Inside Asian Gaming

IAG JAPAN MAY 2021 46 a Royal Commissioner may advert when seeking to establish whether the public interest is served by allowing Crown Melbourne to continue to hold and exploit its casino license. The complexity which the public interest test raises for the Finkelstein Commission lies in the criteria it applies to guide its determination, and the relative weight which it attaches to each criterion. It will need to establish just who is comprised within the scope of “the public”. Does the term include anti- gambling advocates, whose opposition is more to casinos themselves rather than to Crown Melbourne as a licensee? Should such a normative view be accorded greater weight than say an empirical view of the performance of the licensee in complying with the terms of its license? It is this tension which perhaps underlies Crown’s reluctance to concede that money laundering actually took place at Crown Melbourne. If it did concede the point, the normative would align with the empirical, which would provide much greater gravitas to those arguing that the Crown Melbourne license should be revoked on public interest grounds. Normative arguments such as those advanced by the concern sector (generally an amalgam of religious and welfare groups) are often met with the response that Crown Melbourne is the largest single- site employer in Victoria, that the Crown Southbank COLUMNISTS