What we celebrated on that day were the things that make us uniquely Australian – and one of the things that sets us apart from the rest of the world is our sense of a ‘fair go’.
As Australians, when we see an injustice, we become enraged and spur into action to have these injustices addressed quickly by governments.
Imagine the public outcry if people were to suddenly discover that nurses, teachers or emergency service workers were working seven days a week but only getting paid for four.
(And by the way, those extra three days of their wages, well, they are going to someone else.)
We are not trying to equate ourselves to those vocations, but the NSW greyhound industry is also made up of hard workers, and the industry suffers due to a funding injustice aligning with the four for seven days work analogy.
Each year almost one third of NSW greyhound racing revenue is redistributed to the two other racing codes. Neither earned it. It was earned by greyhound racing.
There is no other sporting code in Australia or in the world that has the revenue it earns redistributed to other sports. At a recent event, I called this out as the biggest rort in Australian sport and when you look at the facts, it’s hard to dispute.
We understand our sport can be polarising, but we have done an enormous amount of work on safety and welfare in the past decade.
And, whether you like greyhound racing or not, this unjust redistribution of money that belongs to the sport’s hardworking participants offends our sense of a fair go and expectation that you’ll receive a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.
The redirection of the sport’s funds dates back to the Carr Labor government’s sale of the TAB monopoly in 1998. To enable the government to complete that sale, it needed the three racing codes to agree to how the revenue generated by the privatised TAB would be distributed.
Believing that the distributions would be revised if things changed, the greyhound industry agreed to receive 13 per cent of the distribution.
Which was fine at the time, unless things changed. And change they did.
Greyhound racing has increased in popularity in recent years and today accounts for around 24 per cent of racing code revenue. However, it still only receives 13 per cent.
To make matters worse, in 2018 the Berejiklian Coalition government introduced a tax on wagering – the point of consumption tax.
Under this, it was agreed that there would be a 10 per cent rebate, back to the three racing codes.
However, for some inexplicable reason the government used the 13 per cent distribution split from 1998 to do so.
The greyhound industry and participants lose out again. Browbeaten and bashed over the past decade, greyhound racing participants have seemingly normalised and come to accept this unjust treatment of them and their sport.
The sport has come a long way since 2015. It is now the most regulated sport in Australia with a separate government agency regulating it.
It is the only sport in the world that can electronically track and account for all of its animal athletes. It now has the lowest serious injury rates in the world and rehomes more greyhounds each year than are bred for racing.
The sport is not without its very few bad actors, as is the case in any sport or industry.
Greyhound racing in NSW does deserve recognition for this, but more the point, the sport can no longer be silent and allow this unfair and unjust redistribution of its own money.
