Big Brother Baird’s dog act
IT was a bright cold day in July, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Welcome to Mike Baird’s NSW, a state now resembling George Orwell’s 1984. Orwell had his Big Brother, writes Mark Latham.
NSW
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IT was a bright cold day in July, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Welcome to Mike Baird’s NSW, a state now resembling George Orwell’s 1984. Government power is squashing our freedoms and taking control of our lives.
Orwell had his Big Brother.
In Sydney, we are living under Big Baird and his NSW nanny state. First the government came for anyone wanting a drink and bite to eat in the CBD after midnight.
Then it came for the science textbooks in our schools, telling students there’s no such thing as male and female, no such thing as biology in the Safe Schools program.
Then it came for democratically elected councils, amalgamating local government areas against the will of the people. Then two weeks ago it came for the greyhound industry, with a single Facebook post destroying the dreams, jobs and sporting interests of a generation of battlers who want nothing more than to watch their dogs run.
Without a greyhound industry there can be no greyhounds — dogs specifically bred for hunting and racing.
Big Baird has authorised the state-sponsored genocide of a breed that first came to Australia with Arthur Phillip in 1788, to help the early settlers forage for food.
At his Ministry of Truth, in a classic example of doublespeak, the Premier has told those fighting to keep their industry and animals alive: “I’m a big advocate of small government that keeps out of your way”.
Lockout laws are liberty.
Safe Schools are knowledge.
Council amalgamations are democracy.
Greyhound closures are freedom.
Baird talks in Orwellian Newspeak: trying to look calm and cheerful as he introduces dictatorial government, systematically getting in the way of people trying to exercise the rights of freedom.
He’s the worst kind of tyrant: a self-confident fool who has deluded himself that he holds certain beliefs, while practising the opposite.
Big Baird says the report of the Special Commission into greyhound racing is “chilling”.
It reads more like an undergraduate essay, vainly guessing at the extent of the culling of non-competitive dogs. The report admits that, “the precise number of greyhounds destroyed by the industry each year in NSW is unknown”.
It concedes that some of the figures it examined “did not include greyhounds that were rehomed through private charities or greyhounds that lived out their full lives on owner-trainer properties, or the properties and/or friends of these owner-trainers”. Other statistics were “largely speculative and confidence in (the) figures is low”.
Even its preferred authority, the Working Dog Alliance, “acknowledges that the data upon which it relied might not be fully independent and could contain overlapping categories”.
This is what it must be like living under a Third World dictatorship: where whole industries can be wiped out on a hunch, rather than hard factual information.
Big Baird has ruined the livelihood of thousands of greyhound trainers and track employees based on guesswork.
The NSW Liberal and National Parties are doing the bidding of the Greens. And it’s simply unnecessary.
Greyhound breeding numbers have already fallen in the first half of 2016, with a 37 per cent year-on-year reduction compared to the 2009-15 average. In part, this is due to new breeding restrictions, with greyhound bitches limited to two litters every 18 months.
Big Baird is closing down the industry at a time when the over-breeding issue is being resolved.
This is what authoritarian leaders do: pushing on and destroying lives oblivious to changed circumstances.
Overbreeding and the culling of the herd is an inevitable feature of mankind’s 12,000-year-old domestication of animals. The beef, pork or lamb cuts most of us will be eating tonight are the product of stock culling — animals that are not imposing enough to be kept for breeding purposes.
Each year the RSPCA puts down more than 40,000 animals, mostly abandoned cats and dogs. By the logic of the Special Commission’s report, this warrants an end to cat and dog breeding in Australia.
As it stands, the RSPCA will have to euthanise up to 15,000 greyhounds in NSW — dogs either racing right now, waiting to be raced or in unborn litters. The rehoming of greyhounds, at just 600 per annum, is insufficient to prevent the mass slaughter of the breed. This is another feature of nanny state government: the solution is worse than the problem itself.
The greyhound commissioner, the octogenarian Michael McHugh, might have been a fine jurist in his day — a High Court judge, no less.
But already he has made seven corrections to his report, including the withdrawal of his claim that a slimmed down industry — with fewer dogs and fewer meetings — is “unsustainable”.
Another glaring error remains uncorrected: supposedly exposing a NSW breeder who had drowned his pups when, in fact, he was an American who had done this more than a decade ago.
The former NSW Treasury Secretary and Greyhound Racing Chairman, the widely respected Percy Allan, has slammed the report as incomplete, given its failure to “interview or even examine a representative cross-section of owners and trainers or industry leaders”.
The McHugh Commission started out as a response to the problem of live baiting. Yet on this issue, it found that 80-90 per cent of greyhound trainers are doing the right thing.
They are now being punished with the closure of their industry.
Many are at a point of despair, their lifetime passions and investments reduced to nothing by government decree.
How is Big Baird caring for them?
No financial compensation details were worked out prior to the fatal announcement.
To comfort the people so badly disadvantaged, the government issued a ‘fact sheet’, which ended with the following advice:
“For people affected by these changes who need immediate wellbeing support, there are a number of support services including Lifeline 13 11 14 and BeyondBlue 1300 224 636”.
Truly, what sort of person is Mike Baird?
He wrecks people’s lives, driving them to the edge of suicide, and then hands out phone numbers to stop them from killing themselves?
He’s the biggest animal of the lot.
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