Casinos watchdog cops a mauling as judge pulls no punches

Thanks to a blistering judgment delivered in the NSW Supreme Court on Tuesday, we now know that even the gambling regulator likes to try on a hustle from time to time.

Within judge Christine Adamson’s legal wrangling was a burn so searing that it exposed not just the overreach of the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority, but slovenly politicians who left its powers so ambiguous to begin with.

In the end, it was a case of watchdog versus not-quite-an-underdog — Melco Resorts and Entertainment, a foreign-owned corporation and a veritable whale on the global gambling circuit, with operations in Macau, Hong Kong, Cyprus and The Philippines. Its foes, one might say, are arguably much larger and toothier than the freshly neutered ILGA.

Four months out from a much-vaunted casino inquiry, the company began receiving the first of nine summonses from the regulator to hand over legally privileged documents. Believing it had the powers of a royal commission, the ILGA demanded this paperwork using an obscure set of sub-clauses that were squirrelled away in a piece of its own fossilised legislation.

And the watchdog would have got away with it, too, if Melco hadn’t called its bluff. These powers never existed, but ILGA tried to make a go of it anyway.

The company’s success in court is, yes, something of a short-term win, a bubble-burster for the ILGA on the one hand and, on the other, a mortar round launched at the politicians whose clumsily worded Casino Control Act paved the way for this showdown.

For Crown Resorts, which is on track to open the casino at the centre of all this by 2021, this is neither a win nor a loss. Crown knows that the cardinal rule of the casino game is to maintain smooth relations with the regulator and accept its necessary evils of regulatory chidings and pesky statutory reviews.

If Crown has been open with the inquiry — and there is no suggestion it hasn’t — then Melco’s win will be largely irrelevant. It will continue to co-operate, and the company knows that the government may very well decide tomorrow — figuratively — to ramp up the authority’s legislation in response to the gaps exposed in the law (the more likely course of action would be to do so later in February during the next sitting of parliament).

So this is no time for crowing. Melco’s win, while technically a victory, really confers no tangible benefit on any party except perhaps Melco, a high-roller that’s already playing much bigger hands elsewhere.

The question now, though, is whether the NSW government will heed Justice Adamson’s hosing down, and hastily amend its legislation to give the ILGA the royal commission powers it so smugly thought it possessed.

Or perhaps it will abide by the wisdom of Kenny Rogers, in his song devoted to the vice at the heart of this legal fight.

I don’t need to mention which one.