Acting the goat

I had a near miss at the Roma goat races today. I was in front of a big crowd on the racing side of the barrier in order to get a good photo. When the goats set off I trained my camera on the leaders and started clicking. They passed me halfway down the course and I turned around to watch the finish. However one stray goat came loose from the field and bore down on me. I was unaware of the threat until I turned around at the last second. I saw a rider with arms outstretched as he attempted to regain control of the goat while avoiding clattering into me with his billycart.

I just had time to lean back out of the way and the wheels went over my foot. It also went over my camera bag but somehow did not smash the lens. A little surprised ut otherwise unhurt, I turned towards the goat and rider which trundled its way back on track. The goat was feisty but hardly distressed and there was no other damage done. Yet this tale could easily be another nail in the coffin of the races, the signature event of Roma’s Easter in the Country.

Easter in the Country is a rolling four day festival with something on in town each day of the weekend. There is an Easter parade, markets, thoroughbred racing, a rodeo, drag racing, speedway, motocross, an art show, bush poets and many other events dotted through town. Easter in the Country has been going for 35 years and over time the Easter Saturday goat races have become the iconic event attracting the biggest crowd. Today the main street was closed to traffic and packed with pedestrians finding the best vantage point for the two races. There are five goats in each race and the atmosphere is good-natured and friendly.

But it may be the last of its kind in Roma. Goat racing is legal but Animal Liberation wants it stopped on grounds of cruelty. Animal Lib has been concentrating on northern NSW and has been successful in closing down three goat races. Bundarra had to end its goat race due to the adverse publicity. Lightning Ridge has also replaced its Easter goat race with a big dig for opals in the main street.

The last straw was a Today Tonight report of 21 October 2011 which was a grab of selected crashes at a NSW country meet in Woolbrook. The Channel Seven report typically appealed to “think of the children” mentality while also making itself the story. The footage showed safety and wellbeing could be improved at Woolbrook (there was no examples of pulling goats by the horns in Roma). But the report did not prove Animal Liberation’s claim it was “barbaric and cruel”.

Cruel practices to goats remain unproven in law. However the mere taint of such publicity is now affecting Roma. One of the major Easter in the Country sponsors is threatening to pull out because of the goats. This is a big deal because Easter in the Country is as a not for profit organisation. Unpaid volunteers spend 12 months getting ready for the next event and rely almost totally on sponsorship. They get little financial support from Council (mostly in kind) but bring a lot of tourist dollars to Roma and the region.

The Easter in the Country committee knows the goat races are a drawcard and believes its goats are treated safely and humanely. I saw no evidence to the contrary today (my careless moment aside). Yet they cannot deliver a festival without sponsorship and unless a generous patron can be found that does not believe goat racing is cruel, the practice is unlikely to continue in 2013.

The sponsors who don't condone goat racing are hypocrites. Animal welfare is not their primary concern. If it was they would also have objected to other Easter in the Country events such as horse racing, bull ride and rodeo. The real reason is possible negative public relations coming from the association between the company and a national media outlet story about cruelty.

Perhaps the future will prove me wrong and goat racing will go the way of bear baiting and fox hunting, despite our collective atavistic appetite for animal sports. Seeking a halfway house, Roma could perhaps take its solution from overseas. London has its annual Oxford versus Cambridge goat race, but these goats fly solo, unencumbered with carts or riders. Oxford lost last year due to its goat slowing down to do a poo. Oxford apparently gained such revenge when it won the inaugural stoat race. I hope no-one tells Animal Liberation.

Read all about it: Over half of all Australian news content is PR

A major new study of Australian newspapers has shown over half of all editorial content is driven by some form of public relations. The study by Crikey and the University of Technology Sydney found that 55 percent of all hard news stories in Australia’s top ten papers were the result of a media release, a public relations professional or some other form of promotion. The study backs up similar international and Australian research that says PR is the backbone of modern journalism.

The study was carried out by UTS investigative journalism students and Australian Centre for Independent Journalism student interns in the spring semester of 2009. The students chose a five day period from Monday, 7 September to Friday, 11 September from the print editions of the ten newspapers and analysed news articles from 11 rounds for a total of 2203 articles.

The ten papers in the study were spread across three owners News Ltd (The Australian, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, Melbourne’s Herald-Sun, Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, Adelaide’s The Advertiser and Hobart’s The Mercury), Fairfax (Australian Financial Review, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age) and WAN (The West Australian). The 11 rounds chosen were: politics, business/finance, education, technology/innovation, police, rural, health/science/medicine, arts & entertainment, environment/energy and motoring.

