It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the general public finds itself dismayed and outraged about our live export industry, which transports our happy, healthy cows to deepest darkest Asia to meet a cruel and violent death, at the same time as our government is preparing to transport our refugees to the very same region and it’s only the Greens and the usual bleeding-heart refo activists that are arcing up.
This week, we heard Senator Sarah Hanson-Young hopes to thwart the Government’s plan to send refugees to Malaysia – where refugee treatment includes the occasional caning – by introducing an amendment to the Migration Act that will oblige Julia Gillard to seek the Parliament’s permission before sending refugees to a third country.
The opposition will support Hanson-Young out of sheer contrarianism rather than concern for human rights. But she’ll take her support where she can get it, since the tens of thousands who signed online petitions and wrote to their local members begging them to save our cows don’t seem to have much compassion left over for the human cargo.
Still, perhaps if some daring reporter can get inside a Malaysian refugee camp and take some really, really gruesome pictures, the Australian public might shed its indifference. But for how long?
We’ve all seen how powerful images on TV can get the public’s compassion pulse racing from time to time. Soon after we saw the miserable pictures of Kosovar refugees lugging bulging shopping bags as they fled their burning villages, we were welcoming ethnic Albanian families to our shores (they arrived by plane, which apparently makes all the difference).
In the 1980s, close-ups of balloon-bellied African children led pop stars to record painfully earnest Christmas hits whose sales would feed the world – or at least a bit of it, for a while. Grim footage of remote Aboriginal communities, their youth staggering about in a petrol-sniffer’s haze, or pictures of refugees with their lips sewn up somehow fail to produce quite the same effect on the silent majority.
When human rights abuse happens here, it seems the victims have nearly always brought it upon themselves.
In any case, no matter how overwhelming the public reaction, once the pictures have been replaced by some other news story, we forget about it and move on. We simply learn to live with it. The live export industry is no doubt hoping that’s what will happen this time, since the task of reforming Indonesia’s abattoirs any time soon is surely an impossible one.
In fact, the ALP has already backed away from last week’s ban and trade is set to resume in accordance with “international” cruelty standards that are lower than Australia’s. Animal welfare groups are not happy about it but it’s hard to maintain that level of public pressure over more than a few days.
It’s not surprising that in a developing country still struggling to deliver basic human rights to its people, animal welfare isn’t as high a priority for lawmakers and citizens as it is in Australia. But it’s an irony worth noting that the relatively shambolic nature of Indonesia’s legal and regulatory systems is both the reason the animals aren’t better protected, and the very reason we could see the pictures that ignited this debate.
While Australia’s orderly system keeps cruelty under control, it also keeps public scrutiny at bay. When was the last time you saw moving footage of what goes on in an Australian abattoir or factory farm?
There really is no easy way for Australians to judge whether the legal standards we set for animal treatment are being widely adhered to at home. What are those legal standards, anyway? How do we know whether they are a fair reflection of community attitudes and feelings about how much cruelty is too much?
Few Australian factory farms would be happy to see Four Corners at the gate, cameras rolling, and the same goes for most Australian abattoirs. Even those that operate well within the law have plenty to fear from public exposure.
I don’t like watching animals die, but I do like to eat them. Like most omnivorous Australians, watching the slaughter of pigs and sheep is not something I’ve ever had a chance to get used to.
How many of us would be put off our dinner if we had to watch an animal die “humanely” each time we ate it? What would a “humane” death even look like? There seems to be something dishonest – or at least dishonorable – about our refusal to look livestock death in the eye, preferring to buy our meat in the form of nice faceless, plump, pink fillets, decorously adorned with sprigs of fresh parsley, nary a bone or scrap of fur or feather in sight.
And what about the way animals live their lives here, particularly all those chickens and pigs locked up on factory farms? You can be sure that the industry is well aware of the devastating effect footage of these establishments might have on the meat-eating public.
The security and anti-trespass systems on some these farms make for a kind of Guantanamo Bay for innocent beasts, and when activists do manage to sneak inside and do some filming, the industry seeks injunctions in the courts so that the Australian public can remain blissfully unaware of what happens to its food before it hits the supermarket shelves.
Perhaps, after all, that’s the wrong strategy. Perhaps if we were shown enough of those images often enough – rows and rows of stunned cows falling loose-legged to the ground before having their throats humanely cut, pigs and chickens self-mutilating in distress - we’d just learn to live with it.
Follow Sarah on Twitter - @sarahpgilbert
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@ToryShepherd I hope that's in your piece tomorrow. Also - are you coming over this week or laaaaaater?
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