Send Packer’s Barangaroo Project Packing & Stop the Sell-off of Public Housing in Millers Point!

BILLIONAIRE JAMES PACKER’S HIGH FLYING EXECUTIVES JAILED BY CHINA FOR CORRUPTION

10 July 2017 – This really isn’t happening, is it? Is James Packer, one of Australia’s richest people, really having his interests severely curtailed by state authorities? The same James Packer who is used to having troublesome laws magically disappear for his benefit? The same James Packer before whom Australian mainstream politicians and state officials, alike, prostrate themselves like so many minions? Did sixteen high flying executives of his Crown Group really get sentenced to up to ten months jail for corruption related charged? Seriously? Why, yes, it did happen! Except not in Australia. The executives were jailed in the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Red China, that is! In Australia, Packer and the other most powerful of the tycoons who run this country are effectively above the law. But in the PRC it is a different story. Under the PRC’s system it is public ownership (albeit in a deformed and fragile manner) that dominates and not the interests of rich private sector bigwigs. And now, in what must have been quite a rude shock for them, the greedy James Packer and all of his executives have found that out for themselves.

Two weeks ago on June 26, all the Crown Group staff that were arrested last October in China pleaded guilty to charges of illegally luring high rollers to Packer’s casinos abroad – especially ones in Australia. This is illegal in China. The PRC, understandably, wants to stop casinos being used to subvert its strict control on money movements by the rich. It also does not want casino accounts to be used by corrupt wealthy individuals to hide or move tainted money.

Among the bosses who have been jailed in China are three high flying Australian executives including one of Crown’s most senior executives – head of VIP operations, Jason O’Connor. However, three of the Crown staff arrested last year were not executives. Unlike the other sixteen they were given bail shortly after arrest. Although they also pleaded guilty during the trial they did not receive any jail sentences or fines. That seems fair that non-executives are spared punishment. However, the sixteen jailed really were high fliers paid huge salaries. Court documents reveal that Crown paid O’Connor an annual bonus alone of three quarters of a million Australian dollars! (https://calvinayre. com/2017/07/10/casino/court-chinese-vips-lost-600mcrown-resorts-casinos/). One of the family members of the executives even turned up to the court hearing in a Rolls Royce! (see: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-0626/crown-casino-staff-jailed-in-china-over-gamblingcrimes/8652430). Many of the other relatives of the accused and duly convicted executives left the court in a convoy of black Audis.

Packer and his Crown Group knew that what they were doing in China was illegal. Chinese authorities had specifically warned them and given them a whole year to comply. However, they are so used to getting their way in Australia that they thought the same would apply in China. As one Murdoch journalist put it, from his capitalist point of view, when addressing the lessons for the Western corporate elite to be drawn from the Crown bosses’ trial:

The wider lessons include the danger of believing one understands China and can compute the risks of operating there, when one doesn’t. James Packer has had much less to say on China since so many of his employees were jailed. Four years ago he told the Asia Society how “it often amazes me that so many senior corporate leaders, public servants and MPs have not made the trip to China and still view it as a communist state. “Lesson No. 1: China is a communist state.”
The Australian, 27 June 2017

BARANGAROO FOR EVERYONE – NOT JUST THE RICH

One effect of China’s jailing of Packer executives is that it has dented his project in Sydney’s harbourside Barangaroo area. In this project, Crown Group will run an exclusive, members only, high rollers casino and a six-star hotel that only the very rich will be able to afford to stay in. Although we do not support calls for banning gambling in Australia, it is an atrocity that public land in an iconic spot should be reserved for a resort that only the rich could afford to utilise and all that so that a greedy billionaire can get even richer. Furthermore, the way that Packer got approval for this project was a shocker. Laws and regulations simply melted away as ruling class politicians and state institutions fell over themselves to allow his Crown Group to grab public land at Barangaroo for their luxury resort complex.

