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

Not curing the disease but killing the patient. It isn't remotely likely that what is happening at the moment will rid the country of corona virus. People might just have to face up to the fact that some elderly and infirm will die, just like tens of thousands of people die of the flu every year. We don't have the country in lockdown every winter because of the flu, yet far more people die of it. The vast majority of people who get corona virus will fully recover and will have immunity after that. What Ardern is doing is misguided and will cause immense damage to the country. The top medicos in Australia say shutting down the country will achieve very little and they do not recommend it. Where we live in Australia it is very much life as normal. Pubs and restaurants are closed but that is about it. Racing is continuing with the public barred. NZ will live to regret its little experiment in socialism.

NZ has no racing for at least 4 weeks, probably a lot longer. South Australia has just announced that the Oakbank carnival has been cancelled. SA has no jumps jockeys of its own, they mainly come from Victoria and there is a 14 day self isolation for riders crossing the border. Naturally the jumps jockeys in Victoria won't go to SA and have a 14 day self isolation at each end. NZ jumps jockeys could have seen the opportunity and gone to SA for the winter to fill the void. Jumps racing might have been able to continue as there is no ban on horses from other states crossing the border. During the equine influenza closedown many Sydney jockeys relocated to NZ and made the most of the opportunities. We made good use of them and reaped the rewards. Shame NZ jumps jockeys were asleep to the opportunity.

You guys are slightly deluded if you think closing the joint down for 4 weeks is going to eradicate Covid 19. Are you going to keep the borders closed until a vaccine is developed? Because that is the only way you will keep the disease out of the country. And in the meantime you will have hundreds of thousands unemployed and businesses gone bust never to reopen. Is this really what you want? Remember, NZ has had no deaths so far. Is it worth shutting down the economy and forcing many into extreme hardship to do something that probably won't even achieve the result you want?

The NZ media doesn't seem to have caught on to the fact that much of eastern Australia is being flooded right now. Yes it is RAINING. The heaviest rain in over 40 years in some places. AUSTRALIA IS NOT ON FIRE. The rain has put the fires out. Strange how the left wing NZ media only reports stuff that fits the climate change narrative. Where we are we have had 50ml of rain in the last week. We have had nearly a third of our total 2019 rainfall in 5 weeks. You guys are being brainwashed. It is unbelievable that nowhere in the NZ new sites can I see anything about the flooding currently being experienced on the east coast of Australia.

Slam Dunk perhaps you could go to this site to find many articles by real scientists who haven't fallen for the hoax - www.principia-scientific.org Ian Plimer hasn't been discredited by anyone. However your creator of the so-called hockey stick graph - Michael Mann - has been exposed as a fraud. And if you read the IPCC reports carefully they state that it hasn't been proven that CO2 causes temperature increases but that the whole climate change industry is designed to transfer wealth from rich western nations to the developing world. And closer to home there is a University of Auckland study that finds that Pacific Islands are actually getting bigger rather than sinking, but again this hasn't been reported in the NZ media.

You could hand out a free copy of the book "Climate Change Delusion and the great electricity rip-off" by Professor Ian Plimer to everyone who comes through the gate. Perhaps then people might start to realise what a giant con this whole climate change religion is. The masses have been brainwashed, particularly in NZ where the left leaning media publish nothing that questions the whole hoax. Also you will probably find that most racing people are not the remotest bit interested in climate change, they are too busy trying to eke out a living. As for donating to the Australian bushfires, these have been largely the result of incompetence at state and local government level, not allowing land clearing or preventive burns to reduce fuel loads in forests. Over 200 people have been charged with arson, most of the fires having been deliberately lit. Yes there has been a drought, but this has nothing to do with climate change. There is no link between drought and climate change. If it was getting warmer then you would have higher evaporation from the ocean, leading to MORE rainfall. In fact it is the Indian Ocean dipole which governs much of Australia's rainfall. The dipole has moved in recent weeks, bringing on the monsoon in the north. The east coast of Australia is in for record rainfall over the next 8 days and you will likely see widespread flooding. Here in Central Victoria we have already had nearly a third of the total rainfall we had for all of 2019. Of course you won't read about any of that in the NZ newspapers or on tv. Sooner or later the NZ population will wake up from their slumber. In the meantime you need to do something about increasing stakes or you will see more trainers and jockeys making the move to Oz.

So what was the purpose of the Messara review? Closure of racecourses and now drops in stakesmoney by the sounds of it. The racing industry is crazy to pin its hopes on Winston Peters, the guy is only interested in himself.

picnic racing in Australia is highly competitive and the standard has risen in recent years. The cup races are run for about $6500. Even city trainers are sending runners to the picnics these days.

NSW and Victoria have picnic racing throughout the summer months. Horses run for stakes of $4000 and the jockeys are amateurs. There are about 30 racemeetings during the picnic season.

It might not have been picked up by some but expat Kiwis Don Dwyer and Shaun Cooper have taken out the 2018/19 picnic trainer and jockey premierships in Victoria. Don had 15 winners and 22 placegetters with a winning strike rate of 26.79% and Shaun had 31 winners and 32 placegetters with a winning strike rate of 28.44%. It was only Shaun's second full season of riding.