"Should Sydney's most visible building be a casino?" asks Andrew Andersons, an architect who worked on an early part of the site and as a young man designed the Sydney Opera House forecourt. "You would think for Sydney's most momentous architectural decision you would hope you would have some sort of open process."

Urban triumph

Even casino critics accept that Barangaroo is a triumph of urban development. A beautiful headland park, modern office buildings and hundreds of apartments are replacing a run-down passenger-ship terminal.

The right to develop Barangaroo's southern stretch was won by Lendlease in 2009. Three office towers built by the property developer over the past five years are now some of the most desirable in Sydney. Tenants include law firm Gilbert + Tobin, KPMG and Westpac Bank Corp. Restaurants buzz at lunch times. Two pedestrian bridges provide easy access to the rest of the city and a train station.

Work has started on the foundations of the 270-metre-tall structure, which will surpass the 244-metre Chifley Tower, Sydney's tallest office building. (The 309-metre Sydney Tower Eye, also known as Centrepoint, houses restaurants and an observation deck.)

The Crown Sydney Hotel Resort is likely to be the finest in a city where the average five-star hotel is more than 15 years old.

"I think the building design looks terrific," says Steve Whan, a former NSW emergency services minister and shadow gaming minister who is now head of tourism at the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "It is going to be iconic in Sydney."


Yet, the project is very different to the harbourside park and modest hotel on a pier proposed by Lendlease in 2010.

Premier approval

The lobbying formally began at a meeting with NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell on March 2, 2012, when Packer and Crown chief executive Rowen Craigie said they wanted to challenge the monopoly of The Star, the only casino in the city. After the meeting O'Farrell became an enthusiastic advocate for Crown.

The hotel and casino is on the far left, next to three apartment buildings being built for Crown Resorts by Lendlease named One Sydney Harbour. Wilkinson Eyre Architects

"I think it's an exciting proposal which could add extra life to Barangaroo, give Sydney another world-class hotel, generate jobs and boost tourism," O'Farrell said in early 2012.

O'Farrell's public comments sent a message to the public service that amplified private instructions, according to Sue Higginson, the head of the Environmental Defenders Office, a community legal centre suing the government to have the project stopped.

"There have been a number of bureaucrats who have been told to make it happen the way Lendlease wants it to happen," she says.

With the Coalition government on side, Labor support would defuse any political controversy. The Greens Party and Sydney mayor Clover Moore were hostile, but didn't have enough power to cause much trouble.


An image of the lower floors of the Crown casino from ground level. The building will cast a shadow half a kilometre long. Crown Resorts

Six months after Packer's meeting with O'Farrell, Crown formally asked the NSW government for permission to build a hotel and casino. It was made under the "unsolicited proposals process" designed to encourage the private sector to come up with innovative ideas for infrastructure or other services where "the proponent is uniquely placed to provide a value-for-money solution".

Forty-nine days later – a blink of an eye for a city-altering project – O'Farrell backed Packer's plan. There would be no tender for the casino licence, and Echo Entertainment, which owned The Star casino in nearby Pyrmont, would lose its monopoly.

(O'Farrell and Packer declined to be interviewed. Lendlease wouldn't make anyone available to comment.)

Labor mates

Labor felt a proprietary interest towards the entire Barangaroo project, which it initiated under Premier Morris Iemma in 2007 and was championed by one of his successors, Kristina Keneally.

The 750 apartments will sell for about $500 million, investment bank Citi estimates. Crown Resorts

Packer worked the press, providing interesting information about his plans to The Daily Telegraph and The Australian Financial Review that generated positive coverage. But he never or rarely approached any of the politicians involved directly, except for the premier, according to people involved. When he was shadow tourism and arts minister Whan only met Packer once, at a public lunch for business leaders.


Packer left that to his lobbyists, including former Labor faction leader Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar, who ran the Labor Party in NSW and federally in the 2000s.

The men played on their Labor connections. On the phone and in face-to-face meetings they emphasised the jobs that would be generated and the taxes raised. The casino was portrayed as a few rooms for the very wealthy needed to make the entire project financially viable. A glossy brochure was produced touting an Indigenous work program.

Arbib was such an effective persuader Labor MPs nicknamed him Ray Donovan after a character in a TV show who was a fixer for dubiously wealthy Los Angeles families. "They pretend you are part of a tribe," says one MP. "It's all mate, mate, mate."

Quick approval

One month after O'Farrell gave his approval Labor MPs joined with the Coalition government to enshrine the Crown casino in law. In the upper house, where the government lacked a majority, only three votes were against.

"A six-star hotel at Barangaroo in Sydney, underpinned by VIP gaming, will be able to compete for the tourist dollar of the emerging middle and upper classes we know are starting to travel throughout the world in astronomically increasing numbers from growing economies such as China and India," Labor's shadow planning minister, Michael Daley, told Parliament on November 13, 2013.

"The development must not encroach on land set aside for public use at Barangaroo."

In hindsight, some Labor MPs felt they endorsed the casino too quickly. "Everyone was weak as piss," says a former insider. "No-one cared. No-one understood it."


James Packer would never personally lobby politicians, except for the premier. Getty Images

The architectural plans were out of date. They showed the hotel, which could contain the "gaming rooms", on a pier jutting in Darling Harbour. But public resistance had led the government to decide to put the building on land. Exactly how big it would be was unclear.

"We were talking in broad concepts of a six-star hotel funded through a small high-rollers room," says another insider. "Then MOD 8 came along and the casino turned into a large podium and a stonking big residential sold to billionaire property investors."

MOD 8

MOD 8 is the short-form name for modification eight, the eighth change to Lendlease's original 2007 plan.

