[AusNOG] smh: Misguided and stupid

[Mark Newton]

On 03/08/2010, at 8:28 AM, Kai wrote:

> Well, he's at it again...
> 
> Election 2010: Q&A with the Australian Christian Lobby's Jim Wallace on filters and classification

The Australian Christian Lobby is a company, not a grass roots
organization.

http://www2.search.asic.gov.au/cgi-bin/gns030c?acn=075_120_517&juris=9&hdtext=ACN&srchsrc=1

It offers lobbying services (in exchange for a fee) to its customers.
It presents itself as representative of a wide constituency in its
marketing materials, but it almost certainly counts a small number of
fundamentalist pentecostal religious organizations as customers.

The idea that they're some kind of broad membership-based body 
representing tens of thousands of christians is a PR fabrication.
One "joins" or "donates" to the ACL in the same way that one "joins"
or "donates" to Harvey Norman.

It used to be called the Australian Christian Coalition, and it still
carries ideological (if not financial) links to the Christian Coalition
of America in the United States.

There have been various attempts over the last few years to find 
out who their customers and/or funders are, including a try by the
Greens during the gay marriage debate in 2008.

(I wanted to demonstrate their audience reach by showing a stats page
from Alexa.com, but "Historical data not available for sites ranked
>100,000" http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/acl.org.au :)

  - mark


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