, these are the very people that the majority of the diaspora have fled from. To conflate the victims of a regime with the regime's own beneficiaries only compounds the injustice we face. Iranian-Australians are your doctors, engineers, and neighbours. We are not "risks" to be managed; we are integral threads in the fabric of this country. As my representative, I ask that you stand up for the values of inclusion and respect, and raise these concerns in Parliament to ensure our community is not targeted by divisive rhetoric or discriminatory policy.”
“As physicians, we rely on evidence and individual assessment; to see a national leader use such rhetoric to alienate a specific community is both hurtful and dangerous to our social cohesion. Equally concerning is that this rhetoric is also mirrored in policy. The current Labor government's recent decision to implement an Arrival Control Determination, effectively barring thousands of Iranian visitor visa holders from entering the country, is a distressing example of this. Such broad-brush restrictions punish individuals who have acted in good faith, paid fees, and sought only to visit family or escape the very regime Australia claims to oppose. It is disheartening to see the rights of one nationality curtailed so specifically, regardless of which side of politics holds the pen.”
“Every day, we care for Australians and work to improve our community. We have built our lives here on the promise that this is a nation where people are judged by their contribution and character, not by their place of birth. Mr Taylor's recent remarks labelling Iran a "bad country" and suggesting that individuals from such backgrounds represent an inherent "higher risk" are deeply biased and reductive. I would add that the member for Hume is not the only coalition member who has adopted this harmful label; his deputy leader, Senator Jane Hume, has also repeatedly used divisive and hurtful rhetoric against immigrant communities. I'll continue with Dr Farr's letter: To categorise an entire diaspora in this way is the very definition of prejudice.”
“I'd like to share with this House an email from Dr Babak Farr, a constituent of Kooyong, who, like many others, is concerned about recent harmful and alienating public rhetoric against Iranian Australians and other immigrants to this country: Dear Dr Ryan, I am writing to you as one of your constituents in Kooyong, a fellow medical professional, and a proud member of the Iranian Australian community. I wish to express my profound disappointment regarding recent comments made by Mr Angus Taylor and the broader trend of targeted policy affecting our community. I arrived in Australia 20 years ago with my wife. Since then, we've both dedicated our careers to the Australian healthcare system—my wife as a General Practitioner and myself as a Rehabilitation and Pain Medicine physician.”
“We could fully fund foundational supports and Thriving Kids, so that the 160,000 Australians who are about to get kicked off the NDIS would have somewhere to go. We could dismantle Job-ready Graduates. We could expand paid prac placements. And we could support our universities better. We could fix HECS, so that Australians aren't paying more in HECS indexation than we are receiving from the PRRT. The choices that governments make reflect their priorities. In this budget, the Albanese government has prioritised oil and gas multinationals over Australians. And they're not going to forget it.”
“Every budget, there are winners and losers. This year, gas companies are the big winners. Instead of ensuring Australians receive a fair return on our oil and gas, revenue from our oil and gas will actually fall. Imagine the nice things we could have if our government had the courage to make oil and gas corporations pay their fair share of tax. We could expand the PBS to fund more life-saving medications. We could eliminate out-of-pocket costs for seeing GPs. We could make it easier to see medical specialists in public hospitals. And we could make dental more affordable. We could provide universal child care. We could improve aged-care services, without cutting private insurance rebates.”
“My question is to the Minister for Health and Ageing. After months of sustained advocacy and almost 8,000 campaign emails, I am thrilled that the budget includes an additional $508 million for medical research. This means that disbursements from the Medical Research Future Fund will increase to $1 billion a year from 2030. It's a huge win for the medical research community, but it is contingent on your government releasing the long-overdue national health and medical research strategy. Minister, when are we going to see the strategy?”
“I support this bill because the protections that it introduces are preferable to the status quo. Consumers will be better protected with these reforms than they would be without them. But I will not join the government in presenting this legislation as meaningful, significant consumer protection legislation. This is modest reform, in a narrow area of consumer law. The problems it leaves unresolved are larger, more consequential and much more urgent than the problems that it addresses.”
“When people are making choices between heating and eating, between renewing their insurance and paying their rent and between filling a prescription or filling a tooth and buying their groceries, they deserve more than this bill, and they deserve more than the other measures that this government has undertaken. Presenting legislation like this as a major breakthrough for consumer protections risks understating how serious that crisis has actually become. The legislation mandates a ministerial review of the subscription contracts regime after two years, and I welcome that review. I expect that it will identify further shortcomings in both the scope and the enforcement of this legislation. I hope that the parliament approaches those findings then with greater ambition than it is showing today.”
