Winter’s Whoopsie on Greyhound Funding

It seems Mr Winter has mistaken Tasracing’s balance sheet for the State Budget. Either that, or he is deliberately misrepresenting financial reports from the state racing agency.

Either way, he needs to retract recent statements he’s made on social media and apologise.

In early October, Mr Winter claimed on X that: “TasRacing has reported to ASIC that it expects lost revenues from greyhond [sic] racing to match savings. Therefore, the claim by the Greens that ending greyhound racing will save taxpayer dollars is utterly false.”

In response to an animal welfare advocate posting about the Tasracing annual report showing ending greyhound racing won’t have an impact on the agency’s cash flow, this morning Mr Winter replied with a repost of his October statement and added: “One of your main arguments for ending greyhound racing has been ‘saving’ taxpayer money. You’ve just pointed to a report that shows it’s not true. Well done.”

Oh Dean. Dearie me.

This is what Tasracing says in Mr Winter’s screenshot of their financial report to ASIC, and again in their annual report:

“Tasracing currently anticipates no significant impact on the net cash flows of the company with lost revenues expected to match savings from any closure.”

In other words, the agency will lose the publicly funded revenue they previously received to run the industry – but that loss will be balanced out by the fact they no longer have to pay to run greyhound racing. Makes total sense.

But that’s not the critical point.

The critical thing is the entire reason Tasracing will see “lost revenues” is because they no longer receive taxpayer funding to run the greyhound code – meaning a saving for the state budget in not providing that funding.

In other words, contrary to Dean Winter’s claims, the Tasracing reports actually support the idea that ending greyhound racing will save taxpayer dollars.

This is quite a cock up. As important as Mr Winter thinks the exploitation of dogs for profit is, he should still be able to figure out that Tasracing’s financials are actually a different thing to the state budget.

To use Dean Winter’s own words, his characterisation of Tasracing’s report is “utterly false.” One of his arguments against ending greyhound racing is that it won’t save taxpayer money, but he’s pointed to a report to show it certainly will.

Well done, Dean.