Made public last March, one year and four months after the all-clear from Parliament, it radically changed the entire project. Lendlease and Crown wanted the hotel and casino enlarged and located where the public park was meant to be, on prime land next to the water. The floorspace would be increased to 606,000 square metres, 50 per cent greater than in the original plan.

The shrunken park would be moved behind the hotel next to three tall apartment buildings. "It reeked of an apology for public space," says Higginson, the head of the Environmental Defenders Office.

The upper flats would have ocean or harbour views, making them enormously valuable. The lower apartments would look over the park. Packer's people spread reports a penthouse apartment could go for as much $100 million, an incredible (and unlikely) sum for a relatively isolated city like Sydney.


The hotel and casino would shade the promenade at lunch times, when thousands of tourists and office workers would seek sun and warmth outside.

Sydney Council, which had rules protecting parks' sunlight from skyscrapers, was apoplectic a huge hotel and apartment building would be given precious space right on the harbour. "It was designed to maximise the view from the apartments," says John McInerney, a former Sydney deputy mayor and chief town planner in Sydney, Melbourne and the ACT and participant in the court case. "Getting a lot of flats close to the water is a goldmine."

There was little the council could do. Responsibility for approvals was placed in the hands of the Planning Assessment Commission, an independent experts' panel that reports to the NSW minister for planning. After extensive back and forth, the commission ticked off on the plan on June 28.

Profit bounty

Crown puts the construction cost at $2 billion. One stockbroking analyst, Citi's Rohan Sundram, estimated Crown would raise $500 million from the sale of 100 apartments. Given Sydney's popularity with tourists, the casino and hotel will make $200 million in its first year and $300 million within four – a bountiful 19 per cent return, Sundram reckons.

Interestingly, the analyst doesn't see a foreign-casino crackdown by Chinese authorities affecting Crown Sydney. In October, 17 Crown employees were detained and 16 later formally arrested, including the Melbourne accountant who runs Crown's international VIP program.

They are being held for "gambling-related crimes", which appears to be part of a move against foreign casinos promoting junkets in China, which is illegal because the junketeers sometimes use them to launder money.

The arrests cut Crown Resort's market value by about 10 per cent to $8 billion, mainly due to fears Chinese gamblers would be scared off. But given the Sydney casino isn't scheduled to open for five years, analysts like Sundram say it is too early to predict the financial impact on the project.


In the meantime, Crown's lobbying has made it easier for Asian gamblers to get Australian visas. It complained to the Productivity Commission, a government think-tank, that Chinese visitors are charged $130, have to fill out a 15-page paper application form in English and wait up to 15 days for processing. Visitors from the US, Britain or Hong Kong can apply online and receive an electronic visa immediately for $20.

In March the Turnbull government introduced an "express visa" that guaranteed applicants a response within 48 hours and was available from processing centres in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Chengdu.

The visas for "high value visitors" cost 6062 yuan ($1212) and are regarded in the industry as a "special lane" for Chinese gamblers and tacit government support for bringing high-rollers to Australia.

Please smoke

Crown is skilled at using lobbyists to secure favourable rules. By law, the casino's VIP gaming rooms were exempted from a smoking ban – one of the few public places in Australia – to compete with Singapore, Macau, the Philippines and Las Vegas.

"The government seems to have advice that people who are wealthy, their cigarette smoke doesn't harm anybody," Simon Chapman, a top public health academic, started telling seminars around the world. "It is only regular people's smoke that harms people."

The emeritus professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney would then show a picture of the Barangaroo casino, inevitably drawing a laugh.

"It is plainly a deal that's been done with Packer and the government," he says.


Marketing materials created by Crown and Lendlease mostly illustrate the casino and apartment buildings from a westerly perspective above the horizon. The perspective makes the buildings look less prominent than they will be in reality, according to Andersons, the architect who designed another apartment building at the site and who says he doesn't oppose gambling or casinos.

Andersons compares the casino with Blues Point Tower, a 25-storey apartment building on the north side of Sydney Harbour. Designed by architect Harry Seidler and completed in 1962, the building's isolation and prominence turned it into one of the city's most-criticised buildings.

Crown's casino will be visible from Vaucluse, where James Packer lived in a huge mansion before relocating to Israel and Los Angeles after he stepped down from the board of Crown Resorts, which he owns half of.

"It is unlikely you will have a pleasant environment at the base of the building for much of the time," Andersons says. "It is people with legitimate corporate interests doing what they would be expected to do. But that's not in the public interest."

In court

O'Farrell's successor as NSW premier, Mike Baird, is backing Crown, and has ensured the new casino won't be covered by restrictions on the sale of alcohol designed to cut down on violence across the city.

There is a chance the casino won't be built. A challenge in Land and Environment Court essentially accuses the Planning Assessment Commission of abandoning a responsibility to protect public land.

At a hearing last month, lawyers representing an organisation called the Millers Point Community Group asked a judge to nullify MOD 8 and order the commission to start again. Government lawyers argued the parliament decided in 2013 that the casino would be placed on land next to the harbour, and the commission was carrying out the politicians' wishes.


The Environmental Defenders Office, which has a history of frustrating business development, says the changes made by parliament in 2013 covered the casino's licence, not its location. Its lawyers argued in court the commission should have followed planning rules that wouldn't have allowed the casino next to the harbour.

A decision could come at any time.

Crown Sydney is scheduled to open in 2021. Expressions of interest are being taken for the three apartment buildings, named One Sydney Harbour and designed by Italian celebrity architect Renzo Piano.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said 750 apartments would be sold for an estimated $500 million. It should have said 100 apartments.