departed

Am I right in thinking that the increased stakes are going to be funded by selling off surplus land owned by Counties, without any further reform of the racing industry? It reminds me of the money that Winston Peters put in to a few big races, one at Hawkes Bay worth a million dollars, what happened to that? Counties has already flogged off a lot of the commercially zoned land it had - it entered into a disastrous joint venture with a developer to develop the site which now houses The Warehouse. it was supposed to deliver riches to the club but instead it walked away but pretty much nothing. The developers had a field day dealing with a president who fancied himself a bit too much. Thinking that selling off some assets will allow for stakes increases into the future is just dreaming. There will come a day when those assets are all gone and the clubs will have nothing to fall back on. Installing a Strathayr track will provide a good surface but will not save racing in Auckland. Comparing Ellerslie with Moonee Valley is like comparing apples with pears - Moonee Valley has Friday night racemeetings that are packed. The place has atmosphere. The only day Ellerslie draws a decent crowd is Boxing Day. Sorry but selling assets to provide stakesmoney is a short term fix.

Anyone with even a passing interest in racing or the future direction of NZ needs to read this article https://thebfd.co.nz/2020/08/28/private-property-rights-in-nz/

When you bet on the pokies you get a choice of different games. With horses you have only one choice - the TAB or nothing. How many picnic meetings have you been to in Australia where the betting ring is shoulder to shoulder with punters?

The problem NZ will always have is that it has a government mandated monopoly that controls all betting. In 1910 the Gaming Act was amended to ban bookies and 110 years later that is still in place. You would think that in 2020 with the ease of opening online betting accounts they would have revised this. Every race meeting in Australia has a bookies ring with usually a dozen or so bookies competing for bets. Then there are the big corporate bookies - Bet 365, Ladbrokes etc where you can get great offers and deals. NZ is stuck in the dark ages with the TAB holding a monopoly on betting. During the Covid-19 shutdown in Victoria turnover actually increased as people were stuck at home with nothing else to do. That way Victoria was able to continue funding racing. I cannot believe that the Messara report did not address this.

It is a little over 3 weeks until the new season commences and still on the NZTR site there is no stakesmoney shown for the racemeetings carded. How long is it going to take? Or are horses really going to be racing for $0?

We had heard that the bill was open for submissions until February. I have just checked on the govt legislation website and it is still showing as a bill, which means it hasn't passed into law. I read the bill yesterday for the first time and was horrified. Private property rights extinguished in one stroke of a pen. The code can confiscate private property with no compensation to the owner. It also prevents clubs from dealing with their property as they wish. I suggest that people make this an election issue. Write to ACT's David Seymour, he is very effective. Or try Judith Collins, she is a commercial lawyer and will understand the implications.

legislation.govt.nz

Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, refinancing debt. Nothing will change, no money for stakes. Trackside all but dead and buried, where will the interest in racing be? Sad indeed. But all the well paid people at Petone will just carry on life as normal, overseeing the slow death of racing in NZ.

The biggest problem with NZ racing is that the TAB has a statutory monopoly on punting. A monopoly inevitably leads to a second rate product. That is exactly what you have in NZ. Open up the market to bookies and you will stimulate interest and get a better turnover. This is the one area that Messara never touched on but is probably the most important. Closing down tracks isn't the answer. Nor is synthetic tracks. James Cummings wont race his horses on synthetic tracks. I haven't done a count, but Victoria probably has 3 times the number of tracks that NZ does, and racing in this one state alone contributes $3.2billion a year to the Victorian economy. Go to any picnic meeting on a Saturday during summer and the bookies ring will have 10 bookies operating and people are standing shoulder to shoulder trying to get a bet on. Right now during the covid-19 crisis there are 1 or 2 racemeetings every day of the week in Victoria. The state government has shut down just about everything else but realises that racing is a huge employer and contributor to the economy. Same as NSW. Betting turnover has actually INCREASED during the covid-19 crisis. You wouldn't have that if the TAB had a monopoly on betting. But the corporate bookmakers are out there with incentives and offers and people are taking them. From what I see NZers are just taking whatever is dished out to them. Ardern was so big on compassion after the Christchurch massacre but now she doesn't give a toss about livelihoods, particularly those of racing people, who still have to feed and care for their horses even though the industry that sustains them has been shut down. I have been reading of people who are having to die alone because she won't show a bit of compassion, women having to give birth alone, people missing out on cancer scans when the hospitals are half empty anyway. Then all the small businesses that will probably never reopen again, their owners having lost their years of hard work and investment. This woman is a fraud and completely out of her depth. She has no real world experience and is being led by the nose by health officials. NZ has a chance to get rid of her in September, I hope you don't waste it.

