Lazzarini said there was great relief in the Hunter greyhound racing community on Tuesday after NSW Premier Mike Baird confirmed a backflip on the decision to ban the code over animal welfare concerns.

“There’s a lot of beautiful people here who rely on their jobs at the track,” Lazzarini said. “They were crying when the ban was announced. They had nowhere to go and they are such good people.

“It is a relief now but there’s still a long way to go and the industry has got to make sure it does its best.”

Baird announced the creation of a five-person independent Greyhound Industry Reform Panel, chaired by former Premier Morris Iemma, to clean up the sport.

Newcastle Greyhounds manages The Gardens track at Birmingham Gardens, which is owned by controlling body Greyhound Racing NSW. 

While GRNSW has long been in charge of regulating the code, the state government’s office of racing is responsible for developing and managing governance frameworks and the relationships between government and the industry controlling bodies. The government stepped in at the height of the live-baiting scandal, which sparked calls for dog racing to be banned, and dismissed the GRNSW board before appointing an interim chief executive.

Lazzarini said the state government should have accepted greater responsibility for greyhound racing’s failures and taken action to correct them long ago.

“The government was in charge of the industry from the beginning,” he said. “It’s a wrong ruling when someone can be in charge of something and then blame everyone else when it goes wrong.

“They were in charge of it and the governments before them were in charge of it, and none of them have done one iota about it. The moment it’s gone bad, they’ve blamed everyone else in the industry.”

He said Tuesday’s push for reform should have been the NSW government’s original response to concerns.

“I did expect vast changes, and I think everyone in the industry did,” he said. “No one expected to be shut down, but I expect sweeping changes, better animal welfare, tougher policies on people who break the law and I’m an advocate for that not just in dog racing, but on anyone who hurts an animal.”

He said prominent Hunter participant Kevin Gordon had done “a terrific job here coming to the fore” and Wallsend MP Sonia Hornery “deserves a medal” for her campaign against the ban.

He said the reversal of the ban was “going to make a massive difference to a lot of people” at The Gardens and across the region but it was “up to everyone in the industry” to ensure the sport’s future.

“You have to set a bar and stay to it now,” he said.

An example of GRNSW’s failure to police the industry came at The Gardens. 

GRNSW admitted in July that its integrity unit had received in 2012 disturbing footage of a trainer using a 6000-volt cattle prod on a dog at The Gardens. However, the footage was made public, an investigation was launched and the findings given to police only this year when then-GRNSW interim CEO Paul Newson was made aware of the incident.

“What are you going to do if you report things that are wrong to the body who’s supposed to be in charge of controlling it, and they are not controlling it,” said Lazzarini, who became chairman at The Gardens in 2014.

“If that was a workplace and someone reported something like that to me and I did nothing about it, I’d be broke because the fines would be horrendous.”