Some causes are about money and policy. This one, Jeremy Cordeaux made clear on this Garage edition of the Court of Public Opinion, is about something closer to the heart: the fate of the Snowy brumbies, and a slaughter he believes betrays a debt Australia owes these animals.
A Debt From The Great War
Jeremy began with history. Some 136,000 brumbies, he told listeners, went with Australia’s diggers to the First World War. Only one ever came home. The rest were turned loose or, mostly, shot.
That sacrifice, in his telling, is the moral backdrop to today’s debate. The brumby is woven into the Australian story — a national icon — and we owe it, he argued, the chance to survive and thrive in the highlands of New South Wales and Victoria where it now lives.
The Slaughter Continues
Against that history, Jeremy set the present reality: a program of culling that goes on killing these animals in the high country. He didn’t hide his contempt, describing those who ordered the killings in the harshest terms and making plain his view that the slaughter is a disgrace.
For Jeremy, this wasn’t an abstract environmental dispute but the destruction of a living piece of national heritage — beautiful creatures, as he called them, killed off in large numbers.
Four Questions On The Record
The show’s focus was the stand taken by Tanya Thompson, a National Party member of the New South Wales Legislative Council. Jeremy praised a speech she delivered to Parliament pushing hard on the issue, in which she placed four pointed questions on the record in Hansard.
Those questions, he said, will now sit in the parliamentary record permanently — what he hoped would be a forever embarrassment to a New South Wales government that has allowed the killings. He doubted, pointedly, that the officials responsible could actually answer them.
Giving The Cause A Voice
Jeremy said he was trying to get Tanya Thompson onto the show to speak about her campaign directly — using his program, as he often does, to amplify a fight he believes deserves far more attention than it receives.
His message was one of stewardship. A country that sent 136,000 of these horses to war and got one back has, in his view, an obligation to protect the descendants that remain. The brumbies can’t speak for themselves — so, he argued, it falls to people like Thompson, and programs like his, to speak for them.
Listen To The Full Episode
Catch the complete Garage edition of The Court of Public Opinion, recorded live around the dining room table.
Watch The Full Episode
The Court of Public Opinion streams live every Friday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. (ACST), right here at jeremycordeaux.com. Download the podcast anytime on your favourite podcast app, and join the conversation with your calls and comments.