Worst of all, the needs of Packer’s luxury resort project is a significant part of what is driving the NSW government’s obsessive push to kick out public housing tenants from the very nearby Millers Point and the Rocks. This is something that the public housing tenants in the area have long understood. In an article published in the 2017 edition of the Australian Journal of Social Issues, University of Technology Sydney academic Professor Alan Morris, highlights a “remarkable statement in October 2012 by the then NSW Finance Minister when he announced that the government was considering selling off public housing in Millers Point as the homes were perceived to be not compatible with the Barangaroo development.” The headline points of that high profile government press release were reported at the time in the 26 October 2012 issue of The Sydney Morning Herald (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/residents-stick-totheir-point-of-community-20121025-288bh.html). This statement, made in the period leading up to the government’s announcement that it was selling off nearly 300 public housing units in the area and claiming that, “much of the Land and Housing Corporation’s portfolio at Millers Point is poorly suited for social housing,” revealingly asserted that: “Inevitably, when considering the future of Millers Point, the government needs to consider it in the context of all of the surrounding areas, including the Barangaroo redevelopment area.” In other words,  having working class people in the area is an “eyesore” for the wealthy clientele who will frequent the resort that Packer expects to make billions from. Meanwhile, the NSW government is determined to clear out working class tenants in order to also help its rich developer mates make a fortune from turning Millers Point into luxury accommodation for resort executives and patrons.

Just consider what all this means from a historical point of view. Before 1788 a warm, welcoming and friendly society existed in the area now called Barangaroo. It was the society of the Gadigal nation of the Eora Aboriginal people. However, the invading forces committed terrible massacres against the Gadigal. After heroic resistance, 90% of the Gadigal nation was then wiped out by smallpox deliberately introduced by officers in the first fleet. Later this area became the Darling Harbour dockyards. The bosses brutally exploited workers. But workers formed unions and fought for their rights. They were still exploited but won improved conditions through union struggle. And 110 years ago, unions fought for and won public housing in this area and working class people subsequently built a close-knit community. However, now after the docks have been moved, the ruling class is clearing out the public housing. And they are making a key part of Barangaroo a preserve only for those rich enough to get entry into a luxury resort. In other words, in 230 years that area has gone from the warm, inclusive society of the Gadigal to its diametric opposite: an exclusive area for the rich, serving the interests of a greedy billionaire and where the masses are not able to live anywhere in its vicinity.

However, China’s crackdown on Crown could derail Packer’s Barangaroo plans. If Crown is not able to get away with luring high rollers from China it makes the planned high rollers casino much less profitable. For, although the proportion of high rollers in China is much smaller than in Australia, the country is so huge, with a population sixty times that of Australia, that numerically there is still a big market from there. And especially given that gambling is banned in mainland China, Packer had been hoping for a sizeable part of his Barangaroo income to come from there.

 

THE POSITIVE IMPLICATIONS OF CHINA’S CRACKDOWN

The jail sentences that the PRC authorities handed out to the Crown bosses could have been tougher. However, given that the executives were not charged with bribery or erosion of state-owned assets (in China the latter is considered an especially big crime), they were always going to get lighter sentences than the Rio Tinto executives – including Australian Stern Hu – who were also convicted on corruption charges in China seven years ago. Furthermore, the jail terms, while moderate, still act as a deterrent to Crown luring Chinese high rollers to gamble at overseas casinos. This has been shown by Packer abandoning his stake in the Macau Casino. Indeed, Packer has become so desperate to prove to Chinese authorities that he is no longer trying to lure high rollers from China that his Crown Group has, since the arrests of its executives, closed almost all their offices in the whole of Asia! He doesn’t want to be seen to be using offices in other parts of Asia to lure customers from China. As a result, seven Crown offices from Macau to Thailand to Singapore and Indonesia have suddenly vanished. Moreover, in negotiations with Chinese authorities in the leadup to the trial of their high flying executives, Crown would have had to give assurances that it would pull back from seeking Chinese customers.

So the deterrence effect of China’s imprisonment of Crown high fliers may still be sufficient enough to reduce Packer’s expected revenue from Chinese clients and this may make his Barangaroo project unviable. Indeed, in the wake of the PRC’s initial arrests of Crown bosses, Crown’s income from its high rollers program at its existing Australian casinos has plunged by some 40% to 50% (see: http://www.smh.com. au/business/retail/crown-resorts-profit-slumps-on-fall-invip-revenue-jobs-set-to-go-20170222-guj42b.html). We will have to wait and see over the coming months whether the subsequent jailings will kill his Sydney luxury resort project. If it does then it would open up the possibility that this Barangaroo area in a picturesque part of Sydney could, as it should, become available for public use – like public recreation space or public housing. Furthermore, it would remove one of the drivers pushing the government’s privatisation of public housing in Millers Point – thus making it more likely that the government would make concessions if faced with powerful enough resistance actions by Millers Point activists and their supporters. Although the government has already driven out most of the members of the public housing community from their homes, it is still possible to save and reoccupy many of the homes for public housing before they are all sold off to wealthy developers and speculators.

