Today in Parliament, Abigail contributed to a debate condemning the Greyhound Welfare Integrity Commision for flouting orders from the Upper House to produce fulsome documents in relation to allegations of workplace sexual harassment, systemic sexism, racism and offensive behaviour by senior staff.
Abigail said:
On behalf of The Greens, I indicate that we will also be supporting the motion. It is pretty extraordinary—and I take the point from the Leader of the Opposition that it does not really matter what your position is on greyhounds—that we are looking at a body that was set up in the course of giving the greyhound racing industry a second chance in this State. Part of that agreement, after everything that the public looked at, after all of the scandals, was that we would have this strong integrity body. There have been some teething issues with the Greyhound Welfare and Integrity Commission [GWIC]. We all know that. When the parliamentary select committee looked into the commission a few years ago, there were a lot of questions being asked even at that time. But it is very clear that when the Parliament, the Government and the State, and the people of this State are giving a significant amount of money to an organisation that has "integrity" in its name, we would expect them to act with integrity. The very least the commission could do is take the powers of this House seriously.
There is a kind of creeping incursion into our powers. There is a horrible expression about the fish rotting from the head downwards, or whatever it is, which I am sure the Hon. Emma Hurst, as a vegan, agrees is a bit something. When you have a government that is so allergic to accountability and so allergic to transparency, doing everything it possibly can to avoid these sorts of orders, perhaps it is not surprising that GWIC also thinks it can get away with doing things like putting redacted documents into privilege. That is the culture that this new Labor Government is setting for the entire Government, including all of its agencies. That should worry all of us.
It is not up to GWIC to decide whether or not it complies with the orders. It just needs to do that. The least that the Minister could do, without us having to instruct GWIC to do it, would be to pull the commission into line and let it know of the Government's expectations that it should be complying with what is an incredibly serious matter and with the powers of this House. Really getting to the bottom of something is a great example of why the powers of this House are so important, because it is getting to the bottom of something incredibly serious. For all of those reasons, we support the motion.
Read the debate in Hansard here.
27 May 2026