Crown started as a high rollers' casino and should not become an RSL
After the federal government streamlined visas for Chinese citizens to gamble in Australian casinos, NSW governments were happy to allow casino group Crown Resorts to prey on high rollers from the Mainland so long as they stayed away from the locals.
The Herald cautiously supported an invitation-only casino with no poker machines and no access for the general public on the eve of the original Packer-Crown casino being approved in 2013. We considered the high rollers option the best chance to capitalise on gambling tourism without changing the vibe of the city or exploiting Sydneysiders.
But the Chinese vanished and in a breach of faith, Crown has gambled irresponsibly on going after our most vulnerable players.
In an exclusive story, the Herald's Harriet Alexander this week revealed Crown Resorts executives are lobbying Minns government MPs, the opposition and crossbenchers to support a company proposal to install 500 cashless poker machines at Barangaroo.
This time Crown is preying on other NSW gambling venues, hoping to remove 500 cash poker machines and installing a similar number of cashless poker machines under the specious claim of proving the new technology works. There may be an argument that relocating in a highly regulated casino could be a better outcome. But the issue facing NSW is to reduce poker machine numbers, not move them around between venues.
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Crown's sleight of hand on poker machines treats the people of NSW with contempt and ignores the important principle at stake: the casino was licensed on a promise of no poker machines. Now, behind closed doors Crown has chosen to break that promise.
Premier Chris Minns on Friday ruled out changing legislation to permit Crown Resorts to offer poker machines at Barangaroo. Importantly, he did not say how Labor would vote should a crossbencher introduce such a bill. But the revelations emerged the same day as a damning audit of gambling regulations in NSW by the auditor-general found that it would take 55 years for NSW to reduce its poker machine numbers to the national average at the current rate, and that the government had no targets to reduce gambling harm.
NSW had 87,749 poker machines operating across 2000 venues in 2023-24, and they generated a profit of $8.4 billion, which the auditor-general took as the best measure of loss to patrons. They accounted for half the machines operating in Australia.
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