Victoria Ferguson email to the AHIC

From: Victoria Ferguson
To: secretary@horsecouncil.org.au
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2008 4:52 PM
Subject: Re: Information from the Horse Industry Council

Any levy has to be fair & equitable so the horses that are able to earn the higehst incomes eg racehorses should be paying the highest levy, so they should pay levies on prizemoney won and a levy on all TB auction sales. There are plenty of horses that are not registered with any organisations so they will not make any contributions, a lot of horses are multi registered, so they should only have to pay once, the grants which were given to businesses and payments to horse carers are now going to be taxed so those taxes should go directly to this fund and not into general revenue. There are plenty of horses slaughtered at the meatworks, so there should be a levy on them retrospective to 25 August. But the biggest levy payers should be the owners of the shuttle stallions, they should pay a percentage of every service fee they get for 2008 & 2009 season. The above measures would soon pay the 80%, but I am sure this will never happen in a million years as it is too fair. The levy on registration is a joke when you look at the above suggestions.
However no legislation should be introduced until the results of the Callinan enquiry are known it is absolutely iniquitous that this legislation is being rushed through as they know Callinan results won't come out till 24 April.