Australia May Reopen Christmas Island Casino

Added: September 11, 2014

It was reported in the Australian press that the Commonwealth parliamentary committee for northern development has recommended the reopening of the Christmas Island casino. Christmas Island is an Australian territory to the north-west of the mainland in the Indian Ocean. In the 1990s, the Christmas Island Casino was highly profitable and it catered mainly to wealthy Indonesian gamblers. But after the Australian financial crisis the casino was forced to close.

The committee pointed out that Christmas Island has a very uncertain economic future and urgently needed to be made financially independent. The obvious avenues were tourism and gambling. So far the economic activities were phosphate mining and the immigration detention facility. While the mining is expected to continue for 20 years, the returns will be decreasing. The immigration related activities are expected to drop substantially. Therefore these will no longer be able to sustain the island’s economy in the future.

The resort on Christmas Island to which the casino belonged is owned by Soft Star, which had bought the assets for $5.7 million in 2000. Presently the resort apartments are used to accommodate the detention centre workers and the casino is non-operational. According to managing director David Kwon, there is considerable local support for reopening the casino. This includes support of the Christmas Island Council, local members of Parliament and the local community. One reason for this could be that when the casino was functioning in the 1990s, one-third of the staff was permanent residents of the island.

Gordon Thomson, the president of the shire of Christmas Island and the general secretary of the union of Christmas Island workers, lent support to Kwon’s views. He said that 90% of the island is for reopening the casino. The concerns about the negative impacts of gambling are not a major issue. Thomson pointed out that the casino would bring the much needed stability and security to the island’s economy. He added that the casino could be reopened almost as soon as the license was issued. Soft Star has already refurbished the hotel rooms and the casino infrastructure was still in place.

There are over 2,000 residents in Christmas Island, most of who live on the northern tip of the island. They have seen the prosperity that the casino once brought to the island and have also seen that prosperity vanish. Casino gambling is on the upswing in Asia and Christmas Island can easily get a share of the market.