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a large organization, so our expectations needed to be realistic. However, it was long enough for Crown to demonstrate sufficient progress towards what became known as the Melbourne Transformation Plan. The Casino Control Act required us to consider the Royal Commission reports into Crown’s casinos in Victoria and Western Australia, and the Bergin inquiry in New South Wales. We had to consider the special manager’s progress reports, but in the end, the VGCCC alone was required to determine Crown’s suitability to keep its license. Fortunately, we were also able to consider reports or inquiries into Crown by any relevant regulator including our own reports about disciplinary actions, which provided insights into their culture and attitude to regulation. Crown’s responses to these actions raised concerns early on that it was not genuinely committed to improving how it operated. I’ve already mentioned Crown’s response to our action against the use of picks to in effect lock gaming machines into continuous play mode. Another example was their confrontational and argumentative response to our action against their failure to follow their own Responsible Gambling code. That response was withdrawn when Crown installed a new chair, and we received a fresh and far more contrite response, which Crown then consistently displayed in the later disciplinary action processes. Once the special manager’s final report was delivered to us in early 2024, our job became clearer. The report confirmed that across a range of work streams, including culture, governance, risk management, mitigation of criminal influence and gambling harm, Crown had built up a significant momentum for change. Nonetheless, the five commissioners, of which I was one, still had two concerns: were we not just satisfied but clearly satisfied that crown was suitable to hold the casino license? And how could we as an agency ensure that Crown’s continuing efforts were sustained in the years to come? SP: What threshold did you as a commission rely upon to meet the requirement that you were clearly satisfied that Crown was suitable? How did you define clearly satisfied? AS: That wasn’t easy. Clearly satisfied was a phrase that Justice Finkelstein used in his report: his recommendation was that Crown ought to lose its license in two years, unless we were clearly satisfied it was suitable. That phrase then found its way into the legislation that was passed at the end of 2021
and so we had to ask ourselves, what do we think it means? We could find no legal precedent for that particular phrase. It obviously needed to be something higher than just scraping over the line, but it didn’t need to meet the criminal threshold of beyond reasonable doubt either. The position that we adopted, and we were helped with legal advice here, was what’s called in Australia the Briginshaw standard of being comfortably satisfied. And then the question becomes, how do you become comfortably satisfied? Do you need to be satisfied just over the line of 50 percent but with a lot of different factors that all are at that level or does the most important element need to be a long way beyond the 50 percent line. And if other less important elements are still hovering around that 50.1 percent then, does the biggest, most influential criterion being well satisfied carry everything to the point of comfort? SP: Your answer seems to refer to priorities. What were these priorities? What were the areas where you clearly needed to see more than the minimum? AS: Well, there were four areas where we needed to see a culture change and they were all spelled out by the special manager right from his first progress report. We were looking for improved governance and compliance, improved risk management, improvements to the responsible service of gambling and that financial crime had been properly addressed. So those were the four work streams that he and his team followed through. And that’s the best way of saying what we thought were the priorities. From a legal perspective, being clearly satisfied is a standard that has never been specifically defined in Australia. We wanted to find a method that would give us comfort that, based on the evidence, Crown had become suitable. In other words, not a borderline call but one that we could justify with evidence. This prompted the five of us to engage in robust discussions, challenge each other’s thought processes and push points beyond polite conversation. Underpinning this testing of ourselves was a vital element: mutual trust. Over the two years we went out of our way to connect as a group outside the work environment. As a result, we were able to work through situations where we disagreed in a way that allowed us to see where the other was coming from. Eventually we reached a point where we had no level of comfort that the evidence pointed to Crown still being unsuitable. That might sound like a lot of negatives, but it added
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IMGL MAGAZINE | MARCH 2025
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