Taiwan’s crab-like crawl toward legalised casino gaming continues if not quite apace, then at least in a mildly forward direction.
The good news is that Taipei seems to have settled on the Penghu Islands as the preferred location for up to three resorts.
The not so good news is that the government is tendering for ‘consultants’ to advise it on how to execute the casino resort plan.
Asian Gaming Intelligence rather wonders what more the government needs to know, given that the proposal for gaming on outlying islands has been doing the rounds of civil servants’ offices in Taipei since 1993. Sixteen years is clearly not enough time for Taiwanese public servants to chew upon this weighty matter.
Taiwan is said to admire Singapore’s approach to the casino policy issue. Singapore’s timeline on its two integrated gaming resorts is only four and a bit years from initial government proposal to the actual expected opening of the first facility, Marina Bay Sands, in early 2010. On that basis, Taiwan looks positively slothful.
It’s possible to argue that Singapore has a more autocratic system of government than Taiwan and so finds it easier to push policy decisions through the political system. From Asian Gaming Intelligence’s perspective, the dallying of the Taiwan authorities must raise serious questions about the level of political and social opposition to casino gaming in Taiwan within the political establishment. And that’s not even beginning to weigh the small matter of whether for political reasons Mainland Chinese citizens will be allowed to visit any Taiwanese gaming resorts, which would after all be in market competition with China’s home grown casino product in Macau.
Oh yes, and the residents of Penghu still have to vote in favour of the scheme in a referendum—a referendum postponed once already because they couldn’t get enough voters to turn out.
Will this saga ever end?
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