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up to a decision. As our choice was between yes or no, that left us with a yes decision. More than that, it was the only decision that felt comfortable. All five of us recognized what the legislative phrase clearly satisfied felt like. SP: You said your second concern was to ensure that Crown’s commitment to change was sustained after the special manager left. How did you satisfy yourselves that this would be the case? AS: Yes, and this was really about how would we ensure that Crown continued to lock in the gains it had made by completing its transformation plan once the Special Manager’s role concluded and he no longer had daily oversight of its reform program. We decided we would have to replace the outgoing special manager with something less intensive that would nevertheless ensure Crown did not slip back into its old ways. Consequently, we exercised our statutory powers to issue a direction to compel Crown to implement the transformation plan over the next three years and to periodically review it via our transformation plan audit team to ensure the reforms remain relevant and fit for purpose in the context of changing circumstances. SP: That’s a fascinating insight into a really thorny decision. A lot of our readers are private practice lawyers. How much did you rely on external counsel on your side? AS: Significantly. We have our own seven- or eight-strong internal legal team, but we engaged DLA Piper who in turn engaged a very experienced barrister and even a retired Federal Court judge. We were very much in the trenches, but they were right there with us. I had been 40 years in private practice before this role and it was very helpful from my perspective as an experienced lawyer to be able to do what I think Crown ought to have been doing and challenging the external legal advice. Unless you test that advice, you don’t know how well it will stand up to scrutiny. SP: As we end, I wonder if we could zoom out and ask what, from this incredibly large and high-profile case, have you learned that could be applicable elsewhere? What are the key takeaways that you would like to share with other regulators? AS: I wouldn’t presume for a second to say that ours was the only process that could be done to arrive at such an important decision, but the critical things for us were the need to start preparing for the decision early. Two years might seem a
relatively long time, but in reality, it’s a very short time. An early start to planning is vital, and getting the help you will need to make the decision is vital. In our case, that included getting external receivers and managers retained in advance, even if we might not have ended up needing them. So that if in April 2024 we say Crown is not suitable, we don’t just then have to start hunting around for the right sort of external manager. So we did go out into the market very confidentially and retained a potential manager, gave them some early briefings about what the scope of their role would be and what the timelines would be. As it ended up, it wasn’t needed but we had to be able to avoid the unplanned-for consequences of saying the license should be cancelled. If we had said that and the government accepted that and did it, then without some contingency all the jobs would be lost because there wouldn’t be an operating casino until a new operator was eventually installed. That’s going to hurt the economy. It’s going to hurt a lot of innocent people and hit the surrounding businesses that are all dependent on the casino being a hub. So the other part was making sure we had that transition process contractually locked in with Crown and the government so that the casino would continue to operate while Crown was leaving the building. SP: Having gone through that lengthy process, are there powers that you would have wished for or things you couldn’t do that you would have wanted to do? AS: Yes, I think it would have been helpful if we had been able to take into account all the business as usual issues that our team encountered with Crown during the two years we were developing our decision. Instead, what we had to do was identify important issues and construct them as investigations, then use reports of a relevant regulator namely, ourselves arising out of those investigations. If we had been able to consider everything that happened with Crown vis-à-vis the regulator from the end of the Royal Commission to the time of the suitability decision, it would have been a bit easier. But really, it’s unreasonable for any regulator to expect a licensee to be perfect: that’s too high a standard. We’re not perfect, so we can hardly expect them to be. What we do expect is for them to be as good as they can reasonably be after having tried as hard as they can possibly try. As commissioners we had to get to the point where we understood that the casino operator could be suitable, even if it was not perfect.
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IMGL MAGAZINE | MARCH 2025
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