Terry McCrann: Crown lost its casino training tape and Victoria is jobs dead-weight
Victoria is dragging down the rest of the country’s jobs recovery from the pandemic. But when we are back on track Australia can’t return to the old way of doing things, writes Terry McCrann.
Terry McCrann
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The bad news in the latest jobs data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics is just how much damage Victoria is doing to the national economy.
Jobs across Australia apart from Victoria down 2.8 per cent from pre-virus; jobs in Victoria down 7.7 per cent.
The good news in that is just how much of a boost Victoria could generate, obviously for itself, but also for everyone else, when – if? – it joins the rest of the country in allowing its economy to function.
But even that will only go so far to getting Australia and 26 million Australians back to something like normality.
There are two further critical stages and one huge – and I mean huge – macro question.
The first absolutely basic ‘next step’ is as Ronald Reagan demanded: ‘premiers, tear down your border walls’.
Unless and until that happens we can’t get to anywhere closer than around 97-98 per cent of where we were back in February. That would still leave us 3-5 per cent down on where we should have been in a normal year by now.
The next step after that is of course opening up the international borders – letting in especially the millions of tourists that come here; letting out the millions of Australians if they want to go. Plus foreign students.
Beyond all this though, there’s that bigger question: we have to build a new growth model that really adds value and real wealth.
We cannot go back to the old (fake) growth model built on pouring more and more migrants into Melbourne and Sydney.
CROWN LOST ITS CASINO TRAINING TAPE
Hearing all the evidence at the Crown casino inquiry in Sin City – when you are imprisoned in Chairman Dan’s Lockdown Melbourne, you’ll grab at any chance to have a dig at those living in freedom north of the Murray – there is one big question that remains unasked and so unanswered.
Were the board of directors of James Packer’s Crown group collectively and completely unaware of Robert De Niro’s movie Casino? And if so, who stuffed up; who failed to prescribe it as an introductory training manual?
Now, nobody’s accusing Crown of being a front for the mafia – whether of the US, the original, or just our downunder version.
Similarly, nobody’s accusing anyone at Crown of ‘skimming’ off the top some of the cash flowing through either of its (current) casinos, in Melbourne or in Perth – the central element of the movie and why various figures got ‘whacked’.
But surely, if they’d seen the movie, the penny might have dropped – that they were presiding over a business where people figuratively and even literally and certainly frequently came through with suitcases filled with cash.
Knock, knock: didn’t the directors understand that a casino is not just the ultimate cash business, it is entirely a cash business; and a cash business like no other where literally millions of dollars tick through every day, even if these days the cash can travel in virtual reality cyberspace.
And that – some more broad if not exact guidance from the movie – when a lot of cash is flying around, naughty things can and almost certainly will happen unless you are super-vigilant.
So that, at the very least you need to have much, much more robust control and monitoring systems and practices than a business which operated through accountants and invoices and 30-day settlements.
And that you, both the board collectively but also every single individual director, had to be both clued in to the monitoring/regulating and then acting as a continuous auditor in 24/7 real time as both self and company protection.
All something, that if only they’d watched the movie, might have – at least a bit – filtered through the normal board structures and processes and directorial delegations and the like.
Forget about normal protocols of properly and meticulously crossing Ts and dotting Is – just, as Tom Cruise said in another movie, “follow the money”.
Yet Crown seemed to have the same sort of nonchalant approach to what was demanded of both directors and management, as the ministers and public servants in Victoria had to hotel quarantine.
At least they can say, and so far as we know, nobody died at the baccarat or roulette table. But certainly some reputations have.
Further, again so far, the indications have been of bumbling incompetence rather than active malfeasance; and again the question has to be asked, as also with the bank cases, where was Austrac in and through all this?
The guys, definitely non-gender specific, down there at the money-laundering regulator also don’t seem to have seen the movie. At least, that is, not until recently.
Or maybe they thought those sorts of things could only happen in Las Vegas. Or Macau.
Bottom line remains: Crown has to be sanctioned for its failures; and that has to carry over to Packer as the clearly controlling shareholder.
Apart from his various periods as very definitely hands-on in the boardroom, the evidence of his deep briefings when outside the boardroom, shatter any suggestion that he was not the – actively and always – controlling shareholder.
As I wrote on Tuesday, he was on a path to exit anyway; he now runs the risk of the timing and price being snatched out of his hands.
Originally published as Terry McCrann: Crown lost its casino training tape and Victoria is jobs dead-weight