If Crown is unfit to hold a licence, then politicians are unfit to govern

If counsel assisting the Victorian inquiry into Crown casino, Adrian Finanzio SC, had his way, Crown would lose its Melbourne licence, its chair and its Melbourne CEO. Not, he told the royal commission yesterday, something he recommends lightly.

The list of scandals, failures and regulatory evasions and attempts at intimidation by Crown is long. But the scale of corporate misconduct doesn’t necessarily balance evenly.

The banks, too, engaged in egregious misconduct, enabled money laundering and sexual abuse of children, immiserated their customers, gouged dead people, refused to hand over insurance payouts to the terminally ill, and an array of other abuses. The private aged-care sector, too, has been exposed as abusing, neglecting, harming and killing some of our most vulnerable people.