While the venal incompetents of Greyhound Racing Victoria (GRV) have set the standard for wasting public money on abusing animals, Greyhound Racing NSW (GRNSW) made a valiant attempt to match them in its recently released annual report. GRV managed a $22.7 million loss, but GRNSW wasn’t shamed, with a loss of $16.7 million for 2023-24, reflecting, in part, the same welcome decline in wagering revenue that hit Victorians. As in Victoria, the loss was despite millions in government funding flowing into the industry.
Where GRNSW is preeminent, however, is in scandal — though you wouldn’t know about it from the report. There is, for instance, no reference to the explosive “handover report” submitted by former chief veterinarian Dr Alex Brittan to GRNSW in mid-June, which detailed the ongoing abuse and overbreeding of dogs in the industry. Nor is there any reference to the “investigation” by a former police commissioner, announced by then CEO Rob Macaulay in late June.
Macaulay himself lasted just a few days longer, resigning on July 9. NSW Racing Minister David Harris — under pressure from 2GB’s Ray Hadley, a one-time industry supporter-turned-feral-critic of GRNSW — had threatened to sack the entire board a week earlier if it didn’t take action.
One wonders how much of that saga will make its way into the 2024-25 annual report. In the current edition, chair Adam Casselden thanks Macaulay “for his efforts in FY23-24 to lead and implement the necessary steps of transformation that continue to be a part of the industry’s path forward for generations to come”.
Well, that’s one way of putting it. Macaulay is reportedly now suing GRNSW.
To distract from its loss and rolling scandals, GRNSW devotes space to an “independent report” showing greyhound racing supports 4,580 jobs and contributes $809 million to the NSW economy (long-term readers can guess how my eyes lit up when two of my favourite issues, “independent modelling” and greyhounds, finally came together). Sadly, neither the report’s authors nor GRNSW were prepared to provide me with the actual report, so we’re stuck with the claims made about it by GRNSW, though the Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds has done a fairly detailed demolition job on it.
The report says 1,855 direct jobs are “sustained” (interesting word; clearly they’re reluctant to say “employed”) by greyhound abuse, with another 2,700-odd resulting from “flow-on” effects. The 1,800-plus jobs suggest there has been a remarkable population explosion in the racing industry since 2021 — in the census of that year, a grand total of just 2,405 people reported working in the entire NSW racing industry — horses, harness racing and dogs combined (ah, the ABS, deflating rentseeker overstatement since 1901).
As for the other 2,700 jobs “indirectly” generated by greyhound racing, they belong in the same category as the $809 million “contribution” to the NSW economy: they’re based on the economic absurdity that if people weren’t gambling on greyhound abuse, or attending — in small and ever-diminishing numbers — greyhound abuse events, they would not spend that money on some substitute.
This is no more likely to happen than people working from home not spending the money they otherwise would have if they worked in a CBD, or people who spend any money in any industry not spending that money if that industry didn’t exist: in the absence of greyhound abuse, people would bet on horse abuse; in the absence of animal abuse, they’d bet on pokies; in the absence of animal abuse meetings, they’d spend that recreational money on some other substitute, and the same money would generate “indirect” employment somewhere else. Interestingly, the really serious gambling lobby groups representing poker machine owners, like Clubs NSW, don’t try to justify poker machines with the number of jobs created by the money put through them, just with all the good that clubs allegedly do with the revenue.
But accepting for argument’s sake that there’s no ready substitute for punting on abused animals, the claims of benefits overlook the harms that are generated by the industry. Even putting aside the poor hounds tortured and killed, problem gambling, particularly in regional areas, inflicts a significant cost on the community. Now this, too, is fungible: to the extent that people couldn’t gamble on dog abuse, they’d be likely to gamble on any other available form of gambling, with the same attendant harms, but pokies don’t come with an extended toll of animal misery in their wake to add on to the human misery.
According to data from the Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission (GWIC) compiled by the Coalition for the Protection of Greyhounds, that toll was 334 dogs dead as a result of racing in NSW in 2023-24. GRNSW continues to claim it is committed to “zero unnecessary euthanasia”. There’s a pretty simple way to achieve that, and it will save taxpayers a lot of money.
