curious

Covid response, safety and probable economic recovery/opportunity timeline.

And I have family in a similar situation booking/planning a return for a 12 month hiatus here.

Fair enough. Similar death rate and testing rate on that basis too. The jury's out still on how things will go over the next few months both health wise and economically. I'm happy with the NZ strategy for now.

Really? You are dreaming.

I guess we just have to stay sitting here in the dark a while longer.?

What do you mean? NZ has a completely different COVID strategy, rightly or wrongly, and only time will tell that.

hahaha .... are the horses also leading themselves around? And if one of the RV staff has the virus it sounds like a good way to quickly infect the entire jockey population.

If true, that's atrocious behaviour and a very bad look for the industry. Someone should call the police.

Surely they will let everyone know if there's been a change of plans?

It was just the July one today and the first 4 months of the new season tomorrow. July is probably moot given the announced level 3 restrictions anyway I'd say. Even if they come up with some way of opening traing centres safely with contactless operation, it will only be able to be for low risk activities, so as previously no fast work jumpouts or anything till we get to level 2 which might be 4 to 6 weeks or more away. That's my read anyway. Anyone have a different take?

No wonder their pricing is so crap a lot of the time and they are complaining about margins if that is the case.

16 weeks to what? And lobby government for what?

Maybe but whether that will be in time to have horses ready for an October HB spring carnival is one question. The other is that knowing how to do it and actually doing it are two different things. There wasn't much sign of that at level 2 and 3 here from what I saw and heard.

And I guess we have to first wait and see whether or not there will be a HB spring carnival at least one that looks like the one we know.

Maybe but they've been doing that for years and I don't see it happening unless they get this draconian and illegal legislation through and I can't see that happening either.

Blurs a lot of things. It IS a bit of a blur.

Why would RITA want to close tracks? Can't see why they would care. They just want us producing product for them to take bets on don't they?

The spread of COVID-19 is based on two factors. 1: How dense the population is. 2: How dense the population is.

There are two different scenarios here. One is businesses that are likely to have similar levels of business post-covid as pre-covid. They need to do what they can to retain employees for re-opening. Many may need more at least temporarily to cope with backlogs and demand and possibly to manage level 2 and 3 protocols. Others like Air NZ which predict a 90% reduction in business will not need large numbers of staff hence redundancies are inevitable and they might as well be getting on with them. I'd expect RITA would be closer to the latter category than the former though it's hard to know when we don't even have the half-year report let alone any indication of what they expect going forward.

Isn't the idea to avoid layoffs by providing businesses a means of retaining and paying (at least something) staff to keep them on during the closure period) so they are there ready to go at restart?

Business Name Number of employees paid Total amount paid Last updated RACING AT AWAPUNI COMBINED ENTERPRISE INCORPORATED 32 $150,000.00 08/04/2020

I was trying to figure out what they all do or are doing? I could see a case for about half that with the events, market etc. and there are evidently a few part timers in there. It appears there are salary/wage costs of about 250k directly related to race days and about $1.25m associated with the catering/function business.

There's a provision for new businesses that don't have year old revenue figures so they have to show that revenue this year has dropped 30% from a month preceding COVID to a month following it.

Yes, it's 12 weeks @ $585= $7020 for each employee working 20+ hours per week.

What I can't work out is how the codes would meet the 30% year on year drop in revenue requirement? Has that been indicated to member clubs?