“Price gouging will only be illegal in relation to supermarkets going forward, and even that prohibition hasn't yet come into force. Encouragingly, the government has increased ACCC funding to pursue misleading pricing practices by $30 million, and that is welcome. The regulator has to be properly equipped to protect consumers and to enforce the law. But stronger enforcement against misleading pricing is not the same thing as addressing the underlying concentration of market power and price controls in essential sectors. A regulator can prosecute misleading discounts while the structural conditions that weaken competition and sustain high prices remain unchanged. Australians deserve honesty about what the government is doing and about the scale of the problem that we are facing.”
“Unlike the EU, the UK, Canada, South Africa, India and several states of the USA, Australia continues to rely on consumer protection provisions rather than direct price regulation, and we saw the consequence of this approach in recent months in which Australian fuel prices have outpaced international markets amid reports that more than 500 specific allegations of price gouging had taken place. In response to that global fuel crisis, the Prime Minister promised that the ACCC would take action against overcharging service stations, but, as Allan Fels, the former head of the ACCC, has noted, the commission actually has no real power to do anything about price gouging—a fact that was confirmed when I asked the Treasurer about that in this place.”
“The Prime Minister has looked away from calls for stronger anticoncentration measures, including divestiture powers as a last-resort remedy against entrenched anticompetitive conduct. The supermarket industry, let's remember, is the area where the government has been most willing to act. The government still has not addressed excessive concentration in our insurance markets. It hasn't addressed energy retail margins. It hasn't addressed the broader conditions that have allowed essential goods and services to become significantly less affordable while corporate profits in those sectors have remained consistently strong. We've seen this in the government's reluctance to adopt any general economy-wide prohibition on excessive pricing or price gouging.”
“The government is consulting on stronger unit-pricing rules to address practices like shrinkflation. Additional ACCC funding has been provided to pursue misleading pricing practices, and, from 1 July of this year, new regulations relating to excessive supermarket pricing will come into effect. But these measures are still focused on price transparency rather than the underlying uncompetitive structure of a highly concentrated market. The ACCC's inquiry pointed to the significant market power held by the two dominant supermarket chains. It noted that Coles and Woolworths account for two-thirds of supermarket sales in this country, and yet the government remains reluctant to pursue the reforms that would generally require it to confront entrenched market concentration.”
“But that broader agenda is still avoiding confronting the central issue, which has been identified repeatedly in inquiries into essential sectors: the role of concentrated market power in driving poor consumer outcomes. Highly concentrated markets are less competitive. That can mean higher prices, weaker consumer choice and reduced pressure on firms to improve outcomes for customers. We see this most clearly in Australia's supermarket duopoly. The ACCC's 2024 supermarket inquiry identified persisting concerns about market concentration, weak competition and inadequate price transparency. It recommended a range of reforms to improve transparency and to strengthen competition within that sector. The government has acted on some of those recommendations. The Food and Grocery Code of Conduct has been made mandatory.”
“Drip pricing, manipulative interfaces and obstructive subscription cancellations do cause harm, but they're not the primary drivers of financial stresses in this country. A family paying a few extra dollars because a booking platform hid a service fee—that's frustrating. But if that family can't afford its power bills or if its grocery spend has increased by hundreds of dollars a month, or if it can't find a rental property within its budget, then it will not be materially helped by this legislation or by the government's wider competition agenda. The minister has claimed that this bill forms part of a wider agenda to strengthen competition, improve transparency and support consumers across the country.”
“I do welcome the minister's announcement that further legislation will be introduced later this year to extend aspects of these protections to small businesses and franchisees. Many small operators experience the same asymmetries of bargaining power and information as consumers do. I look forward to examining those reforms closely when they arrive. The government has presented this bill as part of its response to the cost-of-living crisis. But the bill, in fact, does not materially alter the economic pressures that face Australian households. At most, it introduces important but very limited protections against some particularly exploitative commercial practices. The minister himself has described these practices as irritants, and they are.”
“However, the legislation also contains substantial exclusions. Leases, higher purchase agreements, childcare services, school tuition arrangements and any other additional contracts excluded by regulation will fall outside these consumer protections. While the reforms contained in this bill are worthwhile, they're also cautious, limited and incomplete. Notably, this legislation won't commence until 1 July 2027. Every practice that this bill seeks to regulate will remain lawful for at least another 12 months before consumers receive the benefit of the protections that we should legislate this week. That is too long at a time when money for many families is as tight as it has ever been.”
