The following article was written by the Tourism News:
http://www.thetourismnews.com.au/tony-fung-the-bad-boy-of-the-stockmarket/
The interest article in this story is highlighted in red where a un-named senior official made a stupid statement " the locals are pushing hard, and anyone who raises questions or concerns is shouted down or lined up".
What a load of crap no one has been howled down nor have they been "lined up" this gutless senior official made this ludicrous statements that makes it look like Cairns has a rebellion on hand.
You want to make a statement then put your name to it or shut up.
It is everyone's democratic right to express an opinion.
Stakes high as mega-casino rolls into view
From The Weekend Australian, 5th April 2014Not since the early days of the white-shoe brigade in Queensland – when developers waltzed in and out of the top offices of the Bjelke-Petersen government – has the talk been so big, the stakes so high.
An $8 billion Macau-style resort – with two casinos, eight hotel towers and a golf course – (is planned to lure) a million guests a year, from the gambling obsessed Chinese middle class and big-betting ‘whales’ from around the world.
The proposed Aquis Great Barrier Reef Resort in Yorkeys Knob, just north of Cairns, is promising to user in a new era of prosperity single-handedly for a tourist town struggling with the high dollar.
Easily the most expensive ‘non-resources project in Australia, the 240ha complex is proposed to be built on cane fields in the sleepy seaside suburb where a timber shack with a garage underneath is considered to be a high-rise. It seems Tony Fung – a Hong Kong businessman who last year burst out of nowhere with his plans for a mega-casino resort – has got almost everyone on side. Politicians are talking it up, businesses are making plans to expand and families are designing extensions to their homes to rent to the 9000 construction workers and 10,000 permanent staff if the casino gets the go-ahead. It has sparked a frenzy of support in Cairns, where a multitude of ills – sever acute respiratory syndrome, the global financial crisis, cyclones and lack of new investment – has depressed the local economy to the extent that it has the highest youth jobless rate (21.6 per cent) in Australia.
But lost in the excitement of a resort, and its projected annual take of $11bn, is growing division among the 3500 residents of Yorkeys Knob, one of the only residential beach suburbs in Cairns.
“We moved here to raise our families in a peaceful seaside community, and now we are going to be living beside the new Las Vegas,” Yorkeys Knob Residents Association president Pamela Bigelow said.
Ms Bigelow, who was appointed briefly on a “reference group” set up by Mr Fung, said she also doubted some of the promised benefits of the development.
“Publicly they have said that 10,000 staff will work in the casino, but when I asked them how many would be locals, I was told it would be limited,” she said.
“I was told that the front-of-house will be Chinese, and I guess the locals get to do the lawns and clean the toilets.”
Mr Fung’s son Justin, who is normally based in Cairns as Acquis chief executive, said in an interview from Hong Kong he could not give a breakdown on the proportion of local and flown-in staff.
“Obviously we will have a management team and we need Mandarin and Cantonese speakers… but we remain dedicated to improving the employment rate in Cairns,” Justin Fung said.
Bigelow’s group is pitted against the recently reformed and rebadged local business group – now known as Yorkeys Knob Community Progress Association – which admits to receiving “some funding” from the Fung family. While the groups fight it out, there is a real prospect that the proposal to build the resord on existing can fields – which sits on a flood plain criscrossed by crocodile-infested creeks – will not win environmental approval.
James Cook University professor Jon Nott, of the Centre for Tropical Environmental and Sustainability Sciences, said the project would likely breach local planning rules.
“There is a reason nothing has been built in that area before,” Professor Nott said.
“The proposed development is located on the Barron River delta, which floods regularly and is also prone to storm surges from the ocean during tropical cyclones. They are proposing to raise the levels of the project, but it is based on outdated methodology.”
With the resort set back from the beachfront, and sealed off from the neighbouring waterways, Tony Fung had hoped to avoid a drawn-out approval process.
Labelled “the bad boy of the stockmarket” by the HK Economic Times, he has had a simple message for the Newman government since announcing his plans last year: approve the resort quickly or he will go somewhere else.
One senior official, involved in the assessment of the project, said that pressure to approve the resort quickly was intense, especially as the state government approaches an election, due early next year.
“It is a frenzy up here – people are desperate to get this thing happening,” he said.
“And it is not just Fung either – the locals are pushing hard, and anyone who raises questions or concerns is shouted down or lined up.”
Mr Fung has repeatedly warned that he will go to Japan, The Philippines or South Korea – where casino licenses are soon to go onto the open market – if he is made to wait too long.
“The window of opportunity that is available to us is limited… there are a lot of people going after a piece of the action and the competition for me is not Mr (James) Packer or Echo (Entertainment) but from other countries,” he said last year.
The son of one of Hong Kong’s most successful traders, Mr Fung – who had initially hoped to begin the four-year build in July – has been disappointed by the Newman government.
Last year, prompted both by his plan and a push by Mr Packer’s wish to build a casino resort in Brisbane, the Newman government called for bids for three “integrated casino resort development” licenses in Queensland.
Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney said yesterday: “The integrated resorts are the emerging product in the tourism market world-wide, and the casino license is just one part of that.
“They have enormous potential to inject life into any number of centres, like they have in Singapore and Dubai, and Cairns is just one spot.
“The resorts attract tourists and we have the comparative advantage of also having the drawcard of the reef, the rainforests and the beaches throughout Queensland.”
The host of natural attractions was the decider in wanting to build a casino for the booming Chinese middle class in Queensland, where Mr Fung began investing, in cattle stations and property, two decades ago.
“We are going after the people that are shy who, if they were asked where they are going for Chinese New Year, would say Macau and be called a gambler, but instead they can say Aquis Great Barrier Reef and be labelled a ‘family man’.
During the week, the government announced there were 12 bidders, who had put up the $100,000 application fee, with plans for resorts in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Whitsunday region, Great Keppel Island and Fung’s proposal outside Cairns.
The decision last year to call for a competitive process is understood to have enraged Mr Fung, not least of all that it delayed the project’s earliest date that if can begin building by at least a year, to next May.
He sacked his local lobbyists – including former conservative premier Rob Borbidge – before rehiring him in the new year.
But he is unlikely to make good with his threat and pull up the surveyor’s pegs on the project anytime soon.
Mr Fung has a lot of skin in the game. He has now bought the Reef Casino Trust, which operators the existing Cairns casino, as well as the casion in Canberra for $269 million.
Justin Fung told The Weekend Australian that the family couldn’t comment on whether the existing casino licence would help in the push for approval for the bigger project.
“We look forward to operating both properties in Cairns,” Justin Fung said.
As to the growing concerns from residents about living next door to one of the biggest casinos in the world, he said there was enough space between the resort and people’s homes.
“We are doing our best to mitigate the issues,” he said.
“But there is a buffer zone, it is not as if someone in Yorkeys is going to hear the jackpot of a slot machine.”
