The Vikings Group has put in a new application to build a club in Jerrabomberra after the first application was turned down.
The club group has said it wanted to cross to NSW because it was suffering "death by a thousand cuts" in the ACT because the territory government was clamping down on poker machines.
The original proposal for what was called the "Poplars Club Development" would have had a 1300-patron capacity, with a restaurant for 300 diners and a car park for 300 cars.
When that was rejected a year ago, the residents' association rejoiced - but now say they are unable to see how the new proposal was different from the one thrown out by Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council and by the NSW planning authority.
"We are in the dark," one resident neighbouring the site said.
The Vikings Group was contacted but hadn't responded at the time of writing.
After rejection of the original plan, the Vikings appealed to the NSW Land and Environment Court. Its decision appears to be that modifications to the previous plan might be viable.
The Vikings Group has three clubs in the ACT - in Civic, Erindale and Lanyon. A fourth, Chisholm, closed recently.
Clubs in the ACT have complained about what some see as hostility by the ACT government to poker machines. It's been trying to wean Canberra clubs off revenue from pokies. As a result, the 5000 or so machines in all Canberra clubs in 2018 fell to around 3500, with the ACT government aiming to get the number down to 1000.
But for many clubs, revenue from poker machines is substantial. In the last year for which figures were available, gamblers at what were then the four Vikings clubs lost $24,350,687 on their poker machines.
"There hasn't been any growth. Our costs have risen dramatically, and revenue does not keep pace, so our profitability is virtually non-existent," Vikings chief executive Anthony Hill said when he was trying to get the original approval for the expansion to Jerrabomberra.
"If we want to grow our core business, we have to go over the border. We've got approximately 10,000 members over the border."
But the first Jerrabomberra proposal met a wall of opposition from local people. The club's residential neighbours said the complex would be too noisy, with too much traffic and too many poker machines.
The NSW planning panel accepted their views. It said that the Vikings had offered to keep the noise down with what the panel called "a swath of noise management measures", including "a three-metre-high acoustic barrier".
But it decided that these measures would have "adverse impacts, including visual, security and social, which further degrade the proposal's compatibility with adjoining residential development".
Unease about clubs' reliance on poker machine revenue probably increased with the news of the death of Raimo "Ray" Kasurinen who took his own life in 2020 after pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into machines at the Hellenic Club in Woden.
The club was fined $1.2 million by the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission. The club has appealed with a hearing before the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal in March. The tribunal is yet to give its decision.
