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The health and wellbeing of Australians should be a top priority of any government.

But gambling, alcohol and unhealthy food companies are currently allowed to bombard us with advertising telling us to gamble more, drink more alcohol and eat more unhealthy food. As a result, their sales are booming, while we experience more cancer, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, mental ill health and financial hardship. 

Gambling, alcohol and unhealthy food companies use advertising to paint their products through rose-coloured glasses – glamorising and normalising products that cause significant harm to our community. 

These companies advertise their harmful products in places they know children will see, surrounding them with harmful messages everywhere they go. Gambling companies advertise when children are watching sports, alcohol companies advertise on kids’ routes to school, and unhealthy food companies target kids with advertisements as they go online. As a result, our children are growing up having their minds flooded with imagery and messages about these products that are deeply unhealthy. 

At the same time, these companies collect and use the personal data of people most at risk of harm, to tailor and target them with advertising enticing them to buy more and more.  

This makes it very hard for people trying to cut back on gambling, alcohol or unhealthy food to escape the clutches of these companies. 

Everyone would benefit from less advertising for gambling, alcohol and unhealthy foods. 

It’s time for government to put the health and wellbeing of our community before commercial profits by shielding our community from the onslaught of marketing by harmful industries. 

That is why we are calling on the Australian Government to introduce a new Harmful Products Marketing Act. 

This will see the introduction of a new legislative framework that regulates the way gambling, alcohol and unhealthy food companies promote their products, so that we all see less marketing for these harmful products in our daily lives. 

The Harmful Products Marketing Act will be designed with the health and wellbeing of our community at its centre. It will be modelled on the world-leading success Australia has seen through the Tobacco Advertising Prohibition Act which, since its introduction more than thirty years ago, has made a significant contribution to the reduction in harms from tobacco use in Australia – saving and improving countless lives. 

The introduction of the Harmful Products Marketing Act will see Australia lead the world once again, by freeing our sports fields, TV screens and mobile phones from advertising by gambling, alcohol and unhealthy food companies once and for all. 

This will be a bold step towards improving our community’s health and wellbeing for the decades ahead. 

Sincerely,