2025-12-10
The NSW Government has dismissed key recommendations of the long-awaited and damning report of the NSW greyhound racing industry.
Greens NSW MP and Animal Welfare spokesperson Abigail Boyd has condemned the government’s failure to respond adequately to the report and the ongoing support for the greyhound racing industry as an ongoing political cover up of the greyhound racing and gambling lobby.
Quotes attributable to Abigail Boyd, Greens NSW MP and spokesperson for animal welfare:
“Across 722 pages, Commissioner Drake paints a damning picture of the greyhound racing industry, detailing persistent and systemic governance and animal welfare failures. Constrained by the inquiry's terms of reference, the Commissioner walked right up to the line and all but called for the shutting down of the entire greyhound racing industry in NSW.
“After sitting on the report for months, the feeble response from the Minister in the face of incontrovertible evidence, shows what we have known and said all along, this inquiry and report process was nothing more than a political fix from a government in the thralls of the gambling and racing industry.
“Commissioner Drake’s recommendations include a breeding cap, genuine whole-of-life tracking for greyhounds, independent oversight of both the racing industry’s corporate arm as well as the regulator, overhaul of the industry’s rehoming regime, implementation of minimum track standards, and an end to the export program sending greyhounds overseas.
“We have known all along that the greyhound racing industry is incapable of reform. It seems now the Minister agrees, and so has no intention of requiring it to.
“Today’s Wentworth Park announcement stinks of cheap politics and a shoddy attempt to obscure the government’s far deeper failure to protect greyhounds across NSW.
“How many more inquiries, corruption scandals, and well-documented evidence of live baiting, doping and discarded greyhounds do we have to have before the NSW government finally listens and shuts this morally bankrupt industry down?”