All bets are off in Crown’s big gamble

Illustration: Rod Clement.

On Wednesday Ray Finkelstein begins his probe into the suitability of Crown to run a casino.

The royal commission comes as Crown executive chair Helen Coonan at the same time begins the process of navigating private equity giant and 9.9 per cent Crown shareholder Blackstone’s $8 billion highly-conditional offer for the still James Packer-controlled group.

All those balls in the air, including a soon-to-launch inquiry in the west, means Coonan will be earning every penny of the $2.5 million she is getting for the gig.

At least she still has the consulting services of former chief executive Ken Barton and former company secretary and legal counsel Mary Manos, who both formally exited in the fallout from Patricia Bergin’s forensic inquiry into Crown in NSW, to call on as the Dan Andrews-instigated Victorian inquiry unfolds.

Crown executive chair Helen Coonan. Picture: John Feder for The Australian.

How strange that the more things change the more they stay the same.

Manos’s offsider as assistant company secretary and legal counsel Lauren Harris has also just left the group, leaving head number cruncher Alan MacGregor as acting company secretary with diminishing ranks.

Meantime, not sure how a company like Crown recruits a new CEO and clutch of fresh directors to a company that is subject to two royal commissions as well as a mega private equity takeover offer.

Who’d take on such a role amid uncertainty like that?

Blackstone border

Looks like Peter Dutton holds at least some of the cards in the unfolding multi-billion dollar takeover proposed for Crown Resorts.

If the private equiteers at Blackstone, led locally by James Carnegie, are afforded the opportunity by Crown executive chair Helen Coonan to undertake due diligence on Crown Resorts’ operations, will Dutton even allow Blackstone’s international executives entry to Australia?

While much due diligence can be conducted virtually towards bringing Blackstone’s bid for Crown to fruition, there might be the need for the likes of its Singapore-based Asian head of real estate Alan Miyasaki, his Singapore office colleague and Asian head of tactical opportunities Kishorre Moorjani or its Hong Kong-based Asia Pacific chair Robert Heady to actually spend some time on the ground in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth eyeballing operations and meeting Crown execs face-to-face.

But thanks to biosecurity measures and travel restrictions to help prevent the spread of COVID-19, Australia’s international borders are closed unless you are the likes of an Australian citizen or resident.

And even you are given permission to come based on approval as an “individual in a critical sector or with critical skills”, any traveller must quarantine for 14 days on arrival – and that even includes masters of the universe.

So are the Blackstone operatives running the $8 billion bid for Crown working in a critical sector or boasting critical skills?

Debatable.

Perhaps Morgan Stanley should get the forms into Dutton’s Australian Border Force, stat.

Crown’s Victorian royal commission kicks off on Wednesday. Picture: NCA NewsWire

Out of the frying pan

The problem we have with Scott Morrison is that what we heard Tuesday morning isn’t matched by his actions, by what he actually does.

The Prime Minister has had more than a month to sniff the wind, he knows he has a major political problem and that he has to, at the very least, be seen to be doing something about it.

ScoMo started his 9.30am presser with all the right words.

“I am shocked and disgusted, it is shameful,” the PM said of recent events that have cast the spotlight on the treatment of women in Parliament House — from revelations of the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins to news of lewd sex acts on the desk of female Liberal MPs.

ScoMo was contrite, accepting via prepared thoughts that many had not liked his responses to these revelations, but adding that “no offence was intended” about his choice of language over recent weeks.

“Some women of Australia feel I haven’t heard them,” Morrison acknowledged.

At this point, we recall opposition leader Anthony Albanese recently using Question Time to tell the PM he’s “not got a tin ear but a wall of concrete.”

ScoMo was emotional, choking back tears as he talked about having “the deepest vested interest” in improving the status of women — that is, his two daughters and wife Jenny, who, along with his widowed mother Marion, are the centre of his world.

Events that had come to light, Morrison said, were “such despicable things I can hardly process them”.

Then the PM got angry and this is where his language started to drift.

Morrison held his ground and won’t concede to Labor’s claims that he had misled parliament last week over the update on the secretary of his department Phil Gaetjen’s report into the Higgins rape allegations.

The Prime Minister in Canberra on Tuesday. Picture: Getty Images

He then went on to defend his decision not to go out and meet with the women protesters last week — that’s the women who the PM thought should consider themselves lucky not to be met with bullets.

Then finally, with Morrison’s hot button ignited by a journalist questioning his leadership as the effective “boss” of the organisation, the PM went on the political offensive, warning about people in “glasshouses” and raising allegations of an alleged harassment of a woman from the reporter’s news organisation in a staff toilet.

Be “very careful”, the PM warned as he wielded his political weapon against journalists just doing their jobs. News Corp, the reporter’s employer and publisher of The Australian, refuted the claims in a statement as “simply not true — no complaint has been made”.

So after a month that’s how Morrison shows he’s got in touch with the “lived experience of many Australian women”.

“It’s processed, I’ve heard, I’ve listened,” he declared.

Really?

And still we wait for his government’s response to sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins’ more than one-year-old, almost 1000-page report — Respect@Work: National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces — that is still on a shelf somewhere in the office of on-leave Attorney-General Christian Porter (himself subject to historic rape allegations)?

And what of the fate of also on-leave Minister Linda Reynolds, on whose couch Higgins is alleged to have been assaulted and who when the allegations came to light described the young former staffer as a “lying cow”?

It’s unlikely that will be the last question he faces on this issue over the next few days. He’ll be glad that Parliament doesn’t return after Thursday until May for the Budget session. Whether ScoMo’s words Tuesday represent a genuine deeper reflection and shift in his beliefs that will translate into action for the betterment of women we shall see.

The fear is it just turns out to be an act of political expediency. Even survival.