“Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig. He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.”
It’s doubtful if the NSW premier, Mike Baird, heeded Winston Churchill’s advice as he went through the torment of changing policy on greyhound racing and the protection of dogs from those owners and breeders who are cruel and unscrupulous.
It would be unwise for a dog, or anyone else, to look up to a politician. Cats, on the other hand, need no help because they are so manipulative that they would soon have Baird around their tiny paws, as do the National party and a few radio bloviators.
Pigs, along with race horses and much of the pet breeding industry, have been left out of the equation – as if we needed reminding that the backflip on greyhound racing was little more than a rescue mission for cockies corner in the NSW parliament and its plodding leader, Troy Grant.
After the greyhound experience, it’s unlikely that stopping the slaughter of racehorses, pigs, lambs, moo-cows and the live export trade will happen any time soon.
“I got it wrong. The cabinet got it wrong. The government got it wrong,” the premier said in his mea culpa. Maybe, he had broadcaster Alan Jones running in a permanent loop in his brain, for Jones had been basing up his listeners with the intelligence that Baird was wrong, wrong, wrong.
The broadcaster, in his trademark self-basting manner, paraded his part in getting the premier to switch teams. He was looking very pleased with himself in an ABC interview, following a much publicised fish and salad meal with Baird at his Toaster bachelor pad.
“I told him what I thought and it was up to him to determine what he was going to do about what I thought.”
His power of persuasion is amazing, even if the argument is over-egged: “You can overplay this animal welfare thing. At the end of the day there are people here who are being driven to penury and to suicide, and when I explained that to him he understood.”
You might think this was the car industry being closed down, such was the horrendous level of social and economic disturbance.
If you consider that Jones’ audience comprises the rusted-on souls from Struggle Street, then he’s preaching to the already converted. To that extent he’s not changing anyone’s mind because they all at home in their slippers, nodding in tune to Alan’s wisdom.
Conceivably, if the premier had stuck with the ban, in time the self-appointed friends of battlers would have dried up and soon unearthed a new project to excite their faux class warfare, and the National party would have returned to its eternal slumber.
Arguably the original decision to close down the greyhound racing industry was evidence based while the decision to reverse that policy was merely politically based.
Even so, Greyhound Racing NSW disputes some of the evidence presented by the McHugh special commission and says it wasn’t given an opportunity to be sufficiently heard.
That’s not to forget there remain concerns about animal cruelty. On the day Baird threw the policy into reverse, it emerged that Chad Achurch, a bikie gang member and trainer with a lengthy criminal record, was in court on a live-baiting charge.
Indeed, the relationship between greyhound racing and bikie gangs is an issue that has been insufficiently explored throughout this entire opera – reports of mass graves for greyhounds and vets giving graphic accounts of animal cruelty, including one of an owner-trainer yanking the tail off a live dog, are enough for us to handle.
Crikey reported that the greyhound racing lobby celebrated the policy reversal with threats against witnesses. An outfit called National Greyhound Racing United posted a message on Facebook saying: “We will enjoy this victory, then we will turn out attention to those that made submissions in the McHugh report, their crime will not go unpunished.”
Once more GRNSW has been invited by the government into the last chance saloon, where it has been already drinking for years.
Michael McHugh’s special commission itself was a response to a Four Corners program on training greyhounds with live baits. It is not the first time a government has swung into action with alacrity in response to shocking revelations.
John Howard turned into action-man in 2007 after the release of a report co-authored by Patricia Anderson and the former Northern Territory DPP Rex Wild, called “Little Children are Sacred”, which provided shocking details of the sexual abuse and neglect of Indigenous children.
The NT National Emergency Response was the result, sometimes known as the Intervention – a package of welfare and law enforcement measures, supplemented by military involvement. It implemented only two out of 97 recommendations from Wild and Anderson’s report and at the time was criticised for lack of consultation and being a hurried flourish with the pending 2007 election firmly in the frame. At least, though, there was compelling evidence as the basis for the Canberra intervention.
Similarly, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, wasted no time in establishing a royal commission into the Four Corners report on the treatment of young people at the Don Dale detention centre - another area of neglect by the NT government. At least there may be an evidence-based policy outcome.
Howard, again, instigated strict gun control measures in response to the Port Arthur shootings. It was a case of act now, get the evidence later – but only gun nuts were complaining. Interestingly, in that case, Howard kept his pig-shooting rural rump inside the tent.
Barry O’Farrell in NSW introduced the pubs lockout regime after two young men died from violent assaults on the streets of Kings Cross.
The evidence as to whether it has worked and the extent to which changes were needed came later in Ian Callinan’s liquor law review. Maybe backflip is the wrong word – what about “policy evolution”? Stand by for some policy evolution on the lockouts and associated micro laws about shots after midnights and bottle shop closing times.
Careful consultation and gathering of facts is not invariably the preferred option for politicians when creating policy. Sometimes a backflip – or indeed evolution – is required, even when there is strong supportive evidence; other times we find a gritty determination to stay the course.
As that wizard of opportunism, Howard, observed: a backflip is not necessarily a bad thing, it just depends if you land where the public wants you to land.
Politicians have got to choose their backflips/evolutions carefully. Former prime minster Tony Abbott’s performance was predictably gauche when he went back on promises not to cut funding of the public broadcasters, and to health and education.
He landed on his head, as did Kevin Rudd when he abandoned the “greatest moral issue of our time” as the polls shrank.
Baird has landed just as awkwardly.
