The Racing NSW Participants Bulletin issued on Wednesday was so misleading that it deserves comment.

Firstly it was headed "Betfair Required To Be Transparent."

This was a reference to a Federal Court interlocutory judgment obtained by Racing NSW that morning requiring Betfair to supply some additional documents in its well publicised case against Racing NSW.

The obvious implication is that Betfair had something to hide, which is true enough. The documents included Betfair's full internal financial accounts. Naturally it was concerned that these might fall into the hands of its competitors.

However Betfair's case against Racing NSW does not in any way relate to its profitability or otherwise. It is purely to do with whether the Constitution permits Racing NSW to charge a fee which penalises an interstate operator at the expense of one in New South Wales.

What Racing NSW forgot to explain in its Bulletin, was that the discovery claim it was appealing against was one which asked for some 60,000 documents from Betfair, including material prepared well before its Race Fields legislation went to Parliament.

Justice Perram disallowed that request on the basis that he could not see how such an onerous burden should be imposed on Betfair.

The final request allowed by the Full Federal Court amounted to some 100 documents.

The order was only permitted because counsel for Racing NSW admitted that their case had little chance of success unless something turned up in the new documents.

In such circumstances, a Court will normally bend over backwards to assure the defendant every chance of a fair trial.

When it comes to transparency, Racing NSW can hardly hold itself up as a paragon of virtue. It too had to be forced by the Court to disclose documents earlier in the case.

The second element of the Bulletin repeated the fiction that the Supreme Court in Victoria had decreed that turnover was the only valid basis of determining a race fields fee.

It actually said nothing of the sort, as pointed out by Michael Duffy, Chairman of Racing Victoria in his own Participants Bulletin yesterday.

In what was purely an administrative law matter, TAB Limited claimed that the wording of the Victorian Race Fields law referring to "amount or amounts" required a precise fee to be charged as opposed to using a formula.

It highlighted a few situations where a gross profit based fee might not be precisely calculated:

How should unclaimed dividends be treated?
What about bad debts? (strange that one for a TAB that doesn't give credit)
What happens with an all up bet across different states or sports?

Well guess what? Exactly the same issues arise with a calculation based on turnover.

More importantly, there are other laws and agreements which determine what TAB Limited pays the government and the racing industry in New South Wales. Many of them work on the basis of gross profit, so its a bit cute of TAB Limited to take Racing Victoria to court, saying it can't understand how the race fields levy should be calculated.

The upshot of all of this is that the NSW Race Fields legislation uses almost identical wording to the Victorian law, upon which it is based. If it was being absolutely consistent, TabCorp's Victorian operation should now be suing Racing NSW claiming that it doesn't have to pay race fields there because the amount cannot be quantified exactly based on turnover.

Somehow I doubt that this will happen.

TabCorp is disputing the fee with the various racing bodies in New South Wales anyway, saying it shouldn't have to pay anything.