Carol Altmann – The Terrier

An urgent meeting will be held by the W’bool City Council this Friday (21/12) to allow large-scale racehorse training at Levy’s Beach, starting almost immediately.

Planning Minister Richard Wynne, as predicted, has intervened and asked for interim changes to the local planning laws – the same laws that found racehorse training was illegal in this section of the Belfast Coastal Reserve.

The council is now classing the matter as so “urgent and extraordinary” that a special meeting will be held on the last day before the holiday break to endorse this decision.

Not a word of this was raised in public last night (17/12), when the council held a meeting to talk about waste management and new signs at the entrance to the city.

Once that meeting finished, however, the real fireworks began with councillors called to a confidential “briefing” where they were given details of Mr Wynne’s intervention.

All of this in the last week before Christmas, when everybody is distracted and busy. But, of course, that is precisely the point.

Governments of all persuasions know the best time to bury controversial decisions is around the biggest holidays of the year.

What a gift to the racing industry. What a slap – again – to our precious environment.

Those councillors who vote for this on Friday night and call themselves environmentalists are a bit like self-declared vegetarians who eat meat once a week.

You can’t, pardon the pun, have a bet each way.

You either stand for the environment, and the endangered species and fragile dune system at Levy’s Beach, or you don’t.

To pretend this is some sort of “compromise” is simply a cop-out. Parks Victoria don’t want this. The majority of people who responded to the management report for the reserve don’t want this. Racing people who love the environment don’t want this (Clare Lindop, I am looking at you x)

The only people who want this are a handful of wealthy, well-connected, well-resourced trainers who stand to make a lot of money from brutalising our beach.

I am going to be there on Friday night, just to witness the capitulation, because that is exactly what it will be.

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Things have gone eerily quiet on the push to get racehorse training up and running at Levy’s Beach in Warrnambool, which makes me suspect something is afoot, because the billion dollar racing industry is not going to give up that easily.

As we know, plans to have up to 160 racehorses a day training on Levy’s Beach (120 on the beach and 40 in the dunes) by December 1 were thwarted when it was found to be against the law under the Warrnambool City Council planning scheme.

That pressed a big fat pause button while the state election was held and the man who could change things for the racing fraternity, Planning Minister Richard Wynne, found out whether he kept his seat in Richmond. He did.

The word is that, since then, the racing industry has been pressing hard to have Mr Wynne step in and do something to fast track their access to Levy’s.

What Mr Wynne can do is intervene and issue an interim order allowing racehorses to train on the beach, while the council goes through the much longer process of changing its planning laws to accommodate them.

From my understanding, even with Mr Wynne’s intervention, the council would still need to finalise licence arrangements with the Warrnambool Racing Club, but given its forelock tugging so far, that should not be a problem.

As a sweetener, the WRC even generously offered to add more asphalt to the Lady Bay waterfront and build a $400,000 bespoke carpark and horse wash-down facility for its own needs.

The idea of this, as pointed out by club, was so horses could train their guts out on the dunes and foreshore at Levy’s, then hop on a float and be whisked down to Lady Bay for a refreshing swim and aqua aerobics.

So, as you can see, the industry is not about to give up easily on establishing a convenient, low-cost, one-stop-shop racehorse training facility just a few minutes drive from the racecourse, subsidised by our unique natural environment.

 

For all this, trainers will pay an annual licence of a few hundred dollars, plus the princely sum of $6 per horse per day for Lady Bay and probably $3 per day for Levy’s beach.

I pay more than this to use the Aquazone swim centre and I am not a wealthy racehorse trainer.

While we wait to see what happens next – and something will happen – it is worth remembering that the majority of us, including those who love and support horse racing (#notallracehorsetrainers #notalljockeys), did not want this.

More than 60% of people who responded to the Belfast Coastal Management Reserve draft plan said they did not want commercial racehorse training in the coastal reserve.

There are some key words here: “commercial racehorse training” and “coastal reserve”.

To be clear, Lady Bay is not part of the Belfast Coastal reserve, it is a separate issue.

Commercial racehorses are not recreational horse riders, they are a separate issue.

Racehorses are not Rundell’s horse trails, they don’t use the dunes for strength training.

What people did want was a management plan for a spectacular, remote, wild, yet often neglected and abused part of our coastline that is home to rare and endangered birds, rare plants and a rich indigenous history.

There was no management plan for the area. Now we have a plan…but there are racehorses stuck right in the middle of it.

Parks Victoria is not happy either. They can’t say that, of course, because they are public servants, but they have been forced to hammer this square peg into a round hole.

The last time Parks staff spoke to the public in Warrnambool about the plan, that anguish was palpable.

But the racing industry is powerful. It uses terms like “dollars” and “jobs” and “tourism” and “Darren-Weir-will-move-his-stable” to try and shame anyone who says, hold on, we like horse racing, but why do you need to tear up our wild beach?

To date, Cr David Owen has been the lone voice of dissension on council. I don’t expect that to change.

The racehorse industry will get what it wants from the State Government*. That won’t change either.

But what can change is our understanding of this issue and what it means, long-term, for a coastal reserve in our backyard.

We need to get a full grip on that and then decide if we want to join the push to stop this race, because believe me, it ain’t over yet.

* The State Government last week announced another $33 million will be made available as prize money for racing in 2019-20. The total prize money now available in Victoria is $255 million, up 47% from 2015.

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By Carol Altmann

What the heck just happened?

