When Melbourne Cup-winning jockey Corey Brown was fined $500 yesterday for the celebratory love-tap of his mount Shocking as they passed the finishing post on Tuesday, we truly crossed the rubicon: we can now say with some certainty that the narks, nannies and do-gooders have taken over Australian life.

Brown had twice finished second in the great race - on Mr Prudent in 2002 and, in the most agonising of near-misses, on Bauer last year. He's also managed a third placing as well, on Lahar in 1999. When he finally got Shocking clear of the field to crack the greatest win of his career, Brown gave his 500kg mount an exultant tap on the shoulder with one of the new officially-sanctioned padded whips.

Responding to the growing hysteria in the media over recent years about the use of whips in racing - The Australian has relentlessly and tediously banged on about it - the VRC stewards called Brown in for an explanation. They didn't want to be seen to be condoning this shocking practice of giving a horse an over-zealous pat, so they looked sternly over their half-moon glasses and called Brown to account. The jockey said he merely flicked his wrist in a celebratory gesture and did not believe there was enough evidence the whip made contact with the horse.

The stewards disagreed and handed down their fine for ‘unnecessary" use of the whip - $500 - which is a piddling, token punishment anyway. But that's another matter.

I heard Brown's fellow-jockey Michael Rodd speaking on radio yesterday, before he piloted Faint Perfume to victory in the Oaks later in the day, and he was aghast at the suggestion jockeys - and trainers and owners for that matter - would ever knowingly inflict pain on a horse, or sanction cruelty in any way on one of their stable. Rodd said he was an animal lover; he said the horses received the best possible veterinary attention, were mollycoddled in comfortable stables and wanted for nothing. The tone of his voice suggested he was aggrieved at the very notion he, or the vast majority of his colleagues, would needlessly flog what is essentially their meal ticket.

Listening to Labor Party powerbroker Graham Richardson on the ABC show, Q+A, last night, I thought immediately of Rodd's remarks. Asked about the whipping debate in racing, Richardson said he was first taken to the races in Sydney as a five-year-old boy, and had been going pretty much ever since - which meant the past 55 years. He said horses had always been cajoled along by jockeys with the whip - sometimes more zealously than they should have been - but it had generally been done in a reasonable way. The anti-whip hysteria had only // -->