Even if the Barangaroo luxury resort is not killed off, the jailing of the executives is still a rare blow against a billionaire Australian capitalist. It is notable that one of the news headlines in Australia announcing the sentences refer to “James Packer all at sea as Crown staff jailed and fined in Chinese court.” Moreover, the PRC’s crackdown on Packer’s henchmen can give confidence to working class people that the tycoons who lord it over everyone in Australia are not invincible and we should, especially, stress that point. Furthermore, because the executives pleaded guilty they have basically proven that Packer and his Crown corporation are, indeed, thoroughly corrupt. No matter how the media spins the guilty pleas, this can only discredit Packer and his corporation in the eyes of the masses. All this should give renewed vigour to those opposed to the handover of public land at Barangaroo to a greedy billionaire, to those fighting the sell off of public housing in Millers Point and to all working class people engaged in other struggles against exploitation and against the tyranny of the tycoons of Australia.
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WHY THE CRACKDOWN ON PACKER’S CORPORATION COULD TAKE PLACE IN CHINA

Two days before the Shanghai court trial of the Crown executives, public housing tenants, a group of proudly unionised dock workers and other leftist supporters of public housing rallied in Sydney against James Packer and the Crown bosses. We welcomed China’s prosecution of the Crown executives, opposed the handover of public land at Barangaroo to James Packer and opposed the Packer casino project-driven sell off of public housing at Millers Point. Demonstrators chanted: “Defend public housing – Give Packer the boot.” Also knowing that the Peoples Republic of China has so spectacularly increased its provision of public housing by providing over 40 million additional places in the last seven years, while Australian governments have slashed the amount of public housing places here by over 13 thousand, we chanted: “Public housing for you and me – Just like in the PRC!”

Speaking at this rally at the entrance to Barangaroo from Wynyard Station, a key Millers Point public housing activist, Peter Muller, denounced Packer’s Barangaroo project and received enthusiastic applause when he declared that the struggle to save public housing in the area is far from over. Wayne Sonter, the then secretary of the Sydney district committee of the Communist Party of Australia, stressed in his speech how, “the politicians and bureaucrats and the shadowy corporate players behind them” hold the people in contempt:

This rally poses a simple question – The People or Packer?
Is development on this key city site to be for the public good or for the profit takers?
…So here, at Barangaroo, the choice confronts us clearly – are we to let government of the sort that supports ratbags like Packer and his goons, caught in criminal activity and facing trial in China, to continue? Or is it time for us to draw a line and say, `No more! We the people, we the workers assert our sovereignty and our power.’

Sara Fitzenmeyer, chairwoman of Trotskyist Platform, the group that called the demonstration, highlighted the “eerie resonances” between what James Packer and the NSW government have been doing to public housing tenants in nearby Millers Point and “the avoidable tragedy that caused the death of up to hundred people in the Grenfell Tower fire in the UK’s capital city of London”:

Firstly, the authorities here have shown the same contempt for public housing tenants as they do in capitalist England – nobody listened to tenants’ concerns and the capitalist governments don’t work with the interests of the working class ever in mind.
… Just as Packer and the government want to get rid of Millers Points tenants because having working class people in the area in modest housing is considered to be an eyesore for the wealthy clientele expected at Packer’s luxury resort, the housing authorities in London used cheap panelling over the Grenfell Tower in an attempt to stop the tower being an eyesore to nearby rich residents. It was this very cheap panelling that was the reason why that fire spread with such deadly speed. All part of an overall gentrification program in the Kensington area of central London which has been described as `regeneration work’ that `amounted to ethnic and class cleansing.’ And class cleansing – social cleansing – is what the ruling class is doing in the Millers Point, Rocks and Dawes Point area.
Except actually it is they who need to be cleansed. This greedy capitalist ruling class not only exploits working class people like crazy but they are dishonest and corrupt as hell. Here in capitalist Australia, these bourgeoisie are celebrated. They get away with whatever they please. They sit right up at the very peak of the capitalist pyramid. But it is a different story in socialistic China.

