The Calling

[interupt]

Attention Aussie DUers,

Ever since the bitterness of last weeks election, the inability of a strong opposition of the Greens and Labor. and the rise (pah!) of the fundamental Family First party, I have been seriously considering starting a grass roots campaign to counter the extreme religious right that is the Family First, One Nation, The Christian Democrats.

Allow me to share my vision with you....

Something struck me during this election is that Labor paralysed themselves with their "positive campaign" and pandering to every potential large voting block to the detriment of low paid workers, Aborigines and the disenfranchised through continual lies, foreign policy blunders and high taxes of our current government. The Liberals were vicious and were unchallenged. The media with the Andrew Bolts and the Murdoch rags savaged the Greens painting them as socialists and communists. The negative adverts were effective to the uninformed masses.

And now we have the rise of Family First. A party that has come from nowhere, inextricably linked to Assemblies of God, have answered no tough questions and garnered enough media attention to caputre a Senate Seat...I mean what the fuck happened?

I have been musing on several messages on DU about starting an Organisation to run TV spots and adverts exposing Family First's agenda of putting families first which is a joke! It seems that I have captured a few peoples attention due to some private messages I have recieved.

Heres my idea for the Organisation. Start low key with the website and requesting donations. Try to garner media attention to spread the message. Make no political alliance at the start apart from bringing the truth to Family Fist...I mean First (wow Freudian Slip) Appeal to a cross section of the community as well as maybe looking at social polling about real concerns. Solid research into who is actually funding Family First and their real policies. If we can raise enough money through donations or media interviews to get some advertising...we wait until the first major shift where FF make their colours shown and then go for TV spots across the whole of Australia.

I also want to make who are donating to us abundantly clear and straightforward. Family First will make a move straight away to attack our crediblity and we need to be honest. Personally I dont care if Greens Labor or the hidden Liberals make $100K donation, we list it and say "here we are! look who is funding us"

Already Foreigncorrespondant is excitedly putting thoughts into a webpage for the site. I am still tossing up between two names for the organisation


Australian Voice of Reason (starting to really like this title)
Australians for Responsible Policy (sound politcal, but could be good to play the political game for media attention)


Any people who are willing to help us out, give us a shout or PM me. Those who wish to support us but not get involved, we thank you for your time.

I also ask a favour. Anyone with FF how to vote cards could you email them to me or link them. Doesn't matter which state, but the campaign needs information as to who are supplying what to FF.


Thankyou for your time.

[Violet_Crumble]

1. I'm willing...

..though until this semester ends in around three weeks, I'm a bit caught up for time. But after that I'm free. I'm not sure how I could help, but for a living I do web design and maintenance/publishing for a govt department. But if I can help out in any way, let me know....

Violet...

[Djinn]

2. sounds like an idea

although I've been wondering whether the media will now savage them, I don't think many people expected them to get a senate seat and therefore kind of ignored them but now they're under the radar a bit more, also they have indicated that they're not overly fond of removing cross media ownership restrictions so that should have the Murdochs and Packers digging as much dirt as possible about them.

Any group opposing FF should refer to religion/dogma in their name, FF don't because they know most Australians are fairly low key about their religious beliefs or don't actually beleive, Australians for Secular Parliament or something?

BTW - I'm liking Family Fist!!

[foreigncorrespondent]

3. Well you already know I am in. :)

However, I just wanted to let you know, I got struck down by a really bad computer virus last night. So bad it even removed my norton.exe program, so I couldn't run norton to get rid of it!!!

Anyway, I have been working to get my computer back up to scratch, and as soon as this is running properly, and I have everything re-installed (I had to do a recovery of the entire computer, and bring it back to the day I brought it, so I lost everything I had done so far), I will get to work on the Web site for us. I already pretty much had a template finished, but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

So if you don't hear from me for a few days, don't worry, you know you will hear from me as soon as I have a template for the site done.