Carol Altmann – The Terrier

Now this is some serious clout: top-gun academic Dr John Sherwood, from Deakin University, is preparing a report on the Levy’s Beach area which has been earmarked for large-scale racehorse training.

Dr Sherwood, a member of the State Government’s new Marine and Coastal Council and the 2017 Warrnambool City Council Citizen of the Year, has been keeping a quiet eye on the plan to allow up to 160 racehorses a day into what is part of the Belfast Coastal Reserve.

Dr Sherwood is now looking closely into the so-called “Hoon Hill” area, which has been woefully under-researched in terms of its potential environmental and cultural importance.

Respected local ecologist Jodie Honan is also preparing a report on the plants and animals in the area, because – once again – we don’t really know what is there.

Despite this gaping hole in the data, the Warrnambool City Council and State Government intend to allow up to 120 racehorses a day on the beach and 40 a day on the dunes, five days a week, from November.

As you do…in a coastal reserve.

Both reports have been commissioned by the Belfast Coastal Reserve Action Group which, as we know, has been fighting commercial racehorse training on beaches for almost four years now.

Dr Sherwood entering this issue is, to me, monumental because he comes with decades of experience and a tonne of respect.

His most recent work, in case you have been hiding in a cupboard, gained international attention after it raised the possibility of humans living at Moyjil/Point Richie in Warrnambool up to 120,000 years ago – 50,000 years longer than previously thought.

I will be fascinated to see his and Jodie’s reports.

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

The full power of the horse racing industry in Victoria has been laid bare.

In 118 pages, the Belfast Coastal Reserve Management Plan released this week ties itself in knots to justify the unjustifiable: allowing full-scale racehorse training along one of the few, accessible wild beaches in our area.

At no time, unlike with the dirt-bike riders or off-road drivers, did the State Government consider banning racehorse training on the stretch of beach between east Killarney and Levy’s Beach, which is home to a breathtaking array of endangered birdlife and indigenous cultural heritage.

No, from day one, it has been a case of the government working out how to accommodate racehorses, as if they have been on our beaches for thousands of years and have wings and feathers, or gills and scales.

Let’s do the maths on what is now going to happen:

Up to 40 racehorses a day, five days a week, all year round, will be allowed to train on ‘Hoon Hill’, a long sand dune area west of Levy’s Beach. This equals up to 200 horses a week.

Up to 120 horses a day can train on Levy’s Beach foreshore, five days a week, all year round. This equals up to 600 horses a week.

This means up to 800 horses a month will be running up the dunes and 2400 running along the beach.

In one year, this is the equivalent of up to 9600 horses on the dunes and 28,800 on the beach.

In two years time, when the government plans to assess the impact, there will have been – potentially – a combined total of 76,800 horse movements along Levy’s Beach and up the dunes at Hoon Hill.

Up to 76,800 horse movements in just two years of a 15-year plan.

Will it have an impact on the beach? Hmm, let me think about that for one nano second.

This entire “problem” of what to do about professional racehorse trainers has been created by the sheer power of an industry that has huge clout well beyond our little patch in south-west Victoria.

You only have to see the cosying up that goes on between politicians and the Victorian Racing Club.

Free passes. Memberships. Tickets to the Cup. Heck, some of them even own racehorses themselves, like our local MPs Dan Tehan and James Purcell who, in an Orwellian twist, receives lavish praise for looking after his own interests and that of his son, Aaron, a professional racehorse trainer.

And if anyone dares to mention that racehorses can be trained in purpose-built facilities, that they don’t actually need to be trained on our wild beaches, they are whacked with a thinly-veiled form of blackmail: the trainers will go “elsewhere” (although I am not sure where “elsewhere” is), all the jobs will dry up and the local racing industry will collapse.

What a load of bullshite.

The Warrnambool Racing Club would not be investing millions into the Warrnambool racecourse if its whole survival depended on continued access to a stretch of coastline.

Let’s not forget that these professional racehorse trainers just started showing up at Levy’s one day, using the beach without permits or permission, and when one of those horses won a Melbourne Cup in 2015, they began to arrive by the truckload.

But instead of telling these trainers to pack up and leave a coastal reserve, it was decided there was no option but to bend the rules around them. Not only that, carparks and tracks will now be added to give them better access!

The motorcross riders and off-road drivers must be feeling hard done by.

They have been tearing around the dunes at Levy’s Beach for years and – quite rightly – have been given notice that they will no longer be tolerated.

So as one form of horsepower moves out, another much stronger horsepower is moving in.

Don’t be fooled for one second by the romantic images of horses wading into the surf to soothe their weary muscles, or swimming gently behind a row boat as they swim out their strains. They can do that now at Lady Bay.

This is not horse riding, this is racehorse training, on a massive scale.

This is about conditioning, this is about pace and strength: the hard, powerful stuff, up dunes and down dunes and along long stretches of beach, dodging the walkers and birdwatchers and startled birds, and squashing the starfish and worms and bugs and shellfish and little pids and pods that make up the full and brilliant ecosystem of a wild coastline.

It makes me want to weep, this sort of destruction, all for no other reason than convenience, ease and greed.

And nobody else, nobody, but the powerful racing industry would ever get away with it.

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