Editorial - Tuesday August 6, 2013

Who gives a rat's?

We don't do protesting very well in this country. Others do it much better, and tend to have more success.

There have been exceptions - the Maori land march of 1975 raised public and political awareness of genuine issues, and the movement that founded our nuclear-free status will forever keep its place in our history, but more commonly protests involve the usual malcontents who wave their placards and chant their chants then go home and do something else, while the majority tolerate them as a largely irrelevant adjunct of democracy.

Perhaps it is our innate conservatism that deters us from assembling in our thousands day after day, demanding the removal of an unpopular government or policy, burning cars and shops, attacking the police or Army and killing each other.

Perhaps it is that the issues that lead to public protests in this country aren't really all that significant in comparison with those facing societies where people are prepared to die for fundamental freedoms that we already have, and which, however unpopular any specific reality or government policy might be, are never going to be removed from us.

Whatever our politicians do we know that, at a prescribed time, we will have the chance to effect political change via a free and fair election.

We know that our children will always have access to education, despite the hysterics of the teacher unions in purporting to defend that education against what they insist on painting as barbarians within the conservative political parties, and we know that, if we have the gumption to get out of bed in the morning, we will enjoy three meals a day. Unlike many, this really is a country of opportunity for all.

So protests tend to run out of steam fairly quickly. Life here isn't bad compared with what is endured in many other countries, and people who have livings to make, homes and families to maintain and recreation to enjoy aren't going to devote too much time to demonstrating displeasure.

Politicians know this, and generally seem happy to let outrage run its course, confident in the knowledge that the disgruntled will either forget whatever it is that's getting up their noses or will never garner enough support to pose a threat to their survival.

Last week's protests over the fact that the law as it stands will not prevent the manufacturers of synthetic 'recreational' drugs from testing their products on animals departed from the familiar pattern for one significant reason, however, and should have departed from it (but didn't) for another.

The good news for Friends of the Beagle is that associate Health Minister Todd McClay is one of them. Opposition MPs see it as their sworn duty to side with protesters whatever their cause, but it is rare for a government Member, and a Minister to boot, to publicly agree with them, and to promise to do what needs to be done to change the law accordingly. The process will no doubt be as cumbersome as always, but at least the opponents of testing on animals have an ally inside the tent, and that might well be unique, in recent history at least.

Mr McClay said last week that he had already told his ministry officials that they were to drag the chain as much as they possibly could before granting licences to test, despite the fact that as the law stands applications would be perfectly proper and lawful, and undertook to work with animal welfare representatives to design a regime that will prohibit animal testing. That was a great result for a protest that, not uncharacteristically, was hardly up to Egyptian standards. One journalist even described the Bay of Islands' contribution to the uprising as more akin to a pet parade than a protest.

The reason that this protest should have departed from the familiar pattern is the nature of the cause. Some more obtuse commentators have argued that to prohibit the testing of recreational drugs on animals would inevitably demand that all animal testing be banned, and that New Zealanders should even stop eating dead animals. More rational beings would hopefully fail to make a connection between what might be seen as the torture of animals for financial gain and the eating of meat, and 'torture' for financial gain and the testing of drugs with the potential to ease the suffering and/or save the lives of millions of people.

The testing of drugs on animals is abhorrent to many people, but there must be a point where the potential ends justify the means. To most people, surely, justifiable ends would not include ensuring the safety for human use of cosmetics or recreational drugs.

There is something wrong with a society that already abuses drugs with what we are told is world-leading enthusiasm then sits back and allows a legal way to be paved to introduce more. However some might see their right to drop in to their local dairy to buy a product that will fry their brains as gifted by God, there is absolutely nothing about synthetic drugs that will benefit any person living in this country, apart, of course, from the manufacturers and dealers.

The opponents of these drugs being tested on animals also point out that there are dozens of other, more accurate means of testing than using animals. They don't have the same appeal for drug manufacturers, however, because they are more expensive. Testing on animals is financially attractive.

So who gives a fat rat's derriere? Quite a lot of people, it seems, although not enough to suggest that New Zealanders in general can be bothered to stir themselves to oppose the marketing of yet more substances with the potential to wreck their children's lives. If ever there was a cause that justified sustained mass protest, this has to be it, for our kids if not lab dogs. Hopefully Mr McClay will do the job for us.

There is perhaps more logic behind the singular lack of public rage over revelations that a journalist's email and telephone data had been supplied to (but apparently not examined) by the inquiry into the leaking of the Kitteridge report on the GCSB, despite the extraordinary assault on the freedom of the Press that that represents. Freedom of the Press has always been a given in this country, and the Andrea Vance affair should not be taken as a calculated attempt to undermine that. The lack of public outrage might be a manifestation of that view, or a lack of interest in and understanding of what appears to be a farce of Gilbert and Sullivan proportions. Or it might be the public perception of journalists as people who have no ethics, and who deserve what they get.

Some journalists and media organisations have worked long and hard to earn that lack of public trust, and it would be unrealistic to now expect a show of public sympathy.

Remember too that Andrea Vance is not a bold, crusading journalist who was determined to give New Zealanders information that she believed they were entitled to. What she did, as some journalists do every day, was breach an embargo. Her aim was simply to see her newspaper publish the Kitteridge report before the opposition could when it was publicly released a week or so later. Freedom of the Press should be defended to the death, but the action that inspired this sorry affair was an unethical one based on self-interest, as every journalist, Andrea Vance included, knows.