Rally speakers from Trotskyist Platform, pointed out that it was possible to bring the Crown Group to justice in China because in the PRC tycoons have far less influence than they do in capitalist Australia. This is because in socialistic China, despite the ruling bureaucracy implementing a degree of harmful privatisation in the 1980s and 1990s, the commanding heights of the economy remain under the socialistic umbrella public ownership. So all the biggest banks, biggest energy companies, biggest mines, biggest telcos, all the major ports, car, rail and aircraft manufacturers and around 90% of the biggest 100 companies in mainland China are state-owned. That means that the billionaires there, while they have some influence, have much less than they do, here, in capitalist Australia. They cannot threaten to withdraw their production and assets from a project to get their way because the main productive assets are still publicly owned in the PRC. The dominance of an economy based on socialistic, public ownership of the key sectors is possible there because – albeit in a deformed way – the working class still retains state power in China flowing from the 1949 anti-capitalist revolution. That the PRC is some sort of workers state means that those billionaire exploiters that do exist in China often face crackdowns. As the rally mc explained:

Fittingly, twelve days ago when it was first announced that Packer’s executives would go to trial, it also emerged that one of China’s most prominent billionaires, Wu Xiaohui, head of Anbang insurance, has also been detained over corruption. Indeed even though China has a much lower overall rate of imprisonment than Australia, in China one out of every six people who have appeared on rich lists have either been investigated, jailed or indeed executed. That is why the nickname they have in China for the rich lists is `pig killing lists.’ I love that: `pig killing list.’ This curbing of the capitalists is a great thing for the Chinese masses and as we are seeing with the Crown Group arrests a good thing for working class people here too.

 

When capitalists and their henchmen, people like Wu Xiaohui or the Crown bosses, are curtailed in China then that has crucial significance for the direction of that country. This is because the working class rule that exists in China is, unfortunately, fragile. The capitalists that have been allowed to emerge in the PRC are able to buy some degree of influence. Through this influence and through the pressure of a layer of right wing economists, lawyers, academics, journalists, so-called dissidents and pro-capitalist elements within the wavering bureaucracy itself, the PRC’s socialistic system is under threat. However, whenever there’s a crackdown on capitalists there this gives encouragement to those genuinely pro-socialist elements seeking to resist capitalist restorationist forces. Seizing on such anti-capitalist crackdowns, determined workers and genuine servants of the masses must fight to smash all political influence of the capitalists and restrict the private sector in China to the level that is actually needed for its transition to socialism.

That the socialistic system that has kept the billionaires from power in China is under real threat makes it all the more important that supporters of working class interests around the world stand by the PRC against the forces pushing for capitalist counterrevolution. That means we must defend the Chinese workers state against Western imperialist military threats, for example, by U.S. and Australian warships sailing provocatively through the South China Sea. We also need to expose and deconstruct all the various propaganda campaigns against socialistic China that are constantly foisted upon the masses in the West.

That it was the workers state in China, as deformed as it is, that was able to strike a blow against a billionaire so powerful and well connected as James Packer, highlights the necessity to fight for a workers state here in Australia. As Trotskyist Platform activist, Samuel Kim, emphasised when addressing the June 24 rally:

In Australia, the rich are getting richer and the poor and the workers are creeping towards more and more poverty. Billionaires like James Packer together with the Gina Rineharts, Andrew Forrests, the Pratt family and the Lowys and the other capitalist billionaires have incredible power and influence… and, likewise, the entire bureaucracy, this establishment with its police, commissions, courts are acting in the interests of the likes of these billionaires against the interests of the poor and working people. However, despite this, it is the working class that creates the wealth of the billlionaires, the masses of poor and workers outnumber these elite and corrupt few.
“… Workers need permanent secure jobs, we need to cut billionaire profits, we need to stop billionaires slashing jobs. We say let’s make the greedy billionaires and the ruling class increase hiring at the cost of their profits. If they complain that this will ruin the economy then we working class people need to take the economy out of their hands. We need to put the means of production into our collective hands and run a socialist economy. Sisters and brothers – we have had enough of the tyranny of the tycoons. Let us fight towards a state where we, the working class people, run society. A future workers state will ensure that abominations like the Crown Barangaroo resort and the sell off of public housing will be things of the past.