“That is a sensible requirement, but the bill still does not require businesses to display a single total price upfront. Consumers are still expected to calculate the final cost themselves. This means that, despite this reform, the underlying commercial logic of drip pricing—which, after all, is attracting consumers with a low initial figure before progressively adding unavoidable costs—will remain largely intact. Finally, the bill contains exit provisions to ensure that subscription cancellations are easier to find and straightforward, and that is genuinely meaningful. Signing up to something can take 30 seconds, but cancelling, as we've all experienced, can take a phone call, a waiting queue and sometimes several billing cycles. Ending that asymmetry for consumers is the right thing to do.”
“But while I support the objectives and the policy intent of this bill, I cannot ignore the fact that submissions on the exposure draft to this legislation raised some very valid concerns which have not been reflected in the final drafting of this bill. Firstly, the prohibition on unfair trading practices has been drafted very narrowly. The bill prohibits conduct only where it manipulates the consumer and causes detriment. While no-one wants prohibition so broad that it will capture ordinary commercial persuasion, many submissions to this bill cautioned that this threshold is so high that the prohibition will be difficult to enforce in practice. Secondly, the bill addresses drip pricing by requiring transaction charges to be displayed prominently and in close proximity to the advertised base price.”
“From the consultations on the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Unfair Trading Practices) Bill, it is clear that there is broad agreement across regulators, consumer advocates, academics and industry that there are significant gaps in our legislation, and, as the minister has pointed out, existing consumer protections have not kept pace with sophisticated methods of influencing consumer behaviour, particularly in digital markets where businesses can actively shape purchasing decisions. That's what this legislation seeks to address. The bill introduces disclosure obligations for drip pricing, establishes clearer exit requirements for subscription contracts and creates a general prohibition on unfair trading practices. These are sensible reforms. They strengthen Australia's consumer protection framework, and I support them.”
“For some younger Australians, it means trying to establish a degree of financial security in an economy in which stable employment no longer guarantees financial stability. It's in this context that Australian consumers are more vulnerable than ever. When household budgets are already stretched, manipulative pricing tactics, unfair subscription arrangements and deceptive conduct can cause real harm. So it's entirely appropriate that this parliament should act where regulatory gaps in the Australian Consumer Law have allowed those practices to flourish.”
“Australians are under serious financial pressure. Across the country, households are finding that everyday expenses have become unaffordable. Grocery bills have risen sharply. Energy costs remain high. Insurance premiums continue to climb for homes, for cars, for health care. Renters are spending more and more of their income on their housing. Many Australians are deciding not where to put money but which essential expense they can now afford to delay. For some families, Australia's cost-of-living crisis means skipping medical or dental appointments to pay for groceries. For some pensioners, it means deciding whether or not they can afford to heat their homes through winter.”
“So, while I support this legislation, this is what the government should do: the government should immediately ensure that all regulatory loopholes open to the predatory gambling industry are firmly and immediately closed; the government should act immediately to address the profound health and financial harms caused by the toxic gambling industry by demonstrating, through its legislative actions, that gambling is a public health crisis that Australians can no longer afford; and the government should immediately implement the 31 reforms recommended by the Murphy report into gambling harm, starting with its cornerstone proposal for a comprehensive phased ban on all online gambling advertising.”
“Its reach extends into political donations, sponsorships and lobbying activity—tools that continue to influence government decision-making at the very highest levels. Gambling related industries have made more than $80 million in political donations over the last two decades alone. In 2023-24, gambling companies donated $1.5 million to political parties. Most of that went to the Australian Labor Party. It's been more than a thousand days now since the Murphy report into gambling harm was released, and the government is still to act, still to adopt even one of the report's 31 recommendations. If anyone is wondering why, let me be clear: the influence of the gambling industry over the government is the reason. Gambling is not just a public health issue; it's a deeply entrenched political lobbying issue.”
“Every TV ad, every online promotion and every push notification from a betting app on a young person's phone reinforces the harm that this legislation purports to seek to reduce. The public health evidence is clear. Gambling advertising increases participation. Gambling advertising encourages risk-taking. Gambling advertising normalises betting as entertainment, particularly for young Australians. If the government is actually serious about coherent evidence based reform, it shouldn't be stopping at R&D subsidies. It should urgently confront the harms of gambling head-on. Not doing so is virtue-signalling without substance—words without weight from the Albanese government. The gambling industry has long had a powerful lobbying influence in Australia. It seeks to shape policy and it seeks to protect its profits.”