The Country 14/08/25: Chris Russell talks to Jamie Mackay

Our Australian correspondent talks about animal activists and the Great Australian Cattle Drive. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
He's our guy across the Dutch. His name is Chris Russell. Chris.
So we're going to start with the court ruling that
animal rights activists filming secret videos don't actually have the
rights to those videos. They're illegal and they belong to
the owner of the facility. Tell me more.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Yeah, So, an animal activist group has been banned from
ever using the footage that it took inside of Victorian Abatoar. Now,
they were told initially by a judge and it's now
been confirmed by a federal court appeals court ruling to
stop this mob called the Farm Transparency International, from publishing

(00:39):
a fourteen long minute long video that was taken by
hidden cameras in during twenty twenty four. Now, they were
trying to use that because they're all about stopping people
eating meat and animals and so on and so forth.
And the court said, no, this is not only does
this belong to them because you took it illegally, but
you can pay them damage as well, though they think

(01:02):
the damages aren't enough, but nonetheless one hundred thousand dollars.
And they've told them to assign the copyright of the
images to the owner of the Abatoir and all this
means that we hopefully might see people thinking twice before
trying to destroy these businesses by going in and sneaking
photographs of things. That's not to say that we should

(01:22):
condone animal welfare breaches that are blatant, but a lot
of these are out of contents, misconstrued and or just
simply mistakes which can be fixed. They certainly don't deserve
the destruction of a business which might be crucier to
a particular town.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
I love the story about the Great Australian Cattle Drive.
It's just ended, but the background to that is that
people actually pay to go on it.

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Yes, this has been quite a popular thing for people
to do. It's they seventeen hundred head of cattle. It's
just reached roma four hundred and seventy, which is about
four hundred and seventy kilometers northwest of Brisbane and about
seven hundred and seventy kilometers from where they started out
at bark Halden. It follows the old original we say old.

(02:10):
They still use stock roots and some of the guys
running it are people that do this all the time.
In this case, you could join this cattle drive as
a volunteer mustra you paid for that privilege, and then
they raised quite a lot of money for I'm not
quite exactly how much they raised, but it was significant
amounts of money for charity. These stock roots have always

(02:32):
been part of our history and it's wonderful to see
them being kept open. And I think everyone who participated
in that saw that is something pretty special to do.
So I think it will become after twenty years of
some of these musters have never been in the saddle,
they get back in the saddle, and I think it
will becomes something we see happening, if not every year,
certainly every second year.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Chris Russell, thanks for your ton that problem.