(Image: Nicki Kohl/Telegraph Herald via AP, File)

The discovery in August that Australian greyhounds were being “exported” to the UK and re-shipped to China — a location to which Australian dogs are not permitted to be directly sold given the appalling treatment they face — has shone a light on the federal government’s refusal to prohibit greyhound exports. State body Greyhound Racing Victoria is currently investigating the UK export case.

Notionally, greyhounds can’t be exported without a permit from industry body Greyhounds Australasia (GA) — which won’t approve export to destinations like China, Hong Kong, Macau (home of the sickening Canidrome, now closed) and Vietnam, which have a record of animal abuse.

The requirement has been effective in reducing the number of greyhounds directly exported to such countries. But it is an industry-run scheme, with no external sanctions for breaches and no legislative support. Some in the industry evade the requirement either by shipping via countries like the UK or, potentially, New Zealand, to where most exported Australian greyhounds are sent — or ignore the requirement altogether.

To prevent evasion, the industry itself has been calling for the federal government — which controls exports of “prescribed goods”, a category that greyhounds fall under — to intervene and legislate the export licensing requirement, since all the way back to 2005.

Former Labor agriculture shadow Joel Fitzgibbon examined this in 2015: Greyhounds Australasia said then it had been lobbying the government to block the export of all greyhounds without GA’s approval, but then-agriculture minister Barnaby Joyce didn’t even respond to GA’s requests on the issue.

Joyce’s complete lack of interest in the issue was consistent with his disgusting record on animal welfare.

Greyhounds Australasia told Crikey it tried again with a different minister — Joyce’s successor David Littleproud. “GA made a formal request in November 2018 for the introduction of greyhound passports for any dog that was to be exported,” CEO Cherie Nicholl said. “In February 2019 the federal minister for agriculture and water resources advised GA that the state and territory ministers did not support GA’s proposal for a greyhound passport scheme that would become a requirement for export.”

So, according to Littleproud, the states are the ones blocking the export licences (even though exports are a Commonwealth responsibility). That’s quite a turnaround. In 2015, then-Victorian racing minister Martin Pakula savaged Joyce for refusing to legislate the export licences.

So if it wasn’t Victoria, which state is opposed? NSW is the major source of greyhound exports — but it’s not NSW. According to a NSW government report earlier this year, in 2017, NSW “wrote to the then Commonwealth minister for agriculture and water resources to advocate for strengthened regulation and oversight of greyhound exports”.

Maybe Western Australia, then? WA wrote to Littleproud in 2018, too, urging greyhound passports.

We asked Littleproud to say which state opposed greyhound passports. Then he changed his tune. His department now claims not that the states blocked it but that it isn’t even a matter for the Commonwealth, telling us “greyhounds are not livestock and as such there are no licensing requirements”.

What’s curious about all this is that in 2016 Littleproud’s department, having been shamed by the ABC’s reporting of the treatment of exported greyhounds in hellholes like Macau, supported greyhound passports. The McHugh inquiry in NSW, which devoted a chapter to exports in 2016, found that Agriculture had supported the adoption of GA’s greyhound passport as a condition of export. And contrary to Littleproud’s current stance that the Commonwealth has no role, greyhound exports are already regulated by the Commonwealth under the Export Control (Animals) Order 2004.

To resolve the impasse, the Green’s Mehreen Faruqi proposes an outright ban on greyhound exports. And GA has now made a new industry requirement that all racing greyhounds be desexed upon retirement. Most exports are now for breeding, so this will further reduce export numbers.

The only question remaining, therefore, is why Littleproud and the Nationals continue to stand in the way of a reform that the greyhound industry itself, and the states, have been calling for for years. Plain bastardry seems an unlikely reason, but it’s one of the few plausible ones.