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I'm not even sure why we have a minister for racing. Minister for sport - sure. For racing?

Rogerson says that Winnie is the best Minister that racings ever had. He must be right given his tipping ability of his own horses.

But that's been the thinking for the last twenty years. At which point does the thinking change?

Yes agree, but imagine if Saundry put together a budget and arrangement like that for the thoroughbred industry, the knives would be out for him, especially that lot at Ellerslie

I don't agree that NZ needs or should have tiered racing. We don't have a distribution of trainers/jockeys/horses that creates the relationship. There is no real difference between a horse racing at Woodville to a horse racing at Trentham. It would takes years to manifest such a variance. Our training areas aren't reflective of those areas. Things like that allows the tiers to operate effectively in Australia. And costs of a trainer in a metro area are significantly higher than they are for a country trainer. Can you expand on which areas/tracks would be candidates for Metro status? And can you give us some ideas on stakes levels? Country $6k, Provincial $9k, Metro $25k - or something different to that? And can you give us an idea of a schedule. We will need one metro meeting at least every week. So the metro tracks chosen are going to need to sustain more than 52 race dates (since they will have some midweek dates for carnivals etc). And how will we maintain those metro tracks so that they don't become stuffed?