Racing industry support for NZ First has never been a secret, but revelations this week that a number of donors have been slipping contributions in at just under the $15,000 anonymity cutoff point should be sending stark warning flags to their partners in government.
The Racing Industry Bill introduced to Parliament last year seems to have slipped through the process so far under a Harry Potter-style cloak of invisibility.
Select Committee hearings are happening this week but I’ve seen little media coverage – yet what this legislation proposes is an outrage.
What little coverage there has been includes lines such as this, from a Stuff article:
A section of the bill has proposed the Minister of Racing to be able to use money from the sale of small local racing clubs towards funding improvements in other venues.
Racing supporter Graham O'Brien of Hawera, said the bill was the biggest land grab since early colonial days.
If passed, the Bill will in effect allow the closure and forced sale of the venues of a number of racing clubs, potentially including those at Avondale, Stratford, Central Otago, Kurow, Banks Peninsula and Wairoa.
Even if a club has stopped racing, or has already sold its venue, the legislation allows for its property to be compulsorily taken.
The purpose of this is to prop up other ‘strategic’ venues that have the blessing of the powers that be, for example racecourses at Auckland, Wellington, Manawatu and Canterbury.
Meanwhile, these community hubs that have been built up over many years and decades, in some cases long before any such thing as the TAB or the ‘racing industry’ existed, will be lost to the people of the local area, with no necessary say from the latter in their disposal.
Racing club venues are community assets often used by many other groups. The Avondale markets are just one example of this.
I am no right-winger, but I find myself unusually in the space occupied by the right – that is, I cannot fathom how property rights can be trampled on in this way, nor how Labour and the Greens can tolerate it.
It is a possibility that Winston Peters sought carte blanche on racing policy as part of the 2017 coalition deal with Labour, yet this week Jacinda Ardern has been quoted as saying, ‘Racing policy, decisions, bills ... go through considerable scrutiny – no one policy is ever decided by one party, they go through all of us.’
If that is the case, it is urgent that Labour and the Greens scrutinise the Racing Bill a trifle more closely than they have so far, and stop it in its tracks before it goes any further.
This seems like a prime opportunity for Simon Bridges and friends to expose and oppose the hypocrisy inherent in a government bill which so transparently ignores any sense of property rights and tramples on the kind of provincial communities from which much National support emanates.
As a Green MP I was the party’s spokesperson on Racing for the ten years I was in Parliament. I sat on the Select Committee considering the 2003 Racing Bill.
During the process I managed to persuade colleagues to insert a clause in the Racing Act saying ‘In carrying out its functions, the Board must (a) comply with the principles of natural justice; and (b) exhibit a sense of social responsibility by having regard to the interests of the community in which it operates.’
The new legislation flies in the face the 2003 Act in regards to both natural justice and social responsibility.
Labour and the Greens must urgently reconsider their seemingly unconsidered support for the Racing Bill or risk being seen as complicit in a particularly unprincipled piece of legislation.