V’landys and Morrison vow to unite
Racing Victoria’s (RV) new CEO Aaron Morrison and his Racing NSW counterpart Peter V’landys addressed the Asian Racing Conference (ARC) in Japan on Wednesday, vowing to work together to combat the sport’s challenges.
Morrison said RV is now working hard to make sure Racing Australia is more ‘effective as an advocate’, while V’landys said both Victoria and NSW have ‘common challenges’ and that it is in racing’s interest to come together and stop ‘sabotaging ourselves’.
“We have a competition outside, that’s our competition. Yet we seem to fight amongst ourselves all the time. We have a civil war happening in the racing industry, while our competitors take that advantage,” V’landys told the ARC delegates.
“If we unite as an industry, we should be taking those competitors on. We should be taking sports betting on, we should be taking other forms of entertainment on. But what are we focused on? Fighting amongst ourselves. The sooner we stop doing that and sabotaging ourselves, the better the industry will be.”
Morrison also reiterated RV’s desire to work hard to bring back RA’s pattern committee.
“We’ve got common challenges. We’ve got a lot of challenges we are facing from a regulatory perspective, taxation and changes to the industry funding model,” Morrison said.
“We are working very hard to look at re-establishing things like the pattern committee and making sure Racing Australia as a national entity is more effective as an advocate.”
Morrison also spoke about the work RV has done surrounding equine welfare.
“I think across the Australian jurisdictions, the PRAs are investing very significantly into equine welfare support activities. Victoria, for example, allocates at least two per cent of prize-money and tops that up with some further investment and that’s something like $6 million a year ongoing,” he told delegates.
“And if you counted up all of the jurisdictions in Australia, it would probably be $15-20 million plus capital investments.
“That goes towards supporting equine welfare initiatives and supports the work that owners and trainers are already doing to rehome horses. That goes into all stages of horses’ life cycle.
“It’s not just about aftercare. A lot of that investment goes into the time when horses are racing, primarily focused around injury prevention and we’ve been investing a lot of money in technology into scans.
“The PET scanners, the CT scanners, Scintigraphy, and we’ve done a lot of work to change our processes and protocols to make sure that the horses are properly cared for and we avoid injury.
“Post-racing, the focus is really around making sure we generate secondary demand for post-racing careers, whether that’s through things like the off-the-track program, that you showed earlier before, our greater equestrian program, both really successful drivers of second careers for horses. And then of course we also spend money in terms of subsidising and supporting credited retrainers and providing safety and services.
“I think one of the challenges though is from our stakeholders, I think it’s a misconception or an assumption that that percentage of prize-money taken out of owners’ returns is enough to fund the care of horses forever and a day during their retirement.
“And that’s unfortunately simply not the case. To do that would require many, many multiples of millions and a real change to the funding model.”
V’landys spoke about Racing NSW’s success regarding welfare through its investment in community programs.