Students investigated the origin of news and feature articles in these newspapers by using Google search engine and the Factiva news database to pick out earlier uses of direct quotes and phrases in media releases. Source material was also found as students combed exclusive interviews, publicity events, specialist email alert services, stories directly tied to and produced to support advertising, and public relations stories targeted and prepared for particular journalists.

The study found the News Ltd capital dailies were the worst offenders for using PR generated stories. Fully seven in ten stories in The Daily Telegraph were sourced from PR while the Hobart Mercury was not far behind with 67 percent. By contrast the Fairfax metro dailies did a lot better for original work with the Sydney Morning Herald just 42 percent spin and the Melbourne Age 47 percent. Worryingly (or brazenly, if you prefer), a quarter of all articles featured a journalist’s by-line with little or no appreciable effort in the article beyond the original PR.

Results also differed widely from round to round. Researchers found that over three quarters (77 percent) of all innovation/technology articles were sourced from PR while police was also high at 71 percent. Perhaps surprisingly given the number of governmental communications officers around, politics was lowest at 37 percent. But this is not necessarily cause for joy. The researchers cautioned this lower figure may be because “more public relations activity happens behind the scenes through journalists’ relationships with politicians and their advisers and for that reason is harder to identify.”

The results would have been worse if PR-heavy rounds such as property, travel and lifestyle were included or if the weekend papers had been included with their mass of supplements packed with promotional material. The problematic sports round was also excluded because contact between sports celebrities and journalists are heavily controlled by Sports PR. Crikey and UTS decided because of the nature of the media and PR industries relationship with sport, it was “too difficult to reliably code the sports reports”.

The findings should be no surprise to anyone working in journalism, PR or in research. Not only does public relations generally pay better than journalism, there are far more people in the PR industry than are currently listed as journalists. And with most companies now exercising strict policies when dealing with the media, it is getting increasingly harder for journalists to get anything other than the controlled message from an organisation.

Allied to this are time pressures and multiple stories which often do not give journalists enough time to get additional sources of information prior to deadline. The lowest-common denominator of Internet click-throughs and corporate penny-pinching also add to the problem. The bottom line is that investigative journalism is on the wane as we move towards the triumph of celebrity culture. On the whole, the quality of what we read, hear and see (the broadcast media are no better) on the news is ordinary. However the fault is ours. As news consumers, we are only getting what we pay for.

Two months in: Thoughts of a new journalist

In the preface to his book “Not for Publication”, ABC journalist Chris Masters noted how the practice of journalism was imprecise. Masters said journalists are constantly in a rush “calculating the odds of what will become objective truth, based on limited primary information and intelligence.” Faced with this apparently insurmountable difficulty, Masters concluded that journalists survive only by “being right more often than not”. In this world of limitless possibilities and limited time and information, it is judgement that sets apart a good journalist from a mediocre one. (photo of Roma Saleyards by Derek Barry)

Barely two months into my career as a journalist, I have no idea yet which side of the fence I’m going to end up on. I’m confident that in the dozens of stories I’ve written so far I’ve been right more often than I’ve been wrong. But the wrong ones are more memorable because they have consequences that you know about. Very few people ring in to tell you how wonderful such and such a story was (though it has happened and I’m delighted when it happens). But I always know when I get it wrong. People ring in, write in or arrive at the office telling me exactly how and where I got a matter wrong. I’ve had people in tears, people irate, and people shaking their head at the obvious venality of journalists and all because I printed something in the newspaper that was wrong, or misquoted someone or misspelt a name or missed a vital detail.

Imprecision is a daily hazard in a busy environment. And the fact is that much of the news I report has unsavoury consequences for someone, so I can face abuse even when I get the facts right. The other day, a young woman crashed her car into a bottle tree on a nearby street. The car was a write-off but the woman wasn’t seriously hurt. We found out about it and took some photos of the ambulances and police. Someone told us her name and we printed that in the story including an eye-witness account that she was seen running across the road to where her boyfriend works.

Today the lady appeared in the office with her Mum and both were visibly upset and angry. The girl said we had made a laughing stock of her and “everyone knew about it”. Her Mum wanted to know why we printed the name when other reports didn’t have that detail. I defended the story as factually accurate and said we were duty bound to our readers to print the name if we knew it. After 15 minutes of heated discussion, they left slightly mollified but still very unhappy.

