It is not easy to take on Peter V’landys, the most powerful administrator in Australian sport. This is something every state outside NSW is now finding out, as a governance crisis at the top of the national $9.5 billion racing and thoroughbred industry makes its way through the NSW Supreme Court. It is something Glenn Burge knows first hand.
For five years, Burge served as the secretary of the NSW Trainers’ Association. During that time, he became a stone in V’landys’ hoof, pushing for Racing NSW to improve the way it dealt with work health and safety issues and worker’s compensation claims by jockeys and trainers, to reduce the use of the whip in races and to fix decrepit stables at country racetracks. When he couldn’t convince V’landys, the Racing NSW chief executive who famously keeps a tight rein on all aspects of his organisation, he took his concerns directly to the racing minister and other MPs.
At the peak of this campaign, the association received a letter from the general counsel of Racing NSW, Peter Sweney, informing them that Racing NSW had decided not to forward to the association $54,000 in surplus insurance premiums it had collected from trainers. With a few taps on a keyboard, Racing NSW had drilled a massive hole in the association’s finances.
The dispute over the funds was complex. The Trainers’ Association had in previous years invoiced Racing NSW for a similar management fee, but Sweney in his letter argued the money belonged to trainers and should not be used to fund the activities of the association. The decision left the association on the brink of insolvency – until a possible way out emerged.
On March 25, 2020, as the racing industry was preparing for the onset of the COVID-19 crisis, NSW Trainers’ Association director Rick Worthington had a phone conversation with Graeme Hinton, the chief operating officer of Racing NSW. Later that day, Worthington emailed Burge and the other association directors his understanding of this conversation – an understanding now disputed by Racing NSW.
“This is exactly where we are at with Peter [V’landys] and Racing NSW,” Worthington wrote. “Peter will release the management funds to the [Trainers’ Association] on the assumption that we have a different communication point going forward. Having a new CEO and chairman.”
According to Worthington’s email, the board had a simple choice: the money or Burge. It voted to take the money. The Trainers’ Association never received the insurance money, but a short time after Burge resigned it was the beneficiary of a $50,000 sponsorship arrangement with Tabcorp, facilitated by Racing NSW.
Glenn Burge (left) with journalists Rowena Galvin and Tansy Harcourt at Randwick Racecourse in 2019.Credit: Jessica Hromas
Worthington died of cancer within months of this episode. When The Age and Sydney Morning Herald contacted Hinton, he said Worthington’s email did not accurately reflect their conversation or the policy of Racing NSW.
“I can’t speak for the late Mr Worthington, however, it appears he was speaking for himself and not us,” Hinton says. V’landys backed the recollection of his second-in-command. “I confirm that I did not give any ultimatum whatsoever to the NSW Trainers’ Association,” he said.
Burge, a long-serving editor of The Australian Financial Review, which is owned by the same parent company as The Age and Herald, says the episode was indicative of how Racing NSW operates.
“RNSW pretty much demands those responsible for advocating for industry participants to be 100 per cent supportive,” he says.
These are heady days for V’landys who, as the boss of Racing NSW and chairman of the NRL, has extraordinary power and influence at the lucrative intersection of sport, politics, gambling and the media and entertainment industries. His use of pressure and patronage, combined with an eye for opportunity and an innate understanding of what punters want, has turned even former critics like veteran broadcaster Ken Callander into latter-day converts. “NSW had to look after its own market and everyone up here says God bless V’landys,” Callander says.
Beneath the surface of an industry flush with prize money and popular new feature races like the $15 million Everest, there are growing concerns that Racing NSW is staking racing’s long-term interests on an unnecessary legal gambit.
The Racing NSW court action against the other states is based on what it suspects was a Victorian-led plot to exclude it from the thoroughbred industry and form a breakaway group from Racing Australia, the sport’s national governing body. The case, which at this stage is limited to a request for documents, hinges on advice provided to the other states by a Sydney-based public relations company, Cato&Clive.
That advice, a series of dot-point paragraphs running to less than two pages, was sought by states other than NSW to bring fresh thinking to the political impasse within Racing Australia blocking progress on any matters requiring a national approach, such as equine welfare.
It outlines a Plan A – tactics that could be used to either encourage, entice or coerce NSW back into the fold — and canvasses a more radical Plan B. “Under this scenario, the states would simply go it alone. Wherever possible, they would ignore NSW. Either the non-NSW [racing authorities] would form a new body or, if easier and quicker, they would simply co-ordinate on necessary reforms.”