Our Warrnambool City Council chief executive officer Bruce Anson earns a salary package of around $320,000 a year and yet it was left to a group of volunteers to reveal to us this stunning fact: racehorse training at Levy’s Beach is illegal.

Had Mr Anson not bothered to have his staff check this possibility before? Why not?

Why was it left to volunteers in the Belfast Council Reserve Action Group (BCRAG) to do all the leg work, which they did?

Even if Mr Anson hadn’t bothered to check the legalities since this whole racehorse issue blew open more than two years ago, he certainly knew about the legal issues by September 20.

That was when the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA) contacted Mr Anson to tell him that the council was breaking its planning laws.

Mr Anson definitely got that memo, because he emailed a response to the VNPA soon after, saying he would ask the city planners to investigate.

(The city planners confirmed today that yes, it is illegal.)

Mr Anson was contacted on September 20 – almost a month ago – and yet he did not pass any of this critical information onto elected councillors, who found out about it last Sunday via an email from BCRAG.

The BCRAG email arrived just one day before councillors were to vote on whether to allow racehorses back in to Levy’s and it warned they were in breach of the law.

The vote went through 4/3 – Labor candidate Cr Kylie Gaston made sure of that – and the council agreed to once again issue permits to allow 60 horses a day on Levy’s beach and 40 on the dunes.

Let’s be super clear on what all of this this means.

It means elected councillors turned up to an urgent meeting called for Monday night to decide whether to allow dozens of racehorses back on to Levy’s Beach without having all the facts.

Facts that were already known to the CEO who seems determined, for reasons unknown, to make sure that what the Warrnambool Racing Club and Racing Minister Martin Pakula want, they get.

If this is not a red-hot scandal, I don’t know what is.

The thing is, it comes on the heels of so many other examples of information being provided to councillors or the public that is either wrong, mis-leading or incomplete.

Just this week we saw an attempt by council to chainsaw two 115-year-old Australian banyan trees from Raglan Parade this weekend because of false suggestions they were causing car accidents.

Last month we saw a mass correction published in the council papers when wrong budget figures were included in an earlier agenda.

Before that we saw rubbery figures provided to the public about how well Flagstaff Hill Maritime Village was travelling, when in fact it is going backward.

And that is just the stuff we know about.

Ratepayers – and councillors – rely on being given accurate information by its very well-paid senior council officers, with Mr Anson at the top of that tree.

We shouldn’t have to work this hard to get to the truth.

It shouldn’t be the case that every time a major issue arises, we have to strap ourselves in – volunteers, ratepayers, journalists, councillors – for another exhausting wade through the reports and fine print to see what is really going on.

But this has become the culture within the WCC and it is the culture that has developed under Mr Anson’s watch.

As BCRAG member Teresa O’Brien shouted out at Monday night’s meeting, “We just want to be told the truth”.

When the stakes are so high – wild beaches that will be trampled, or ancient trees that cannot be replaced – never has this plea been more important.

[Note: What happens next with the racehorses on beaches? Now that the WCC has been found in breach of its planning laws, the State Planning Minister Richard Wynne may intervene and grant permission. If not, the WCC can amend its planning laws, but this is a lengthy process. The State Government moves into caretaker mode on November 1, before the state election on November 24. The Warrnambool Racing Club and Racing Minister Martin Pakula are desperate to have this resolved before then.]

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Carol Altmann – The Terrier

One of the many things that struck me while working through the plan to allow commercial racehorse training on our wild beaches is that all three of our local MPs – Dan Tehan, James Purcell and Roma Britnell – have strong ties to horse racing.

Federal MP Dan Tehan, although his office was oddly reluctant to make this clear, shares a very successful racehorse with the CEO of the Warrnambool Racing Club, Nick Rule, among others.

Independent MP James Purcell has an interest in numerous racehorses and his son is a professional trainer.

State Liberal MP Roma Britnell, who as far as I know doesn’t own a racehorse, has a horse race named in her honour and holds a Warrnambool Racing Club membership.

Which of our local MPs, then, will argue that our beaches should not be used for racehorse training on an industrial scale?

Which of them will lobby to instead increase protection of the Belfast Coastal Reserve?

None of them.

Instead, all three of our local MPs have started from the point that we need to reach a “compromise”, a “balance”, a “give-and-take” on having thoroughbred racehorses pounding along sections of beach between Killarney and Warrnambool and up and down the dunes at Levy’s Point.

Not one of them has said that large numbers of racehorses should not be in a coastal reserve in the first place.

At least Roma Britnell, in an email to me via her media advisor Jarrod Woolley, said she had “a number of concerns” about the draft management plan for the reserve.

When I asked what those concerns actually were, however, there was no more information forthcoming.

This is why documents released to the Belfast Coastal Reserve Action Group under Freedom of Information make for such a revealing – and depressing – read.

They spell out that commercial, large-scale racehorse training in the Belfast Coastal Reserve is virtually a fait accompli.

The correspondence between the various bodies involved in the draft plan never questions why racehorse training should be allowed, but how it will be managed.

At first I felt like giving up and not even bothering to write a submission. What was the point, the cards were already stacked, right?

But then it occurred to me that this is the very reason why other voices need to be heard, or those with the most power, the most access, and the most influence will simply roll right over the top with impunity.

We elect people to represent our views because we don’t have the time to wade through reports, but this time, I am sorry to say, those of us who want to see this reserve preserved are on our own.

So please make the effort, either by filling out the online survey or emailing a submission, via this link: www.engage.vic.gov.au/belfast