Late Night Live — Full program podcast · ABC Australia

Gambling's grip on politicians, Cuba's invasion threat and greenwashing green burials

·55 min·3 clips

Luis Martinez-Fernandez says Cuba may not still be governed by the Díaz-Canel system six months from now.

1. Late Night Live with David Marr moves across gambling politics in Canberra, Cuba under Trump pressure, and green burials in Australia. 2. David Marr speaks with Christian Slattery, senior campaigner at the Australian Democracy Network, Dr. Luis Martinez-Fernandez, historian and Pegasus professor at the University of Central Florida, and Hannah Gould, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Melbourne and senior lecturer in Buddhist studies. 3. The episode asks how gambling lobbying, U.S. pressure on Cuba, and funeral “death technologies” expose the gap between public claims and hidden systems. 4. Slattery says the Australian Democracy Network report “Gaming the System” covers 11 years of gambling donations from 2014 to 2025. 5. He says gambling companies donated about $6 million to federal major parties, split almost evenly between Labor at $3.1 million and the Coalition at $3.2 million. 6. Marr describes gambling as a $31 billion annual drain on Australians and cites polling showing 91% support for banning gambling ads from primetime television. 7. Slattery says donations are only part of an ecosystem that includes lobbying, PR campaigns, and access to politicians. 8. He says Woodside Energy’s 2018 evidence to a parliamentary inquiry showed what fundraising access could buy, including parliamentary briefings, policy forums, budget-night dinners, and drinks with the Prime Minister and opposition leader. 9. He says the federal Lobbyist Code of Conduct, introduced in 2008, only covers professional third-party lobbyists and not in-house government relations staff. 10. He says federal disclosure is weaker than in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, and the ACT, where ministerial diaries are published. 11. Slattery says the only substantive federal sanction he mentions is an 18-month cooling-off period under the Ministerial Code of Conduct, and he says it is routinely breached. 12. He names Christopher Pyne as an example of a former minister moving into defence-industry lobbying after leaving office. 13. He says Responsible Wagering Australia has been chaired by Stephen Conroy, Richard Colbeck, and Nick Minchin over the past decade. 14. Marr and Slattery discuss orange sponsored passes that can grant unrestricted access to private parts of Parliament House. 15. Slattery says the reforms he wants include ministerial diaries, better coverage of advisers and senior public servants, stronger cooling-off periods, an independent watchdog, and civil and criminal penalties. 16. Marr turns to Cuba, where Martinez-Fernandez says the country is facing its worst crisis in history after Trump cut off oil to the Caribbean island. 17. Martinez-Fernandez says Cuba lacks water, transportation, fuel for airplanes, and reliable electricity, and he says buildings are collapsing daily. 18. He says there are reports of high-level conversations in Mexico and elsewhere, and he says the Díaz-Canel government may not be in place six months from now. 19. Gould explains that the University of Melbourne death tech research team studies the relationship between death, mortality, and technologies such as social media, AI holograms, and funeral handling systems. 20. Gould says Zoroastrian excarnation, alkaline hydrolysis, and other low-emission burial methods raise practical, legal, and climate questions, and she describes Australian attitudes to death with the phrase “necropragmatism.”

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