Home, James, and don’t spare the horses: the inevitability of a second Sydney casino

ABSTRACT

Casinos have become an important yet controversial element of many contemporary metropoles, with cities on the Pacific Rim no exception. Twenty years after the opening of Sydney’s first casino, construction of its second is currently underway on a contentious site, the Barangaroo precinct. This paper offers a historical analysis of the current casino project against the backdrop of casino development in Australia general, comparing the current project to the development of Sydney’s first casino, The Star (formerly Star City). We argue that both have been predicated on a cosmopolitan gaze contributing to the image of a ‘global city’ and the promise of increased tax revenues. As a result, planning processes have lacked legitimacy, particularly in the case of Crown, which involves the use of significant public assets. This paper critiques the spectacle of iconic developments of both The Star at Pyrmont and Crown Casino at Barangaroo when set against the morphology and urban form, suggesting that a more sincere engagement with the specificity of place on major developments would mitigate against the polarising effects of contested urban projects.

KEYWORDS:

• Barangaroo
• casino development
• privatisation of public space
• Sydney global city

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Kane Pham http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0673-7789

Bligh Grant http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8055-6046

Notes

1 The Barangaroo Delivery Authority (BDA) is a statutory corporation of the NSW state parliament and was created by the Barangaroo Delivery Authority Act 2009. The BDA is responsible to the Premier of NSW (NSW Government 2009).

2 Premier Mike Baird resigned the premiership and retired from politics on 19 January 2017, citing family reasons (see NSW Government 2017b). On 28 February 2017, the National Australia Bank (NAB) announced that Baird would commence with them in an executive role in mid-April 2017 (ABC News 2017b).

3 Barry O’Farrell resigned as Premier on 16 April 2014 following revelations in the course of an inquiry being conducted by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) that the [then] Premier had received a gift of a bottle of Penfold's Grange wine valued at A$3000 from Australian Water Holdings (AWH) executive Di Girolamo (see ABC News 2014). Arguably, this episode exemplified a period in NSW political history that was marked by allegations of corruption and poor governance at the level of state politics (see, for example, McClymont and Besser 2014; Grant, Ryan, and Lawrie 2015). Drew (2015, 63) noted that even then the instability at the level of state politics had been responsible for obfuscating planning procedure around Barangaroo, stating: ‘It is almost impossible to make sense of what happened. Even professionals find the documents baffling’.

4 For instance, in its Budget Statement 2016–2017 the NSW Treasury disaggregates all taxes derived from gambling and betting from FY 2014–2015 over the forward estimates to 2019–2020. In FY 2015–2016, taxes from ‘Club gaming machines’ and ‘Hotel gaming machines’ were recorded as A$778 million and A$681 million, respectively, with taxes from casinos amounting to A$246 million (NSW Government 2016, 5–7).

5 The NSW Government (2017a) has launched a website advertising the properties for sale and highlighting attractions in the surrounds.

6 Former Prime Minister Paul Keating imposed his influence on the design of the precinct, especially in the early stages of design development. Keating was first involved as a juror for the East Darling Harbour International Design Competition (now Barangaroo) and chaired the Design Excellence Review Panel (DERP), raising concerns of conflicts of interest (Stickells 2010). He successfully argued for the design and construction of the headland but distanced himself after the introduction of the casino resort into the master plan (Davies 2015). Architectural historian Drew (2015, 62) describes Keating as: ‘An opinionated amateur’, commenting of the Keating-led design: ‘Sydney already has eighteen natural headlands and does not need another costing $177 million’.

7 This lack of a formal consultation process did not stop an 11,000-signature petition opposing the development being submitted to parliament by the Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore in May 2011, forcing the issue to be debated in the Legislative Assembly (SMH 2011; see also Drew 2015, 64).

8 The ‘Bilbao Effect’ refers to the revitalisation project of the existing industrial waterfront in Bilbao, Spain through the conflation of the star architect designing iconic buildings, museums and cultural artefacts attracting the growth of tourism into the city. This exemplar has drawn the gaze of numerous ailing cities, spawning numerous attempts to mirror this successful transformation (see Plaza 2000).