Fair enough, they have at least started publishing data promptly and publicly. However, it is also highly misleading.

GWIC has started to confuse us in two ways. First, it is using figures which are not directly comparable to those once used by GA; it relegates litter numbers to the rear and instead it leads off with the number of pups whelped. There is no history to compare with until you do your own arithmetic to guess at what the trends are.

Second, even then GA has published no complete statistics since 2015 FY (2016 data was there for Victoria only) so there is no reliable source of national statistics to use for that comparison. Indeed, GA has completely removed national statistics from its website all of them, old or new. We have no idea why this happened. When GA did do the stats it showed Litters Registered and Greyhounds Named, never Pups Whelped. GWIC does not show Names so we have no idea of the share of each litter which gets that far.

Third, a major problem with all this is that breeding, by its nature, is national in character, not state-centric. To get the full picture now you will need to burrow through each states annual reports, try and reconcile the differing presentations and then add them up yourself.

This is a Mickey Mouse approach to assessing how the industry is going.

It is also an attempt to disguise the hard facts of life. Effectively

Breeding has roughly halved and may well stay at that level.
Little real effort has been mounted to reverse the trend.
The basic betting product has changed by (a) reducing the average field quality, (b) offering large numbers of races with 4, 5, 6, or 7 runners and (c) increasing the proportion of risky races of 400m or less.

I would like to add some info about overall betting turnover but that is not published any more either. The data in the thoroughbreds Fact Book is of some help but is not complete.

Broadly, in NSW Litter numbers are down from around 1,300 through the early 2000s to 563 now. Victoria is running at about 640 compared with 1,250 a decade ago. NSW, Victoria and Queensland are responsible for about 82% of all breeding.

How can that be? The "I" in GWIC stands for integrity.

On a more serious note, using a low year as a comparison base is clearly misleading. Sort of like telling a bank that there is definite evidence that you are on top of your business because you have improved last years loss of $1 million to a loss this year of $950,000.

Charles,

The tricky thing is that while the state admins have some significant structural differences they all conform to the principle of management by committee - ie by a board - with a CEO looking after day-to-day matters.

Consequently, no-one is ever to blame.

The related conundrum is that they are never audited as to effectiveness. An auditor will check that the sums are right but not whether the expense was worthwhile. So, if you spend $1m on trackworks there is no system for assessing whether it was a success or not.

Similarly, are subsidies for, say, distance racing providing a return on the investment? (Of course, the answer is no). The objective might be good but did we get there?

This contrasts, for example, with recent cases in NSW where the Auditor General hammered roads and railways people (both government instrumentalities) for poor investments in hardware or engineering.