CURRENT WORKERS COMPENSATION STRUCTURE - ANOTHER BODY BLOW FOR QUEENSLAND TRAINERS

By Daniel Guy | Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Workers compensation is a necessary stable expense for any trainer involved in an industry where serious injury can literally be just a kick away. No argument there. But the burden of that expense and how it is applied is a sticking point with Daniel Guy, a former secretary of the Queensland Trainers’ Association, who remains committed to tackling the problem head-on until some meaningful change is affected. HRO ‘Guest Blogger’ Daniel Guy states his case.

There is an issue with workers compensation in terms of how much a trainer has to pay in Queensland compared, in particular, with New South Wales.

The New South Wales system is completely different in terms of the way the premium is calculated for a trainer.

There it is calculated on the number of runners, so the more activity you have, the more you pay.

In Queensland it is calculated on wage turnover. The more wages you pay, the more you pay in premiums.

I haven’t got a problem with that. The bigger stables are going to pay more than the little stables. There is no problem with that because the bigger stable should earn more money than the smaller stable, but the way it is structured now it is unfair because we are getting a lot more horses coming to race in Queensland from the Northern Rivers.

The issue there is in Queensland we are not competitive with trainers in New South Wales, in particular, the trainers on the border.

You can train just over the border and run the bulk of your horses in Queensland. By doing that you can almost completely avoid paying the cost of your premium by not having activity … or having very minimal activity in New South Wales. In those circumstances it is not costing you to run in Queensland.

When a Queensland trainer takes a horse across to run in the Northern Rivers or Sydney … wherever, it doesn’t matter … there is still a fee. That doesn’t apply the reverse way.

We are naturally disadvantaged and it’s been allowed to keep carrying on. Nothing is done about it.

You might say if that is the case surely it’s quite easy to relocate to the Northern Rivers. Personally, from our stable’s point of view, we would be a lot better off financially, but you a lot of ties to your local community. It is not as simple as putting your horses on a truck and relocating.

Calculating premiums on wages is a nightmare because it makes a trainer focus on the wage bill. He might try to shrink the wage bill. It doesn’t encourage wage growth. It doesn’t encourage you to go out and find the most experienced person … or the best you can find … because you can’t afford them.

The current system doesn’t encourage wage growth and doesn’t encourage experience growth. The experience will go south where they will get more money. They will do it. It will be alarming ‘experience drain’ yet nobody seems interested in it.

In that sense, the system is already clearly detrimental to the industry in Queensland.

So it’s becoming harder and harder for Queensland trainers. The premiums keep going up and up. We have no idea what our premiums are going to be next year … and there are components of the premiums that aren’t right.

The biggest component of your wages are your ground staff. They are the less likely to get injured. The smaller component in terms of wages is your track-work riders, but they are the most likely to get hurt.

So if you are paying a premium on your total wage bill it drives cost up. Every year it is going up and up.

There are things that happen. Like at the track in the morning your track-work rider can be riding your horse around. Your horse doesn’t do anything wrong. Somebody else’s horse does something wrong. Your horse shies at it. The rider falls off. Your rider gets hurt. You pay. It comes back to impact on you.

There are other things in terms of when you look at the way the jockeys coverage is compared to the trainer’s coverage. It is completely different.

I understand one is a contract of insurance, which the jockeys have, but the trainers don’t have that. We are not exempt from statutory claims … which is a huge worry.

We have a track here in the South East corner … Ipswich. You don’t even have tie-ups in the stalls at Ipswich. Now, the horse gets off the truck with a strapper. It walks in. Now that strapper has to control the horse, carry the gear bag, get the tie-ups out of the bag, tie it up to the rail … all while trying to hold the horse.

Now if that horse runs over the top of the strapper, and the strapper ends up hurt, then trainer gets stung. Going down the line, it is the owner that gets stung.

The trouble is that nobody wants to listen. Everybody passes the buck.

So all we are asking for is a fair playing field.

I spoke to an official from New South Wales the other day. He told me race riding is the only occupation where an ambulance follows you around. So it is dangerous. There has to be workers compensation, but it is just unworkable at the moment.

There is so much that needs to change. We’ve been needing change for a long time. When I was secretary of the Trainers’ Association I pushed for change. I virtually got fobbed off … and it continues to happen in an unsatisfactory manner.

Racing Queensland is completely separate from anything to do with workers compensation. They love to separate themselves from it. They say it has nothing to do with us. You deal with work cover.

Therein lies another problem in that you never deal with the same person twice, so you could have two injured workers dealing with two different people in two different offices.

There is not a certain department dedicated to racing, so there is no knowledge of the industry. It is just a nightmare!

It is not good for the industry because it hurts licensees and in turn it hurts owners because they are paying more money.

If Racing Queensland had a department that actually had the policy and had it spread amongst the licensees … the more you race you more you pay … then Racing Queensland would know what’s going on. They have no idea at the present time what is happening.

At the moment, due to the economic times, Queensland is not competitive in terms of prize-money. We try to understand. That is the current environment and we have to cop that … but we should nevertheless be looking at ways to make things cheaper for the owners, not driving the price up.

At the end of the day the trainer gets stung … he has to pass it on and it hits the owner. The owner walks away or takes his horses down south.

New South Wales isn’t perfect. Don’t get me wrong … it isn’t perfect, but I think we could take the best of the bits and pieces we have and work together to put it all together then we would surely reach a better deal.

But that supposes everybody comes to the party.

Like I say, we just want a fair playing ground so that we can be competitive in this area.

That is certainly not the case at the moment!