THE SUNSHINE COAST NEWSPAPER COLUMN - IS RACING QUEENSLAND BECALMED OR SAILING INTO A STORM?

By Graham Potter | Sunday, October 25, 2015

Graham Potter writes a weekly column for the Sunshine Coast daily. Due to demand from those having trouble accessing the paper these columns are now also published on HRO courtesy of the Sunshine Coast daily.

When the Queensland State Government sacked all the racing boards on June 2 Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk justified that ‘shake up of the industry’ by saying that, given the extent of its problems, racing needed to start ‘with a clean slate.’

Four months on and the ‘clean slate’ vision still has little to show in the credit column.

Sure there was a procedure that had to be followed in terms of getting legislation in place to appoint a new racing board and a consultation process was undertaken with selected participants, which only got going in August.

Sadly though, the point that arguably the majority of stakeholders in horseracing, the prime member of the three code structure, did not agree with the proposed new board structure in the first place and that ‘consultation’ has long since become something of a dirty word to stakeholders means that the first two points that the Government will claim as progress has actually been counterproductive, to some degree, to the will of the horseracing industry.

If the ground was shaky before it has only got shakier.

So what does racing need to get some air into its lungs?

The simple answer ... granted easier to say than to do ... was given by respected racing identity Peter Boyce in the same month that Palaszczuk was pounding out her ‘clean slate’ policy.

On June 10, one week after the Queensland Thoroughbred Racing Board over which he presided as Chairman was dismissed, Boyce said, ‘Whilst I recognize that the industry will continue under new guidance, it should not be left without leadership for any length of time.’

Get it?

Leadership! Where is it?

With the utmost of respect to his financial prowess, Ian Hall the acting CEO of Racing Queensland, who comes from the KPMG financial services group, can’t provide it at this time.

The KPMG slogans are ‘Cutting through complexity’ and ‘Go beyond the obvious’ ... two very strong attributes if they can be correctly applied to a particular situation, but for that ethos to be effective the person in charge needs to be fully up to speed with the intricacies of the business in which he is operating.

Hall, through no fault of his own, is not that person when it comes to racing where he has little to no knowledge of the overall subject matter yet, in the current scenario, decisions he makes will have a major impact on the many thousands of people who rely on the racing industry to make their living.

That fact brings us to a second problem.

Confidence! Where is it?

The confidence of stakeholders is, in one way, quite understandably in disarray because of the perceived lack of leadership. On the other hand, perhaps the stakeholder’s position is of their own making.

Collectively, as the group that powers the industry which pays executive’s wages, it can be argued that stakeholders should be more demanding and, within reason, more bold in those demands.

As Ian Hall said at the Racing Minister’s press conference in July, ‘It is clear that the current position of Racing Queensland is untenable. We can’t continue in this current way. We have to take decisive action.’

The more things change ...

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