Page 1231 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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(4) calls on the Government to continue working to improve the welfare of greyhounds in the ACT through the transition period, including by supporting local animal welfare organisations as necessary.”.
This amendment notes the strong action that this government has taken to ban greyhound racing in the ACT and the $1 million of funding that we have allocated for transition support for those people affected by the end of the industry. This includes, as I have stated many times in this place, funding for support for worker retraining and animal rehabilitation and rescue. It is little wonder that Mr Parton is now trying every desperate avenue to criticise the government for banning a sport that has no place in this society.
You only have to look online at steward reports to see that dogs are injured in every single race meet. In fact, if you look at the footage of Mr Parton’s syndicate’s dog’s last race meet in Canberra, a dog in the race immediately prior falls horribly. This dog is trained by the same person as the syndicate dog, and I wonder how long before poor Nugget, as he is called, falls, fractures a bone in his leg and no longer has any value to the syndicate that owns him and is also put down. These animals are being treated as disposable objects, and Mr Parton is either in denial about it or deliberately avoiding the truth.
Mr Parton is clutching at his final straws, questioning the sale of ACTTAB four years ago. This sale was through a process that the Auditor-General confirmed met all the objectives set out in the resolution of the Legislative Assembly on 28 November 2013 and achieved an appropriate price. Mr Parton is overlooking the fact that the change to how racing is funded was undertaken in close consultation with the ACT racing industry, replacing the uncertainty of receiving a percentage of ACTTAB revenues with the certainty of direct funding from the budget, and that was welcomed by the industry.
Further, Mr Parton’s understanding of how the Tabcorp licence works is simply wrong. Tabcorp pays a $1 million licence fee to operate as the exclusive provider in the territory. Their total national revenue from the wagering division in 2017-18 was $1.8 billion. The licence fee comes from that pool, not from betting in the ACT specifically or on particular codes.
There is simply no quantifiable link between betting on a racing code in a particular location and the licence fee that is paid to the ACT government by Tabcorp. And even if there was a connection between the licence fee and a particular racing code, Tabcorp states that only 15 per cent of gross totalisator revenue comes from greyhound racing in the ACT. Where Mr Parton gets his supposedly conservative 22 per cent—or now, he claims, 30 per cent—is, as with a number of his claims, anyone’s guess.
Given that Mr Parton has so helpfully drawn attention in his speech on his motion to the Labor-Greens government’s position on poker machines, I am happy to restate in my amendment to his motion our commitment to reducing the number of gaming machine authorisations in the territory to 4,000 as a core part of our mission to address the harm caused to our community by problem gambling. The government is
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