AUSTRALIA IS SUSPENDING ALL LIVE animal exports to Indonesia. This is remarkable not because it’s a good thing, which it is, but because it’s an example of a political effect with significant policy and financial implications being forced by an outsider-body to the political process. I’ve seen estimates printed of the value of the trade between $300 million and $1 billion yearly, and it’s been cut indefinitely—with, presumably, entailing loss of jobs—after a Four Corners programme. How often do you get to see that happen?

I have to agree with the otherwise odious Mark Textor:

In some campaigns, an issue so fundamental to community beliefs and values can arise that no amount of spin and technique can help you deal with it. Only a genuine policy response will suffice.

I remain cynical but impressed. I simply can’t think of a single other media campaign which has had such an instant, strong and thorough policy effect in my lifetime. And it’s nice to have the high bar for issues of community belief acknowledged.

It depresses me incredibly, in hindsight, that the demonstrations against the 2003 invasion of Iraq in which, from memory, more than 200,000 people protested in Sydney alone, for whatever reason, were not seen as similarly legitimate expressions of “community beliefs and values”. Hours upon hours of footage of asylum seekers, including children, in Australian detention centres hasn’t changed the Commonwealth’s policy significantly in any regard. When community and social services sector workers rally later today for equal pay, I’m quite certain they won’t find the fair-go dinkum Australian community as supportive of the principle of gender pay equity.

I’m not sure about any lessons people should draw from this who are interested in social change. Saul Alinsky encouraged radicals to copy each others’ practices and learn from the actions that worked—given the circumstances I’m at a loss to see how that’s possible here.

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