PAUL CLARK says reason rather than public hysteria should define the government’s approach to cattle exports to Indonesia…
I have always been intrigued and somewhat comforted by the final verse in the book of Jonah where God explains His decision to save Nineveh, noting that apart from the many thousands of people, there were also many cattle that would have been destroyed.
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PICTURE: Nate Brelsford (www.sxc.hu) “We must do something to change this inhumane practice, but so far the decisions have been media-driven, policy on the run. This is no way to make policy; this is no way to run a country.” |
We have a kind and gracious God whose concern extends to the cattle in the field. Indeed Jesus declared that a sparrow did not fall to the ground without the Lord’s knowledge.
So we concur with the recent outcry stirred by the Four Corners’ report, documenting the cruel treatment of cattle in Indonesian abattoirs.
Yet some aspects of this debate seem to have got all out of proportion, and it’s become something of a soap opera that I’m sure has a long way to go before the issue is back off the nightly news dinner menu. Rather than a reasoned, considered response to the problem, it seems the politicians have once again been provoked into a knee-jerk reaction by media-fuelled, public-hysteria.
Now we’re putting the livelihood of outback Australians at risk in search of the ethical high ground. The whole circus has to make us question the simplistic ethics that are behind such reactions.
For example, the government seems determined to send humans to overseas detention centres for processing where their treatment will be suspect, yet immediately bans all cattle exports to Indonesia on this report. I also can’t help but think – and I raise this issue tentatively – that the reaction would have been much more reserved and nuanced had Four Corners shown the struggle of human foetuses to survive in abortion clinics. (Something, to my knowledge, Four Corners has never done.) Also, why is it only Australian cattle that count?
Most Indonesians seem bemused by our reaction. In the Western world we often make pronouncements far removed from the brutality of everyday life for most of the world’s population. We must do something to change this inhumane practice, but so far the decisions have been media-driven, policy on the run. This is no way to make policy; this is no way to run a country.
While we point and stare at the horror of their abattoirs, who will point and stare at our media-controlled political system that is becoming an abattoir to reason, ethics and considered judgement? Fortunately for us, there are still many livestock in our midst.
Paul Clark is a minister at the Burdekin Uniting Church in North Queensland.
