For the past few weeks our Australian public channels SBS and ABC have been on an emotional roll, with three stories that chilled the bones of their audience. 4 Corners investigated bullying and sexual abuse in the military, followed up with a report on the cruel conditions in the Malaysian abattoirs that process Australian cattle and SBS also used the reality TV show format to put ‘6 ordinary Australians’ through a re-enactment of the asylum seeker journey.

On face value, contrary to the criticism the media have been regularly coping for their addiction to “sideshows”, as denounced by former minister Lindsay Tanner, these documentaries did not shy away from addressing unglamorous social and political issues. The programs appear to have scored high ratings, they prompted copious commentaries on the online channels and the consternation they triggered has been relayed by mainstream media.

So it looks like the mechanism ‘media reporting - public reaction - political action’ worked effectively. The Defence minister, Stephen Smith, lambasted the Defence Force over their decision to threaten the Cadet victim of sexual bullying with disciplinary action for speaking out. In the case of the cattle story, a more dramatic action from the government even ensued with the immediate suspension of live cattle shipments to Malaysia. The refugee issue is still up in the air, but judging by the online comments and SBS efforts to promote the program it is certainly having an impact, to the point of even featuring in the New York Times.

However a more contrarian view would be to ponder the way audiences seem to have suddenly collectively woken up to those endemic issues. Indeed, this is probably the untold story behind the stories. Whilst they bear no relations to one another, they are related by a common pattern - the way public outrage broke out “as if we did not know”. Yet, none of the issues should be news to any adult not living in a cave. There is no shortage of information out there for who wants to know. Have we become so desensitised and absorbed in our own lives that we fail to react to it, let alone notice it, unless it is stuck right under our noses?

Regarding the asylum seekers, there is no doubt that “Go Back Where You came From” was reality TV on steroids. A far cry from locking up 10 couch potatoes in a townhouse and recording their fart jokes; but I am still struggling to see what new facts have been exposed about the refugee issue. The Malaysian police raiding dormitories, the sinking boats, the violence in African camps, the mutilated victims of the Iraqi conflict are shown daily in the news bulletins. 10 years after the Tampa and the start of the war in Iraq, have we really come to the point of needing 3 hours of scripted reality TV to suddenly wake up and realise the terrible implications of this conflict, population displacement and the conditions that asylum seekers are facing?

Even the reach of the show reveals a disconnection with the general public. Yes it has been SBS most successful programme of 2011, attracting 600,000 viewers for the final episode. But to put things into perspective, 3.96 million people watched the Master Chef finale in July 2010: 7 times more people for a cooking show than for one of the major political issues of the past 10 years! Those 600,000 viewers represent only 4% of the 15.3 million registered Australian voters who have the power to really influence the government and whose reach was the ultimate goal of the project. Besides, once you’ve subtracted the viewers already part of the pro-refugee choir, how many of those 4% really belonged to targeted audience of anti asylum seekers?

This is not to mention the unfortunate irony of putting the more conservative participants in the position of sacrificial lambs. They got vilified on National TV because of their “bogan racism”, which is in complete contradiction with the intended promotion of more humanist behaviours! It was even remarked on the night of Anton Enus’ panel that “a show wanting to promote tolerance was boosted by a lack tolerance”. I wonder if the producers realise the uncomfortable parallel with the iconic French movie from the 90s, ‘The Dinner Game’, in which Parisian elites brought along an "idiot" whom the other guests could ridicule.

In a similar manner the reactions to the military sex scandal revealed how ignorant we are of this institution. Apart from the Police, the ADF is the only organisation mandated by society to use lethal force. This means that violence is part of the job description. So of course it comes with a specific culture and a heightened risk for brutal behaviours in the ranks: the guys are primed and trained for that. And none of the political correctness usually invoked to praise the sacrifice they make for the country, which ought to be respected, should mask that tough reality. Governing ‘institutional violence’ requires very special checks and balances. So to shift the debate, as it initially happened, on cyber bullying (the cadet was filmed on Skype) or the place of women in the Army was a hypocritical way to avoid facing the real issue of behaviour standards in the military. This will hopefully be addressed by the inquiry ordered by the Minister.

Finally, the outrage sparked by the Malaysian abattoirs story is also in the same vein. The suspension of live exports until a ‘humane solution’ is found might have been the right emergency response, but is overlooking that the mass slaughter of animals in an abattoir is already a form torture. Whichever way you look at it the slaughtering industry is not a pretty business.

In Australia we kill between 9 and 10 million cattle per year. That is 27,000 animal per day! And that is just for the cattle, not counting sheep, lambs, pigs and chickens. What would it look like if a camera recorded the gruesome spectacle of pack cows killed by a 3 inch bolt shot in their skull, in the supposedly ‘humane’ Australian abattoirs? How would the story come up on screen? Would it look bloody enough to trigger a national debate on the ethics of mass animal slaughtering? The point here is that we seem to react strongly and seek comfort in focusing on those Malaysian slaughterhouses but we feign to ignore the complete picture of the economics and ethics of the high consumption of meat and slaughtering requitement to meet the demand.

In conclusion, the overarching point about those 3 examples is NOT to denigrate the programs per se. Of course reporting those issues is necessary. The point is that the real story exposed by those programs is that we seriously need to address our chronic collective disengagement and faux naivety on these issues.

The way to do this is to realise that the battle against the evils of bullying, sexual harassment, disgraceful practices in the food industry and xenophobia about asylum seekers is one that will not be won by proxy on television. We just cannot outsource that stuff to the ABC or SBS and hope that a few hours of emotional reporting ‘à la Australian Story’ will redeem our complacency. It will be won in the workplace, in the classroom, through policies designed to inject more social and ethical awareness in our society. Is anyone looking at the school curriculum reforms? Are Philosophy and Ethics courses going to be taught in high school? Is the government going to invert the domination of the inherently un-equalitarian private schooling in the Australian education system? What measures are being put in place to reach out to the readers of the Sun Herald and viewers of Channel 9 so that they also receive the messages regularly aired on SBS or ABC? In summary, are we going to actively seek more education on the consequences of the life style we choose as a society?

Addressing these questions is the only way to materially change the circumstances captured by 4 Corners and Go Back To Where You Came From. A more activist mindset among consumers to continually hold the food industry to account, social pressure on the military to make antiquated repressive methods of command unsustainable, and a societal shift towards refugees in the order of magnitude that led modern democracies agree that child labour was anathema, are the only answers to do justice to horror we felt when we watched those programs.

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leLaissezFaire is an amateur blogger with a scientific academic background. He works in the finance industry researching the relationships between economics, governance, regulation, politics and culture. He blogs here: www.theotherschoolofeconomics.org and tweets as @leLaissezFaire

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