Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | October 2010 30 Feature L ast month, King Pu-tsung, the secretary-general of Taiwan’s ruling Kuomintang (KMT) party, undertook a three-day trip to Singapore to study the Lion City’s measures to mitigate the negative social impacts of the recently opened casinos. “We do not know whether Taiwan’s casino plans will be accepted by the public… but we could first learn from Singapore’s efforts to prevent the negative social fallout,” said Mr King, a close aide of President Ma Ying-jeou. In January 2009, Taiwan’s parliament voted through a controversial bill lifting a decades-old ban on casinos. While the main island of Taiwan remains off limits, casinos can now be developed on Taiwan’s offshore islands, though the law stipulates that residents of the respective islands needtoapproveany proposed casinos in referenda. Taiwan may Lessons from the Lion City? Taiwan may not have much to learn from Singapore in getting its citizens to embrace legal casinos King Pu-tsung not be able to learn much about winning public support for casinos from Singapore, where the casino issue was not put to a referendum. Despite the widespread perception that the famously-efficient Singapore government managed a better PR job on its casino initiative than Taiwan’s leaders have managed thus far, the anti- casino lobby in the Lion City remains vocal, and as discussed in the preceding story, ‘Stormy Weather,’ Singaporeans seem to be increasingly questioning the benefit to the community of the two integrated resort (IR) projects. Even though Singaporeans had