HOW CAN THE ABC GET OFF SCOTT FREE? WHERE'S THE ACCOUNTABILITY FOR QUESTIONABLE REPORTING?

By Graham Potter | Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Graham Potter writes a weekly column for the Sunshine Coast daily. Due to demand from those having trouble accessing the paper these columns are now also published on HRO courtesy of the Sunshine Coast daily.

The horrible practises that have been allegedly taking place at the Meramist Abattoir can hold no place in modern society. They are simply abhorrent and should be confined to the dungeons of the past, never to be seen again.

But the matter cannot be left there.

The chain of authority at the Meramist Abattoir has to be given a thorough going over … working up from those allegedly abusing horses on the ground, to their supervisors, to those supervising the supervisors, to senior management, to the owners of the abattoir, to the officials of Biosecurity Queensland which advertises itself as the government's lead agency for animal welfare activities in Queensland.

That chain of authority is in fact a chain of responsibility and that in turn becomes a chain of blame if animal welfare standards are not met … or, even worse, abused as was so graphically depicted on the ABC’s 7.30 program which aired last Thursday.

In essence that is where the buck stops with this particular animal cruelty issue because, as disturbing as it might be, sending a horse to an abattoir is a legal operation and it is arguably fair to say that many of those who take that option do so reluctantly in trying circumstances with their expectation being that the horse will be treated humanely as far as possible in the circumstances.

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The ABC showed footage reportedly obtained by hidden cameras secretly placed in the Meramist Abattoir captured every sickening moment of the animal abuse and The ABC trumpet the fact that they undertook a two-year investigation before putting the program to air.

Stark questions need to be asked of the ABC network and any outsiders who assisted the network in the making of the program … from those who placed and retrieved the cameras, to those who delivered the footage, to all of those who viewed the footage ‘in house’, to those who edited the content, to those who produced and presented the show … and, of course, to the top executives at the ABC who would have given the program a green light.

Questions like, when did you first become aware of this situation and what authority did you report it to? Or, perhaps the question can be rephrased this way. Did you choose not to report it to the relevant authorities when it first came to your attention but, instead, rather tried to prepare your program for airing first at a specific time of your choice?

That would have kept the story’s shock value alive but, according to the evidence they themselves presented, horses would be dying in the meantime.

Answers to either of those questions will show whether the ABC was more concerned about animal welfare or the story.

Hopefully they will be formally and forcefully asked to clear up that up soon!

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The doubt about the ABC’s good intentions is clearly understood in the light of the fact that the vision of the very deliberately edited story was supplemented by unashamed, anti-horseracing propoganda with the program only emerging two days before one of the biggest days on the racing calendar.

Horseracing as an industry is clearly not to blame for what goes on in an abattoir yet the ABC did all it could to twist the story to that angle.

It was an obvious premediated attack both in its timing and its delivery.

The majority of racing stakeholders are absolute horse lovers and they were probably more appalled and distressed at the content of the program than anybody else and they are already looking at ways to better protect horses who are moving away from the limited sanctuary of the protocols of the industry.

That is a completely DIFFERENT story.

So, let’s get real.

If you sell your car to a dear old lady and she on-sells it to another party who then goes out and uses it as a getaway car in a bank robbery, should you go to jail for the bank robbing offence?

On the basis of the way they denounce the racing industry as a whole which has nothing to do with what happens at an abattoir … the ABC seems to think so!