Round Two: More of New Zealand's Retirees Land in Queensland.

A second planeload of greyhounds touched down at Toowoomba Wellcamp Airport last week, about seventy dogs this time, chartered in from New Zealand and cleared for entry as companion animals. A similar-sized flight had landed the week before. Between the two, close to 140 greyhounds have now moved from New Zealand to Queensland, which by the ABC's calculation against New Zealand's pre-ban racing population of around 1,500 dogs works out to roughly nine per cent of the country's racing greyhounds, not the industry as a whole.

New Zealand's commercial greyhound racing ban took effect on 1 August, the result of years of reviews that kept returning the same uncomfortable finding: injury rates had improved, but not enough, and not to a level the NZ's government was prepared to keep licensing. More than 1,500 dogs needed somewhere to go. A transition agency was duly set up to manage rehoming, retraining for industry workers, and an orderly wind-down. Some of the dogs, it turns out, went to Queensland instead.

Queensland's Minister for Sport and Racing, Tim Mander, told the ABC in an interview reported this week that he wasn't aware of Thursday's flight and that the government had played no part in arranging it. He did not sound troubled by its arrival regardless, telling the ABC the dogs had simply come over with their trainers in search of somewhere to keep racing, and that housing and caring for them from here would fall to those trainers. Asked by the ABC about the industry itself, Mander did not hedge: "It's a big industry and it makes a significant economic contribution to our state," he said, citing the thousands of jobs it supports and the money already sunk into facilities, and telling the broadcaster the state intended to keep backing the sport. Animal welfare, he added in the same interview, was governed by an extensive set of rules the government took seriously.

New Zealand's Greyhound Transition Agency, the body set up to manage rehoming as the ban took hold, said it knew about the flights but had no part in organising them. Its remit only extends to dogs whose owners choose to transfer ownership to it, and that option remains open: a dog transferred to the Agency is deregistered from racing anywhere, including Australia. The greyhounds that flew to Toowoomba, in other words, are the ones whose owners decided against retirement. The Agency said the airlines' passenger manifests would be checked against its own ownership records, with anything relevant handed on to the authorities that oversee racing in Australia. The Queensland Racing Integrity Commission did not respond to the ABC's request for comment. Those dogs already have a track built and waiting for them.

Last year Queensland opened The Q, a greyhound racing complex at Purga, near Ipswich, built at a total capitalised cost of about $87.5 million, including $44.15 million accessed from the state government's Racing Infrastructure Fund. It was promoted, before it opened, as being about as safe for dogs as a greyhound track could be. Animal-welfare advocates say seven greyhounds had died from injuries sustained there before the facility officially opened, and that the toll had reached sixteen by October, when racing on one track was suspended and an independent review turned up a long list of problems with the facility itself.

Dr Alison Vaughan, a senior scientific officer at the Royal New Zealand SPCA, put the comparison plainly to ABC Radio Brisbane this week, noting that Queensland's injury rate is higher than the one New Zealand banned the sport over. She was blunt about what the imports mean in practice too: the sport remains legal to export dogs into, she said, but the practice undercuts what New Zealand's ban was actually trying to achieve. Technically legal is doing a great deal of work in that sentence.

The mechanism is almost too neat to invent. Australian biosecurity rules govern how an animal enters the country, not what happens to it once it clears customs. A companion animal, once admitted, is free to become a racing greyhound again, and nobody along the import chain is required to mind the distinction. A federal official made much the same point to a Senate committee earlier this year: control ends at the border. Meanwhile Queensland's own RSPCA is already stretched trying to find homes for the retired greyhounds on its books. New Zealand's exodus does not make that easier, whatever proportion of the new arrivals end up back on a track rather than on somebody's couch.

None of this happens outside an economy. Racing Queensland's 2024-25 annual report records 643 greyhound meetings, 7,316 races, 55,410 starts and $1.4 billion in wagering turnover, roughly a quarter of everything wagered across the state's three racing codes. A separate economic-impact study commissioned for Queensland racing put the greyhound code's contribution to the state economy at $348.4 million for the same year. Wagering tax flows back to fund the codes, the codes stage the races, the races generate the wagering. It is a tidy circuit, and the greyhound sits somewhere inside it.

Australia is not entirely alone in holding on. The ACT banned greyhound racing in 2018. Tasmania has legislated a phase-out due by 2029, though the bill has faced repeated delays in parliament. But Australia remains, by some distance, the largest commercial greyhound racing jurisdiction left standing, now apparently large enough to absorb nearly a tenth of New Zealand's racing dogs rather than let the sport wind down there entirely.

New Zealand looked at its injury numbers and decided the dogs mattered more than the industry, so it closed the industry down. Queensland looked at broadly the same numbers and decided the opposite: built an $87.5 million facility to bring the injuries down, watched dogs die there anyway, and kept racing regardless. Nobody forced two planeloads of New Zealand's greyhounds onto the tarmac at Toowoomba. Nobody in Queensland needed to ask for them, either. A billion-dollar wagering market and a state government that has already put $44.15 million of public money into a purpose-built track do not require persuading. They simply require that nothing get in the way. In Queensland, for now, nothing has.