Cato&Clive was commissioned in April 2022, shortly after John Messara, a prominent thoroughbred breeder and onetime V’landys ally who was invited onto the board of Racing Australia to broker a peace between NSW and Victoria, quit his post in frustration. A year later, Racing NSW’s decision to pursue court action against every other racing jurisdiction has convinced influential figures across the thoroughbred industry that a governance shake-up on the scale envisaged by Plan B is what racing needs.
Antony Thompson, a seventh-generation owner of Widden Stud, one of Australia’s oldest and largest thoroughbred breeding operations in the Upper Hunter region of NSW, says there is a growing consensus that Racing Australia, an organisation formed less than 10 years ago, has run its race. “The administrators are bickering, there is infighting within Racing Australia, no one has got a big-picture view about what’s best for the industry and what’s really important,” he says.
“A lot of participants see RA as dysfunctional and beyond repair, and it is time to move forward with a body that takes a national view and has participants involved in it as well as administrators. The general feeling is there is a lot of work that needs to be done at a national level and the administrators have proven they can’t get it done. We are looking for someone else to do it.”
Widden Stud owner Antony Thompson says Racing Australia must be overhauled or replaced by a new body that can provide effective national leadership.Credit: Flavio Brancaleone
Thompson, like many racehorse owners, has bathed in the rivers of prize money that have flowed into racing under V’landys’ leadership. NSW Racing is this year forecast to return $361 million to thoroughbred owners in prize money, bonuses and other payments – a figure more than double what it was 10 years ago and more than any other state.
But Thompson is convinced that record purses for big races will not, in themselves, secure the sport’s future. He nominates three areas which require a co-ordinated national approach and instead are becoming collateral damage in Australia’s protracted turf wars. These are equine welfare; a system of race ratings known as “The Pattern” which underpins the international horse market; and a critical shortage of people available to work in the thoroughbred industry.
Vin Cox learned to ride horses on his family farm in Mudgee, in the NSW Central Tablelands, before he took over the Australian operations of the global racing and breeding leviathan Godolphin. He says equine welfare and the challenge of convincing the broader public that racing treats its horses well is “fundamental to the long-term survival our industry” and is crying out for collegiate leadership and national advocacy. Neither of these things are possible while lawyers for the state-based principal racing authorities are squaring off in court.
“To use industry funds to fight other PRAs is quite unnecessary,” Cox says. “Does this really need to happen? I think if they all sat around the table like grown-ups they could work it out, but they are choosing not to.”
Australian Trainers’ Association chief executive Andrew Nicholl, who is based in Flemington, says there is a “groundswell of discontent” among stakeholders.
“We have given them every opportunity to resolve their differences behind closed doors. They haven’t and we have now gone public. If those differences aren’t resolved there needs to be an open vote of no confidence,” Nicholl says.
Ross Inglis, a former chairman of the Australian Jockeys’ Association, says that V’landys’ unapologetic parochialism, while good for racing within NSW, does not serve the broader interests of the sport. “Peter is passionate about racing in NSW and terrific at looking after his own,” he says. “That is fine if you are in NSW. My view is that racing is not just about NSW.”
Even within NSW, the focus on headline-grabbing races and burgeoning prize money has not benefited everyone. Matt Benson ran the largest provincial race club in NSW, the Newcastle Jockey Club, for six years. He says the quality of stabling facilities in NSW is significantly below that of Queensland and Victoria: “Despite, unsurprisingly, the sycophantic euphoria of a swag of beaming beneficiaries about the apparent rivers of gold flowing in NSW Racing, the sad reality is that the underwhelming conditions endured by the real star of the show, the race horses, have remained unchanged for years.”
Racing Victoria chief executive Andrew Jones.Credit: Daniel Munoz
Tracing the origins of the dispute between Racing NSW and Racing Victoria is like asking descendants of the Hatfields and McCoys who started it. Victoria is far from blameless, having in 2018 denied Racing NSW the Group 1 status it craves for its wildly successful pet event, The Everest, on a technical reading of the rules.
More broadly, there is a philosophical disconnect between V’landys, who sees racing states as inherently in competition with one another for a share of the wagering market, and those who think greater co-operation between the states is needed to further the interests of the sport.
