James Packer certainly can’t match his famous father for clout. But the war he’s waging to build a second Sydney casino shows that he comes from the same powerful gene pool. And it proves the Packer name still rings loud with the nation’s decision makers.

The gaming and pay-TV tycoon’s $5 billion fortune — somewhat reduced by a couple of bad bets in US casinos in 2008 — is also a powerful tool in getting him what he wants, as is his willingness to take risks and create jobs.

Big Jim already has the Liberal premier of NSW, Barry O’Farrell, eating out of his hand on the casino, and he has now enlisted the ALP’s dream team — Karl Bitar and Mark Arbib — who did such a brilliant job of seizing control of the NSW Labor Party, before they ran it into the wall and wrecked it.

No doubt he’s paying the pair extremely well.

In doing this, James is just copying what his father did with a previous generation of Labor fixers — Graham Richardson and Peter Barron — who proved so useful in getting decision makers to lean the Packers’ way. But he also has Victoria’s ex-Liberal premier, Jeff Kennett, itching to join his campaign to Crownify Sydney, and he can always count on support from John Howard and Peter Costello when he needs it.

On top of all this, he has Howard’s former communications minister Helen Coonan on the board at Crown Ltd, along with the chairman of Tourism Australia, Geoff Dixon, and one-time hard man of waterfront reform, Chris Corrigan. This trio is flanked by investment banker Ben Brazil, who is one of Macquarie Bank’s big kahunas.

All in all, it’s quite a team, and James is no bad captain. Back in 1994, when the Sydney casino licence was up for tender, he phoned a minister in John Fahey’s NSW Liberal government to deliver a message from his dad that they were all “f-cked” if the Packer bid failed to win.

Three years later, when the Packers were contemplating one of their regular bids for Fairfax, he flew around the country to lobby Liberal backbenchers who were blocking the cross-media laws, and trekked out to a shopping centre in suburban Brisbane to press the flesh with one of the most stubborn opponents, Gary Hardgrave. Hardgrave was amazed and flattered that someone as powerful as Packer would come to see him.

This year, James has even been using the media — which he once hated doing — to talk up his casino plan, which involves putting a new six-star hotel for high rollers on a big patch of open space in the middle of the Barangaroo development.

Naturally, Packer has friends who can help in the media, too: Alan Jones is always ready to spruik his wares, and has welcomed the casino as a “visionary” plan. The chaps at The Australian are almost as keen, with the paper’s special Packer correspondent, Damon Kitney, often ready to give Mr P a platform.

So with all this going for him, how come James doesn’t match his old man? Put simply, there are two reasons: one is his personality, the other is what he does for a living.

Kerry Packer’s great strength was that he could be heroically charming or terrifyingly rude. James has some of the first but not much of the second, and doesn’t inspire fear in the way that his father did. It was a brave man who stood up to the Big Fella, as James knows well.

But what also gave Kerry his power was that he ran one of the country’s biggest media groups, which included Channel Nine, The Australian Women’s Weekly, The Bulletin and (once upon a time) The Daily Telegraph and a bunch of suburban newspapers. There was also the constant threat that he would add The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The AFR to his armoury. So politicians were keen to give him what he wanted. Rightly or wrongly, they feared he had the power to break them at the ballot box or, at the very least, make life hard.

Since James cashed out of Channel Nine and ACP Magazines in late 2006, he has had no such weapons in his arsenal, unless you count his 9% share in the anaemic Ten Network, where he helped Andrew Bolt get a Sunday show that no one watches. So he no longer frightens anyone.

*Read the full profile at The Power Index