Squirrelled in one of the innocuously titled chapters of Patricia Bergin’s two-volume report is a subtle glimpse into the wheel-greasing we have come to expect of NSW politics, and the extraordinary access provided to some of Australia’s richest men.
The details, like the plot reveal in any story worth reading, are inevitable and yet paradoxically unexpected: they revolve around a discreet meeting held at the home of media identity Alan Jones and a private audience he was able to pull off for James Packer with the premier of the day, Barry O’Farrell.
This was February 2012 and with the ear of the state’s newly appointed Liberal leader, Packer cast a splendid vision of Sydney, replete with a glimmering six-star hotel and casino resort adorning undeveloped land along Barangaroo. It was a concept brimming with promise for NSW, or so the pitch went.
This wouldn’t devolve into a neon-lit gambling den for punters carrying folded tabloids under their arm — this was VIP gambling on a scale no other Australian company could dream of pulling off, such were Crown’s connections in Asia.
Within a few months, the premier was back in touch with Crown’s then-chairman imparting a few words of advice to smooth the way for the Barangaroo gambit.
In a meeting, he told Packer to use the government’s newly conceived “unsolicited development process” to formally spruik the proposal.
Very few people knew about it — the process hadn’t been signed off by O’Farrell’s cabinet. Within a week of that meeting, in August 2012, the NSW government had updated its process for these unsolicited proposals, removing the requirement for an independent evaluation of the projects and whether they should be allowed to avoid a tender.
Two months later, cabinet formally signed off on the unsolicited proposal process to which Mr Packer had been made privy. Crown Resorts lodged a formal submission nine months later and it was approved within five weeks, paving the way for a binding agreement with the NSW government.
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Benefits become part of people’s points of reference, including the middle class, and therefore any reduction in entitlements is deeply politically unpopular. It’s the principal reason governments find it so hard to control spending.
How campus censors fuel the rise of a resurgent anti-Semitism
Hitler learned to hate Jewish people in the lecture halls of Munich University. His racism was not genetically encoded in him. All the evidence suggests that, when Hitler was a youth, the Jews were not on his radar. It was a university that changed all that.