Racing has done a wonderful job of being able to keep the industry operating during this time. Betting turnover is UP as people have time to kill. Horses are still being cared for and have been kept in work and racing. Staff haven't been laid off. It seems amazing that you can't go surfing or go and have a round of golf in Victoria but there are still one or two racemeetings being run each day under strict protocols.

Very unlikely. You would be hard pushed to prove negligence, where there first has to be a duty of care. The industry's best hope is to make sure Winnie is booted out of parliament in September, along with all the incompetent, anti business Labour party MPs. The rot in NZ racing has been happening for a long time now, it didn't happen overnight. I was involved in the Fair Tax campaign, back in the early 2000s. The root of all the problem, which the Messara report did not delve into, is the monopoly the TAB holds on punting in NZ. Most other jurisdictions allow bookmakers, which promotes competition for the betting dollar, and gives punters a choice. I also don't think the NZ public is all that interested in racing anyway, not the way they are in Australia. You will never get the huge turnover in NZ that you get in Australia. In Victoria alone, racing contributes $3.2 billion pa into the Victorian economy and $9billion pa into the Australian economy. That is why the government allowed it to continue during the lockdown.

I am surprised more Kiwi jockeys haven't made the move. When equine influenza shut down NSW racing a bunch of Sydney jockeys moved to NZ so that they could keep on riding. Yet when NZ racing shuts down the Kiwi jockeys just sit on their hands and do nothing. South Australia has had to cancel jumps races because they don't have any jumps jockeys of their own. Why didn't the NZ jumps jockeys hop on a plane, do the 14 days quarantine in Adelaide and then had South Australian jumps races to themselves for the winter? It appears that apathy has set in since Ardern took over, maybe before then.

My blood is really starting to boil at the massive and permanent damage being inflicted on NZ by a bunch of socialists with no idea how the real world operates. In particular I don't know how the racing industry will ever recover. The NZ Herald has a couple of stories running right now about the pathetic tax package for business that will do nothing about putting money in the pockets of small business owners to enable them to survive during this lockdown and hopefully emerge further down the track able to resume their businesses. How is playing around with tax going to help pay the rent, the mortgage, the power bills, the feed bills, and put food on the table? Then we have former finance minister Stephen Joyce stating what should be crystal clear - that it is pie in the sky fantasy to think you can eliminate the virus. Until a vaccine is available, it just isn't possible. And a vaccine may never be found. It isn't available for HIV or the common cold. And you cannot keep your borders closed indefinitely. In the meantime what is being done to the country is pointless and will not achieve the results Ardern thinks she can get. If NZ ever goes back into stage 2, the country will be well and truly stuffed by then. There will be mass unemployment, mass bankruptcy and Covid-19 will be replaced by suicide as a major cause of death. Here in Victoria we can still do the drive through at Maccas or KFC if we want. Bunnings and many other shops are still open. In the regional area where we live, most shops are open. We can buy magazines at the supermarket or newsagents. Most importantly, we still have one or two racemeetings EVERY DAY. Yes, the public are excluded. Trainers can't even leg their jockeys up or enter the mounting yard. There is no catering on course- you bring your own food and drinks. But we are still racing, and that is the main thing. The horses are being fed and cared for, and trainers can keep afloat. What I find amazing is that with a population of a million or so more than NZ, we have lower rates of new infections than NZ. Yesterday we had no new cases and we have been in the single figures for most of the last week. NZ still has 10-20 new cases a day. And that is after 3 weeks of total lockdown. Why is no-one asking why there are still this many new cases? We haven't been in total lockdown but we are getting fewer cases. Why aren't you guys jumping up and down demanding answers? NZ is going to seriously regret having this seriously out of her depth virtue signaller par extraordinaire in charge when people with serious business and real life experience are needed.

One person has died so far in NZ and in Australia with a population of 26 million 16 deaths

Maybe apathy