Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | August 2013 6 J ames Packer is spending every dollar and pushing every lever he can to bring more Chinese to Australia. But Tony Fung isn’t quite who he had in mind. The 61-year-old Mr Fung, billionaire scion of one of Hong Kong’s best-known banking families, is dug into the economic fabric of the state of Queensland as few Australians are. He owns two luxury homes in the Noosa Hinterland, a cattle farm at Mount Garnet, a wagyu beef-breeding business in Innisfail and a sugar cane plantation on the Atherton Tablelands. And he’s only begun to make his biggest pitch yet—an A$4.2 billion gaming and entertainment mini-city called Aquis Resort at the Great Barrier Reef, a “man-made wonder of the world,” as he describes it, that would dwarf anything they’ve ever seen Down Under, including Mr Packer’s trumpeted Crown Sydney. He’s purchased an option through a local company he controls on about 300 hectares of farmland some 13 kilometers north of Cairns in a seaside hamlet called Yorkeys Knob. Here he wants to build five hotels totaling 3,750 rooms, 1,335 apartments and luxury villas, a golf course, a 25,000-seat sports stadium, two additional theaters, 13,500 square meters of high-end retail, a lake and a reef lagoon and one of the world’s largest aquariums. The “international class” casino—targeting wealthy Chinese, of course—would be larger thanMr Packer’s flagship CrownMelbourne. Initial plans call for 750 table games and 1,500 slot machines. He’s shooting for a 2018 opening. “I have recognised the unique suitability of the Cairns region to develop an integrated resort, based upon the Macau model,” he said in an open letter accompanying the proposal. Aquis, he said, will “drive Asian tourism awareness of north Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef,” and provide the state “an opportunity to fend off its southern and regional competitors for the increasingly important Chinese tourism market.” “Our goal is to introduce a whole new generation of Australian and international visitors to Cairns and far north Queensland and get them coming back for more.” Government, not surprisingly, appears to be enamored of the idea and of Mr Fung, a son of one of the founders of Sun Hung Kai & Co., a former chairman of SHKI Group and the man credited with building the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. They especially like the part about the 9,000 construction jobs and 10,000 full-time positions once the resort is open (the Aquis Web site claims 26,700 jobs are possible) and is reported to have streamlined the review process by declaring it a “coordinated project,” which means officials will look in full at the plan, enablingMr Fung to avoid seeking Gambling on the Barrier Reef Who is Tony Fung? … And why does he want to spend $4 billion in Yorkeys Knob? Aquis, says Hong Kong financier Tony Fung, will “drive Asian tourism awareness of north Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef” and provide the state “an opportunity to fend off its southern and regional competitors for the increasingly important Chinese tourism market.”