It was one of those 4 Corners programs that everyone was talking about next morning, even though rather few people could actually stomach watching it the night before.

I did watch it, from beginning to end - and even as I found myself revolted by the barbarity of the treatment meted out to the cattle ('Australian cattle', we kept being told, as though that made it infinitely worse than if they'd been mere Indonesian moo-cows), I also found myself fascinated by the insouciance of the abattoir workers.

Here was this tall blond white lady recording everything on a video-camera - the beatings, the head-bashings, the hacking at throats, the whole gruesome rigmarole - and nobody turned a hair. Even when a steer broke its leg, and a slaughterman beat it, and stuck his fingers in its eyes and nose to goad it to get up, no one asked Lynn White of Animals Australia to turn off her camera.

And when, weeks later, a full ABC crew turned up - four Europeans, including that Sarah Ferguson (as rugby league supporters around Australia have learned to call her) - they were able to breeze into three out of the four abattoirs they approached with remarkably little fuss; to interview a meat-worker who explained how he wouldn't like to stun the cattle first, that would be irreligious; to compile the footage that showed that what Lynn White had filmed was no mere aberration.

In most places, they had no difficulty in gaining access 'through the front door', the program's producer told me. Only in Medan, where weeks earlier Lynn White had filmed an animal being tortured for half an hour, did the 4 Corners team find itself blocked. As Sarah Ferguson told us in the program:

It's clear from what they are saying that the whole issue of animal welfare related to Australian animals has become very controversial in the last few weeks. They are agitated and they want us to leave.

'Well, and about bloody time', you can imagine some PR flak at Livestock Australia muttering in fury. You can be sure that now, as the Australian slaughterhouse experts rush back into the Indonesian abattoirs for more 'intensive training', they're trying to bash into Indonesian skulls (to coin a horribly appropriate metaphor) at least two messages.

First, for gawd's sake treat the animals with a modicum of decency. Imagine that they can feel like you and me. Or we'll all be out of a job.

And second, if you see a white woman with a camera hovering around - in fact if you see any bloody one with a camera within a bull's roar of the abattoir (to coin another), tell them to take a running jump. But don't, ever, let them inside the doors.

Both of which messages would penetrate said skulls with some difficulty.

With what truth I cannot say, we're told that hunter-gatherer societies revere and respect the wildlife they prey upon: it's part of the 'noble savage' myth faithfully reproduced in the movie Avatar.

To nomadic pastoralists, from the Masai in Africa to Mongolian herdsman, their animals are their wealth. They may not treat their cattle as pets, but they know they're sentient creatures, and you seldom see wanton cruelty.

But I have to say that most peasant societies I've encountered have seemed to me to regard animals as mere tools and foodstuffs. The casual cruelty of poor farmers around the world to their fellow creatures - their oxen, their chickens, their donkeys, their dogs - has often repelled my squeamish, first-world feelings. They seem to be immune to the notion that these creatures are capable of pain, and stress, and terror.

Whereas wealthy, city-living Australians seldom see a live animal except their dogs and cats, the occasional horse and a flying fox screeching in the trees. We are sentimental about animals in a way earthier societies can barely comprehend.

If that's one gulf between the sensibility of the Indonesian meat-workers in the 4 Corners program and those watching it in Australia, there's another just as wide.

These people have never heard of PR. Since they could not credit that anyone might be revolted by the way they treated the cattle they were slaughtering, how were they to understand that the camera was a hostile witness, and that it would soon be giving testimony to a neighbouring nation; that it could endanger their income, their livelihood, and even the reputation of their country and their religion?

That is a gulf indeed. You don't get to film abattoirs in Australia.

For media lawyers, one of the most celebrated High Court cases is called Lenah Game Meats vs ABC - a case in which an abattoir in Tasmania tried to prevent The 7.30 Report from showing footage of the slaughter of possums filmed, without permission, by an activist group (though not, in that case, Animals Australia). In the end, the abattoir failed and the footage was shown.

But try approaching any abattoir through the front door, especially if you're a 4 Corners crew. You've got Buckleys.

Never mind abattoirs, what about coal mines? A few years ago I reported on the effort to produce clean coal. It was an honest attempt to portray the current state of the technology. The Minerals Council was suspicious, but prepared to help. But would any coal company in the whole of Australia allow us into an open-cut mine to get footage of the stuff it was all about?

No way.

I reported on peak oil. Could I persuade a single oil company in Australia to let us film on a drilling rig?

No chance.

(A Texas-based drilling company called Noble was a lot more accommodating. It flew us in its own helicopter from Galveston to one of its rigs far out in the Gulf of Mexico, and we all scored a Noble baseball cap as well.)

But even in the US, home of the brave and land of the free, it's tough to get permission to film in a shopping mall. "Our customers come here to shop," one PR flak told me none too politely in Orlando, Florida, where I was vainly trying to get some pictures of real people for an election story, "not to see themselves on TV. Sir."

Any working journalist - especially if they work in television - will tell you the same thing. In the past 20 years, the armies of media minders have swelled, and the number of times anyone says 'yes' has diminished. So much safer to say 'no', and buy some ads.

It's a lesson those abattoir workers and their managers are surely in the process of learning. I'm not laying bets on how long it will be before Australian cattle are humanely slaughtered in Indonesian abattoirs. But I am prepared to bet on this: next time the intrepid Lynn White comes knocking on the abattoir door, with her little video camera in hand, she'll find she's less than welcome.

Jonathan Holmes is the presenter of ABC TV's Media Watch.