He's

now an anti-gambling advocate.

His journey with gambling addiction has sort of been well documented and he sort of alleged that betting companies gave, I'm going to hesitate to use language inducements, I'll get to why in a second, but sort of gave gifts, if you will, of drugs and sex workers and accommodation and sports tickets and so on to get him to gamble more and bring him to events and so on and so forth.

because they knew that he was essentially a high-risk gambler and was putting lots and lots of money through these betting companies.

The reason I hesitate on the language inducements, and this is probably important to bear in mind, is that the language inducements has a specific legal meaning as it's contemplated by the legislation, and that essentially refers to things like bonus bets.

So that's a very common way of, as the gambling companies told the Senate inquiry into this bill, sort of maintaining customers and customer retention.

But those are things like, for example, if my football club, the Hawthorne Hawks, play on the weekend and I have a Sportsbet account, Sportsbet might know that I bet a lot on Hawthorne, for example, and I'll get a text and it'll say, Darnie, here's $5 of store credit, essentially, to go and bet on Hawthorne.

Rachel Darnie, who wants to go first with a tip for the pig to turn his attention to? Okay.

But, Dani, why don't you kick us off with one of your favourite items for the past month, which was, as I understand, a particularly juicy set of emails from within the National Anti-Corruption Commission that was revealed by a Freedom of Information request.

This FOI was really interesting, I think, to me, Partially because of the politics around the National Anti-Corruption Commission and sort of the process that we have gotten to to come here and the body that we have here, the agency that we have now.

And partially because it is a great insight into the minds of sort of public sector bureaucrats and how they view journalists.

The NAC's response or internal response after receiving questions from investigative journalist Nick Fake, who writes for Crikey, is a regular contributor to Crikey.

And he did a piece for The Point about sort of the failures of leadership and the commission's sort of lack of accountability and transparency, which is quite funny given the point of the agency.

And obviously sort of the political scandals around what is now sort of outgoing Commissioner Paul Brereton and Deputy Commissioner Kylie Kilgour.

we see emails from paul brereton uh where he advises the acting media director and i'm quoting here given this journalist's tracked record with us i'd be inclined to not reply at all and Kylie Kilgore says she's listened to Nick Fake discussing the knack on the Serious Danger podcast, which is sort of a Greens-adjacent podcast hosted by Emery Moon, who's an old Greens candidate, and Tom Ballard, who's a comedian and supporter of the Greens.

Darnie, what did you think about this when we ran the item in the Snoop?

Are they doing, is there any evidence to suggest they're doing worse off than they were before the advent of AI?

It's hard to say, and we're probably going to have a really good idea on Monday when they announce their latest financials.

But the It is hard to say.

There's parts, and Nine are probably doing better than other media companies in this respect, in terms of the profit numbers and that sort of thing.

They have just signed an enormous rugby league television rights deal.

It's a big part of their budgets annually.

It's not as big, it's not as significant for Nine as Aussie Rules is for Channel 7, but it's a really significant chunk of revenue and they've done a really good deal in that sense of sort of drawing down the contribution that they make to that deal.

But the...

Very slow on the uptake.

If, if, if it is not immediately apparent to you that Tommy Robinson is a far right extremist and it is problematic for the fourth biggest Australian on the Spotify charts, the, the biggest man in television, the, the mo- the highest highly paid man in television, if it's not apparent to you that there's a problem with that, you're an idiot.

I think we h- need to have a really serious conversation about the kinds of talent that we platform in this country as the, as the face [laughs] of breakfast television.

I think there, there should be some serious reflection at Nine.

But Nine are in this bind, right? There's this really comical game of professional chicken.

Nine understand how problematic this is.

Their journalists are really upset about the, the impact it has on their reputations, but the minute you let Carl go, I am almost certain there will be an episode of The Carl Stefanovic Show along the lines of why I was canceled by the mainstream media, why I...

... just make that clear.

Would those things be defined as advertisements in relation to these reforms?

We're not entirely clear on that yet.

Like, the, the, the short answer is yes, they'll probably try to get around them in some form.

This is part of the reason why a, a partial ban doesn't work, and this is why experts say partial bans don't work, just because gambling companies find new and creative ways to get around them.

The gambling companies have already, like, lobbied really, really hard on this over the last three years.

[gentle music] In August 2024, it was reported that the then communications minister, now the Attorney General, Michelle Rowland, had sort of met with a number of stakeholders, including the big wagering companies, and the proposal at the time was something to the effect of two gambling ads an hour.

It was then reported in January that Anthony Albanese had come over the top and made a captain's call and vetoed, uh, gambling advertising reform before the 2025 election.

So finally, Dani, is this now bigger than a simple advertising debate? Is it really a question about whether Australian sport has become too culturally and commercially entangled with betting? And does it seem to you like Labor is trying to make gambling ads less visible without really addressing the harms that online gambling has on Australians?

What happened then? Did you see it?

I did.

It was led by organisers, is the first part, and then it built.

So there was a decision made to march, and there was an argument made by Jenny Leung with police that the safest way to disperse was to march.

That was obviously refused.

But... that information is then relayed to the organisers of the march and what they call the Black Caucus, so their First Nations representative, and they are primarily responsible in this process specific instance for making the decision of whether to march or to not.

And it was relayed to me from those organisers that there was a decision that had been made to march.

So Daniel, what do you think the repercussions of this are going to be, particularly of the breaking up of that prayer group?