The editor
Who writes this
Marion Kell. A flat in Perth. A shelf of printed statute compilations, a ring binder of inquiry transcripts with sage tabs down the fore-edge. No newsroom, no firm, no client. This site is that shelf, *retyped* — one subject, six pages, and a standing rule against publishing anything whose job would be to move a reader toward a bet.
It started with the Bergin transcripts
The twenty-first of January, 2020. Hearings open in Sydney, the Hon. Patricia Bergin SC presiding. I watched it the way some people watch a murder trial — no stake in it, no work in the industry, only the habit of printing out the days my eyes could not take on a screen. Thirteen months to the finding. First of February, 2021: the licence-holder unsuitable, and nineteen recommendations laid against the regulatory frame. Out of those came a separate commission for casinos, cut away from the general liquor-and-gaming body.
The folder had thickened by then. Victoria, late February 2021, appointing Ray Finkelstein AO QC to a Royal Commission on the operator and the licence. October of that year, the report. Two jurisdictions. Two instruments. The same question underneath both, and nowhere holding the pair of them together. Paper past the width of the shelf. Something written on the spine at last: the licence file.
I am not a lawyer. I order the same public documents anyone can order, and I write down what they say. That is the whole qualification — and it is why every date here is one you can go and check without me.
What I am not
Set out plainly, so that no credential has to be invented for me later.
- Not a lawyer. No legal training, no degree in law, no admission, no practice — and nothing on this site is legal advice.
- Not a regulator, and not attached to any commission, department, tribunal or inquiry.
- Not an employee, and not a former employee, of any casino, club or hotel operator.
- Not paid by one. No affiliate links, no sponsored pages, no advertising sold to anyone who takes a bet.
The shape of the site
Six pages, one subject
Licensing and its history, state by state: how the first licences were granted, what the inquiries changed, and where two jurisdictions now say different things about the same act. Six pages, because that is what the subject takes. Nothing here needs updating hourly to stay true.
Deliberately absent
No game rules. No odds. No strategy. No venue write-ups, no ratings, no bonus pages, no affiliate links, no outbound path to an operator. If the function of a section would be to send a reader off to gamble, it does not get written, however well it would perform.
Paper, not chips. If a claim cannot be put next to a statute, a report or a dated record, it does not go on the page.
Why Perth makes the differences obvious
No machines in the pubs and clubs of this state. Not then, not since. Stand in a bar here and the wall stays a wall. Do the same thing east of the border and the wall is a doorway, then carpet, then a row of lit screens. One difference, and the whole reason the subject here is regulation and not casinos. Demand did not put the boxes where they sit. Tax did, or a good part of it: club machines, hotel machines and casino machines are struck at different rates from one state to the next, and the rates decided the addresses.
The same fracture runs through advertising. A prohibition on publishing gaming-machine advertising in the New South Wales statute of 2001. Another of its kind in Victoria, drawn separately, pointing the same way. So a single page, unaltered, changes character at a state line: permitted here, an offence there.
None of it was ever decided nationally. Every licence in the country was granted state by state, which is why the opening dates cluster: Wrest Point at Sandy Bay took the first one on 10 February 1973, and the mainland spent most of a decade watching Tasmania before it followed.
Method, sources, corrections
One sentence here and the detail elsewhere: the method page says what counts as a source and what happens when two accounts of the same date disagree, the reading list names the documents themselves — inquiry reports, Acts, compilations — so a reader can go past me to them, and corrections are made on the page that carried the error.
One way to reach me
Email, and nothing else. A correction travels best with the page name and the date you think is wrong.