Queen’s Wharf could be great, but we’re being played for fools

Ask anything about Queen’s Wharf Brisbane and the government will invariably respond with a list of dazzling figures.

The “integrated resort” will create 8000 jobs, or so it is claimed. Four hotels will rise over the CBD – a crucial piece of the yet-unsolved accommodation puzzle for Brisbane 2032.

Queen’s Wharf Brisbane is expected to start opening from April next year. Credit: Nordacious

Cinemas, luxury shopping, bars, restaurants and as many as 2000 private units will sprawl up and over a dozen hectares of prime public land beside the Brisbane River. So impressive will the whole thing be, 1.4 million people will visit every year.

On these measures, Queen’s Wharf is objectively a good thing for a modern city on the move like Brisbane.

But a more unsavoury ingredient underpinning the entire $3.6 billion (and counting) development doesn’t receive the same kind of public relations hype.

It is the casino, of course, under the stewardship of the disgraced Star Entertainment: the same outfit Shannon Fentiman last year found unsuitable to hold its Queensland casino licences (but which she declined to banish nonetheless).

Star has teamed up with a couple of Hong Kong-based partners to form Destination Brisbane Consortium (DBC), which the Palaszczuk government awarded the Queen’s Wharf deal in 2015.

One of the companies, Chow Tai Fook, is currently under investigation for alleged links to Asian triads, even though it previously passed the government’s probity checks.

Aside from all this, Queen’s Wharf is two years late and costing DBC at least $600 million more than envisaged. For good measure, a legal dispute between it and builder Multiplex threatens to add another several hundred million, give or take.

And from the milieu rises the new Star casino, linked by a flight of stairs to a new footbridge named after Aboriginal parliamentarian Neville Bonner and made for conveying gamblers and shoppers across the river from South Bank.

The state government has abandoned a long-term study into the Queen’s Wharf casino’s impact on the community.Credit: Rhett Hammerton

So far, what is most distinctive about the new casino is the government’s seemingly intent efforts to keep public-interest details secret or unknown.

It has never explained, for example, why it gave Star the right to operate 900 more pokie machines than it ever asked for, a decision that’s particularly suss given the government had previously promised to cap pokie numbers.

For context about why capping might be good, Queenslanders lost more than $280 million at the pokies in September this year alone.

Similarly, neither the government nor Star have explained what happened to the new theatre the consortium promised to build at South Bank. Within months of the 2015 “message to shareholders” featuring the promise of a new Lyric Theatre, the responsibility had fallen back on taxpayers.

This week, Brisbane Times revealed DBC and the government had lost interest in pushing ahead with an independent community-impact study that would have kept tabs on important Queen’s Wharf implications such as its effect on crime, safety, traffic, tourism and gambling over time.

Shouldn’t the government demand to know such details?

The State Development Department warned as recently as 2021 that it was “essential” that the Queensland University of Technology study continue. If not, the state might have to “rely solely upon advice from DBC”. Great.

Before the study collapsed, QUT delivered two voluminous baseline reports, which included a gambling impact study. The researchers sought permission to release data so it could promote its longitudinal study and attract investors for future stages. Ever on brand, the government refused.

It is not too much for Brisbanites to expect to know the impact of their new “integrated resort”. It was, after all, their land given up in the DBC deal, which remains – surprise! – a secret, aside from the details the government wants to spout, namely, that Star will pay $880 million in taxes during the new casino’s first decade of operations.

This figure is supposed to be guaranteed. But the Australian casino business has changed since the Queensland backslapping of 2015 because Star and Crown have both been exposed as ethically, culturally and legally loathsome.

Will the Asian high-rollers come to Brisbane over Macau? DBC and the government must hope so.

The Queen’s Wharf development, of which the casino is a vital component, can be a good thing for Brisbane if it lives up to its promises and community responsibilities. Problem is, it is being undermined by government secrecy and wilful ignorance.