Give me the keys to the casino!
I'll make the Star shine for everybody. Also: what to do with an old wall?
Who’d go into hospitality? It’s a fraught business.
We hear almost daily of restaurants and cafes closing. While the pandemic and the subsequent work-from-home movement hasn’t helped CBD businesses, this phenomenon is nothing new.
A decade or two ago, I did a story about closures in the food biz. From memory, the statistic then was 200 a year in the Brisbane City Council area alone.
It’s risky because it relies on so many variables, including location, accessibility, logistics, property rental, retaining key personnel, level of competition, and the vagaries of the public appetite. There’s always been a churn.
But do you know what’s pretty much a constant? People’s desire to gamble.
And while there are such things as games of chance, the odds in the games played at casinos, especially the poker machines, can be controlled. They can be calibrated so that, over time, they pay out a certain percentage and keep the rest for the house.
When it comes to the tables, there are people who can win at blackjack, for example, because they have extraordinary brains that can “count the cards” and work out the shifting odds as they play. But those people are usually identified and banned — not just from one casino, but all casinos. Which seems to me like excluding a champion athlete from competition because they are too good at what they do.
So, with the odds apparently stacked in their favour, why is Star Casino in so much trouble?
The story with Star — which is teetering on the brink as I write, despite just opening its multi-billion-dollar Queens Wharf venue in Brisbane — is, let’s say, nuanced. All sorts of allegations are floating around but an official report on the whole business has been kept secret, so we may never know the full truth of the matter.
Suffice to say, had they stuck to the core business of taking money off gamblers, they’d probably be doing quite well right now, and not have their hand out for government assistance. (Which would mean those taxpayers who are also gamblers paying twice to prop the place up, and those who don’t gamble having to pay for something that’s got nothing at all to do with them.)
Whatever may have happened, the bottom line is: how can anybody with the rights to run a casino, which is virtually a licence to print money, go broke?
What happens next?
I reckon I could take it on, recalibrate the poker machines to return a little more to the punters, pay whatever is required to the tax office, employ a lot of people on decent wages, and still make a tidy profit, some of which could be diverted towards good causes. Everyone’s a winner (except those with gambling problems who should, of course, be saved from themselves by vigilant casino staff and encouraged to seek help).
C’mon, give me a go. I couldn’t do worse than the current management.
Another brick in the wall
I’m in two minds about the decision to move and reassemble the convict-built brick wall discovered during construction of the wrongly named Brisbane Metro.
A big part of me wishes it had remained in situ. But it’s already too late for that to happen, so I guess reusing it as part of a new wall to be built along North Quay is a second-best option.
Brisbane doesn’t have a great record for preserving its built environment — think the Bellvue Hotel, the OG Cloudland and the Regent, to name but three — and I fear the subject is still not being treated seriously.
We lose a little of ourselves when we allow heritage buildings to be demolished or disfigured.
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