The Vikings Group has won its battle to build a new club just outside the ACT despite the local council voicing concerns and the application then being rejected after vigorous objections from the new venue's neighbours.
The business modified the proposal for what it called the Poplars Club in Jerrabomberra, and took the new plan to the New South Wales Land and Environment Court which has approved it but in a scaled-down version of the original.
The original proposal would have had a capacity of 1300 patrons. The new, approved version would have a capacity of 800 people.
On top of that, the NSW court ruled that the previous planned Stage 2 development should not happen. This involved a second, upper floor on the club, with function rooms, an outdoor deck and a multi-storey car park. The Vikings Group had already agreed to a higher outside wall to block off sound beyond the boundaries.
There is no stipulation on how many poker machines the new club can have but a "gaming lounge" remains part of the approved plan.
The club group had 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.
Local objectors to the club had cited pokies as one of their main objections. Heavy-duty gambling in a residential area, they argued, would make it easier for young people, in particular, to get addicted.
The Vikings Group has not said how many poker machines would be in the new club but one estimate, made according to floor space in the plans, put it at between 120 and 150 machines.
Analysis of NSW official figures by the church group Wesley Mission concluded that the average loss by gamblers on each of the state's 88,000 machines in the second three months of this year was $27,043.
Using that figure per machine, the pokies in the new club's gaming lounge would generate on a rough estimate from around $13 million to $16 million a year in losses for patrons who gambled, and a corresponding income for the club.
Some of that income from pokies would go in taxes and donations to sports in the area. The state taxes the profit on gaming machines at between 18 and 28 per cent.
There are three Vikings clubs in Canberra (in Civic, Erindale and Lanyon. A fourth, Chisholm, closed recently).
The Vikings annual report for 2024-25 said they collectively provided "about $2M per annum in grants, infrastructure and other support to more than 50 sporting and community based clubs in the Tuggeranong Valley".
The ACT government has been trying to wean clubs off poker machine revenue. 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 many clubs depend on poker machines. 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.
In 2024, at the start of his campaign to get a new club in NSW, Vikings chief executive Anthony Hill justified expansion out of the ACT: "There hasn't been any growth. Our costs have risen dramatically, and revenue does not keep pace, so our profitability is virtually non-existent.
"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."
Mr Hill didn't respond to a request for comment on the approval of the new club.
Unease about ACT 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 of Canberra in Woden.
The club was fined $1.2 million by the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission. The club appealed and won a partial victory/defeat: the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal cleared it of failing to record signs of the couple's problem gambling but the tribunal found it "guilty" of allowing them to withdraw batches of $200 in quick succession from the eftpos machine there, so getting round regulations meant to put a ceiling on withdrawals.
ACAT is due to give its decision on whether the fine should stand in November.
