Thursday, 10 September 2026

 Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (17:33): (1848) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Casino, Gaming and Liquor Regulation, and the action I seek is for the minister to require rewards clubs, like LMCT Plus, which operate under the trade promotions provisions of the Gambling Regulation Act 2003, to publicly divulge their payout ratios. I touched on this earlier this week when we had a discussion in this place about gambling reforms – of course there are a lot of gambling reforms you could do – but I just want to state again for the benefit of the house what extraordinary businesses these large rewards clubs are, even compared to other gambling businesses.

To give you a stylised example, some of these large rewards clubs might take $100 million a year in revenue from their members and then pay out about $20 million a year in prizes. They then incur about $10 million a year in other expenses, mainly Facebook advertising but a little bit of rewards club stuff, and then that gives them, roughly speaking, a $70 million per year earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation result. To add to that, some of these businesses boast that they have no employees. They contract out some advertising and social media work – presumably they pay for their accountant and other professional services – but they essentially pay no payroll tax at all. And because they are largely outside of that contracted work, merely engaged in transferring their members’ money into their own bank accounts, they have no plant, they have no property, they have no equipment, they have no assets, they have no depreciation and they have no interest, because you do not need to borrow money with a business like that. Essentially that $70 million per year EBITDA result is pure profit. Then they of course have to pay company tax, but they get all of that back as franking credits. So you have what essentially is a sole trader operation that returns $35 million per year to that sole trader as post-tax income, and as those who have done a little bit of finance would know, if you have a business that generates that much money, you can call yourself a billionaire.

As I said earlier this week, I am not one to stand up here and defend Gina Rinehart or Clive Palmer, but at least they earned their billions by going out to remote locations and extracting iron ore and nickel and other commodities from the ground that everyone, all of us, need in our day-to-day lives, whereas these new rewards club billionaires have made their money by making Instagram reels that fleece people on the internet. So when some members of the Liberal Party stand up and say this is the new, great Aussie innovative entrepreneurialism, I disagree with that. I think that we should force these businesses, through legislation, to reveal their payout ratios: how much they take in, how much they pay out and how much they have retrospectively done that. If I had my way, we would force them to reveal how many millions and millions of dollars they have taken from hardworking Victorians and transferred into overseas bank accounts. I thank the minister and his department for their consideration.