“I think racing is competing with every other sport and form of entertainment for fans,” says Racing Victoria chief executive Andrew Jones. “That is the key competition we face. It is not racing in other jurisdictions. I don’t see the merit of infighting within racing. Racing fans and punters watch and bet on races all over Australia. The better it is, the happier they are. I think our job as PRAs is to grow the sport, not stick forks in each other’s eyes.”
Decision-making within Racing Australia is stymied by two constitutional provisions: a board voting structure which gives NSW and Victoria veto rights over any decision; and a clause which allows directors to put the interests of their state bodies ahead of their fiduciary duty to Racing Australia.
Victoria’s representative on the board, Greg Nichols, used the veto in 2018 to stop the elevation of The Everest. Victoria and the states other than NSW now want to get rid of the veto, but at a Racing Australia board meeting last November, NSW used its veto to block any discussion of governance reform.
Racing NSW chief executive Peter V’landys.Credit: Tim Bauer
At the same meeting, NSW blocked the key recommendations of Racing Australia’s equine welfare committee, chaired by Nichols. This included a proposal for all states to share information about when retired race horses find new homes or die, a proposal for all jurisdictions to adopt the same standards for reporting on the breakdowns and deaths of active race horses, and the establishment of a horse welfare forum, where equine experts can share knowledge and collaborate.
V’landys says NSW has taken the lead on equine welfare by banning the slaughter of horses at knackeries and abattoirs and that the starting point for meaningful welfare reforms is for Victoria to do the same. “The level of hypocrisy is mind-boggling when considering that Racing Victoria still allows a one-year-old horse to be slaughtered at a knackery,” he says. “If anything is putting the social licence of racing at risk in Australia, it is other jurisdictions allowing thoroughbred horses to be slaughtered at knackeries and abattoirs when their owners no longer want to race them.
“As to the leaking of what occurred at the Racing Australia meeting in November 2022, again the level of unprofessionalism … is most concerning. That leaking is misleading and designed to deceive.”
Jones argues it is “absolutely critical” to develop national standards for the care of race horses.
Although the impasses within Racing Australia are well known to everyone across the thoroughbred industry, the details of the internal political machinations have been largely concealed by board and legal confidentiality. Board minutes, correspondence between directors and other reports and communications obtained by The Age and Herald and documents submitted to the Supreme Court by lawyers for Racing NSW shed further light on the inner non-workings of Racing Australia, what finally prompted Messara to quit and how Racing NSW previously tried to push Victoria and Queensland off the sport’s peak national body for supporting unilateral rule changes designed to reduce the number of times jockeys whip their horses.
Racing Queensland’s outgoing chief executive Brendan Parnell, who is taking up a senior racing position in Britain, is resigned to the view that, unless something within Racing Australia changes significantly, some of racing’s biggest problems will continue to go unaddressed.
“We would love to see people around the table and progress on things like The Pattern and a mature discussion around whip reform, and we all desire better animal care standards,” he says. “With the litigation it doesn’t feel like it is ever going to be resolved. It is really sad the state that governance is in. It looks rosy with the big races and the great prize money, but we are paralysed on other things.”
Parnell adds that it is a “no-brainer” for The Everest, a spectacularly successful addition to the racing calendar, to be elevated to Group 1. Ironically, the greatest impediment to this happening is no longer Victorian opposition but NSW intransigence within Racing Australia. For the past three years, there has been no progress on The Pattern – the internationally recognised mechanism for grading races – because NSW has refused to consider new guidelines for administering it. This was the reason Messara finally quit Racing Australia’s board.
John Messara (left) with Alan Jones at the Magic Millions Yearling Sale Day on the Gold Coast in 2016. Credit: Bradley Kanaris
Messara, the owner of one of the Hunter Valley’s most successful breeding operations, Arrowfield Stud, has described The Pattern as the “bedrock of our sport”. Less than a year after he joined the Racing Australia board as its independent chairman, a dismissive, one-line email from Racing NSW chairman Russell Balding about The Pattern convinced Messara his task was futile.
“After last week’s Board meeting and a subsequent exchange of correspondence with Russell Balding regarding the Pattern [see below] it appears clear to me that despite strenuous efforts over nearly a year I have been unable to make any progress at all on the matters that divide NSW and Victoria,” Messara wrote to his fellow directors. “I came onto the Racing Australia Board in the hope of reconciling the parties and helping the national racing industry to progress. Sadly, this has proven impossible for me to achieve.”
As long as this turf war rages, racing can only lose.
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