A coroner has called for a major overhaul of Australia’s regulation of online gambling following the “heartbreaking” death of a young man.
Kyle Hudson opened his first betting account on his 18th birthday and died by suicide four years later, after placing more than 8500 individual bets totalling almost $900,000.
Following an inquest into Mr Hudson’s death, Coroner Paul Lawrie found the young man’s ongoing gambling was the “direct and paramount causative factor” behind his decision to take his own life.
Handing down his findings in a two hour hearing on Tuesday, Mr Lawrie said Mr Hudson’s adult life had been “dominated” by gambling, despite “extraordinary” efforts to try to address his addiction.
The court was told Mr Hudson was a university student and working casually in retail.
Over his adult life he earned about $26,000 a year while losing an average of $11,682 annually to gambling.
The coroner said the young man hid the extent of his issues from his family and friends, but confessed to his long-term partner Ashley Baker in December 2020 that he’d lost all his savings.
She urged him to quit and believed he’d done so, but Mr Hudson had continued using other betting accounts.
Two days before he died, Mr Hudson was asking Ms Baker for $1000 and wouldn’t explain why, leaving her to fear the “cycle of gambling was about to start again”.
On the day he died, Mr Hudson made two losing bets totalling $6300 before searching for suicide methods online within minutes of losing the second bet.
Coroner Lawrie said about 85 per cent of Mr Hudson’s online betting was through SportsBet, but he also had accounts with Ladbrokes, Neds, Bookmaker and Bet365.
Mr Hudson had been offered hundreds of inducements to keep gambling over the years, the court was told.
“Kyle was a young man brimming with promise and his story is heartbreaking. He had a loving and supporting partner, and he was surrounded by a loving family and loyal friends,” Mr Lawrie said.
“It was a near ideal picture except for the grip that online sports betting had upon him. The impact went far beyond the money Kyle lost, online gambling had taken over so much of his life.
“Ultimately he lost everything. Kyle’s case revealed, in the sharpest relief, the human cost of online gambling. It should be a clear signal that we cannot leave monitoring and intervention solely in the hands of the betting company.
“These are such critical and obvious deficiencies that the status quo cannot be justified.”
Coroner Lawrie was critical of SportsBet, who had argued the information before the court could not establish that Mr Hudson was a problem gambler, describing the argument as “chilling”.
“I do not accept this proposition. The analysis of Kyle’s bidding activity… presents a startling picture of a young man whose life after age 18 was dominated by online gambling,” he said.
“It would be naive in the extreme to think that gambling advertising had not played a material role in bringing Kyle to this point and keeping him engaged over the next four years.”
The coroner made a series of recommendations to the government including the establishment of a national online gambling regulator and a national data vault to collect and study customer data from all betting companies.
“At present the critical data needed to properly monitor gambling risk and to properly understand the efficacy of safer gambling tools and overall gambling trends is proprietary,” he said.
“In Australia it is held in silos by the betting companies themselves.”
Mr Lawrie said there were numerous overseas examples of a national data vault overseas for Australia to follow, providing regulators real world information on gambling trends and the effects of harm-reduction efforts.
He called for special protections for young people engaged in betting, with deposit and loss limits and the banning of bonus offers and betting inducements.
Mr Lawrie also pushed for a change to the national consumer framework for online wagering to mandate companies to prominently display each account holder’s net financial position to allow bettors to easily understand how much they’d lost or gained.
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