Look, cards on the table here: I’m certainly no fancy big city politician. I’m just a humble news editor for a pop culture website.
HOWEVER. If by some minor or major miracle I wind up as an elected member of parliament (dog forbid) and I found myself in opposition of a particular decision, I’d probably at least figure out why the decision was made before I start flapping my idiot gums about how it should be overturned.
To wit, here we have
Barnaby Joyce. Leader of the National Party. Deputy Prime Minister of Australia (*shudders*). And a man who is not afraid to express just how much he dislikes the recent decision by the
NSW Government to ban all greyhound racing in the state.
The fact that the decision was handed down by Mike Baird and his extremely Coalition Government-friendly Liberal Party pals notwithstanding, Barnaby sees what they’re doing, and he doesn’t like it. Not one bit.
Speaking 2GB radio earlier today, Joyce compared the greyhound racing ban to Julia Gillard‘s 2011 live exports ban, not in the sense that they both address needless, systemic, and horrific animal cruelty issues. But rather that apparently both bans have had no effect other than to harm the “bottom” end of town.
“On the back of the live cattle ban, I am always a little bit cautious about banning anything.”
“If you ban things, I think you’ve got to be careful. You start hurting people you didn’t expect to hurt.”
“There’s a lot of people who just can’t afford to be in the racehorse industry, it’s very expensive, but they can afford to own a dish licker and that gives them an opportunity to be at the track. It’s not the top end of town at the greyhound track, it’s the bottom and you’ve got to be a little bit careful in jumping into a section of their lives.”
Joyce, who is the highest profile politician to speak out against the ban in NSW, stated that a “way around” the ban should instead be explored, with officials working with the industry to try and sort out the problems.
“It’s best to try and work with industry and get them to sort out their problems and that’s going to cause me grief saying that because people will say ‘well, you’re talking against your colleagues.”
“You’ve always got to try and regulate it, monitor it and make sure people are doing the right thing [and] jump on them from a great height if they’re not.”
But here’s the real kicker, when asked for his thoughts into the Justice Department‘s report into the greyhound industry – the one that provided Baird with the impetus to immediately outlaw the sport in the state entirely – Joyce, quite gleefully, stated that he simply had not read it, and nor did he have any intention to.
“I haven’t read the report and to be quite frank, I don’t intend to read the report but what I do is know a lot of people who breed greyhounds and they seem like decent people.”
He hasn’t read it.
He hasn’t read the report.
But they seem like decent people.
The report, it should be reiterated, found that as many as 68,000 greyhounds deemed too slow or uncompetitive by trainers had been slaughtered by the industry over a 12-year period. They even had a fun term for those dogs: “Wastage.”
But yeah nah, there doesn’t seem like much of a need to read that fancy report into the banning of an entire industry, hey Barns. I mean, why do that when you can just blindly jump on the radio and babble on like a ill-informed lunatic instead?
‘Course it’s all a bit rich coming from a man who was absolutely dead set on seeing dogs banned when they were owned by Johnny Depp. Who could forget this now-magnificently-ironic quip?
The Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, ladies and gentlemen.
The nation’s 2IC.
Photo: Stefan Postles/Getty.
