The best way to bury an issue is to form a committee or announce an inquiry then issue a report that government will take considerable time to respond to, so goes the adage. This can transform a potentially damaging topic into yet another document sitting on a parliamentary office shelf.

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But such is not always the trajectory, as is shown by a contentious report issued more than a year ago that has neither died nor received a government response to its 31 recommendations.

You win some, you lose more; the inquiry into online gambling and its impacts on those experiencing gambling harm was produced by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs, chaired by the late Peta Murphy MP.

As the report noted, "Online gambling has been deliberately and strategically marketed alongside sport, which has normalised it as a fun, harmless, and sociable activity that is part of a favourite pastime. Gambling advertising is grooming children and young people to gamble and encourages riskier behaviour."

The words uncannily resemble the rationale for the fast-tracked ban on young people accessing social media.

A new parliamentary report; "Financial abuse: an insidious form of domestic violence"; is less likely to experience delay, given the necessary urgency to address family and domestic violence.

The final hearings of the Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services were in September, and now the report is out. It has twice as many recommendations as the gambling report and, more importantly, no identifiable opponents such as the gaming and commercial media industries.

Who could argue that "victim-survivors of family and domestic violence," to use the report's term, deserve to be financially abused or exploited by an aggrieved partner, current or former? Or suggest that the assets of vulnerable........

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