Are newspapers really that powerful still that my words can have such a reaction? The answer is obviously yes. I was in a pub last night where I struck up a conversation with a young Canadian lad who had just started in the oil industry here in Roma. He was initially willing to have a friendly chat but when I told him I was a journalist, he immediately clammed up. “I’m not allowed to talk to the media,” he told me. I wasn’t after him for a story but both he and I realised the conversation was finished. The oil and gas industries are not alone in their press paranoia. All the big companies and government departments here have similar rules. No-one from council (except the mayor, CEO and communications officer) can talk to me, nor can anyone from the department of health.

And so when there is a problem such as that arose last week at Roma Hospital with mass resignations of doctors, I found it difficult to get at an objective truth of what happened. I couldn't speak to anyone at the hospital and got shunted to a media unit in Brisbane where I got a carefully crafted, bland and heavily spun message that only vaguely approximated to the truth. It may not have been Queensland Health’s fault that the doctors resigned but their caginess in providing an answer only serves to increase suspicion there is a problem. And so media policies designed to keep an organisation “on message” usually turn out to be counter-productive. Journalists and the public become cynical when constantly provided a diet of unrelenting positivity. And those with a genuine grievance within the organisation will spill the beans anonymously (as has happened at Roma Hospital) and often with a lot more openness than if they were allowed to speak freely on the record.

I’m making it sound like I am not enjoying myself here and nothing could be further from the truth. I love the town and I am delighted people are reading my work and engaging with it. I get a kick out of that and hope that The Western Star is providing a genuinely useful service of describing Roma and the surrounding district to itself. But in the absence of objective truth, I certainly need to develop a thicker skin about criticism and get over my unrealistic desire to please everyone. It is simply impossible. But some things are possible. Getting people’s names right 100 percent of the time would be a useful start. It would not only eliminate a lot of criticism, it is also a basic courtesy to the reader.

Understanding the Australian PR state

The Australian Federal Government is rightly getting a lot of flak at the moment for the extraordinary tightness of its media management. The budget came and went without Treasurer Wayne Swan announcing the actual deficit size for fear of giving the Opposition an advertising grab. Just last Tuesday, Kevin Rudd appeared on ABC Lateline and steadfastly refused to attach the word “billion” to the dollar amount of the deficit. Interviewer Tony Jones asked him: “Is there a political spin rule which says the Prime Minister must not say that figure?” Rudd fudged a reply but the answer is undoubtedly yes. The spin rule emerged from the heart of the massive Australian public relations state. Kevin Rudd is certainly the most aware Prime Minister yet about the power of marketing a carefully crafted media message. However, it not just about Rudd’s obsessive media management. Public relations has long been part of the institutional framework of government. This post uses research by political scientist Ian Ward to deconstruct the various components of the Australia PR state.

In their important 1994 study of the UK poll tax “Taxation and Representation”, Deacon and Golding noted how the marketing of government activity had become “a central activity of modern statecraft”. The pair said there had been a massive expansion of the public relations state in the previous 20 years with extensive use of media advisers and communications professionals to promote policy and outmanoeuvre opponents. What had occurred was the institutionalisation of PR within government well beyond the traditional remit of election campaigning.

Governments learned the lesson the hard way from media that they needed to play a strategic role in promoting a particular policy solution. They began to leverage off the natural advantages governments have in order to control the public conversation on political issues. As a result, they began to use advertising, marketing and public relations campaigns to sell policies and to integrate the communication activities of the various PR arms and agencies.

In 2003 Ian Ward used Deacon and Golding’s model to study the Australian PR state (pdf). Ward found the Australian framework was dominated by four features. These were 1) media minders 2) media units to coordinate media relations and monitor news coverage 3) public affairs sections belonging to government departments and 4) integrating instruments that provide “whole of government” coordination of promotional activities.

The media minder is the oldest of the four strategies. The first government press secretary was appointed in 1918 and by the 1930s it was established practice for prime ministers to recruit an experienced journalist to write speeches and press releases. Over time other senior ministers got their own minders and under Whitlam all ministers had a press secretary. Now relabelled as media advisers, they have evolved to provide strategic advice to ministers on how best to manage political news with overall responsibility to portray the government in the best possible light.

Ward illustrated his argument with the 2001 example of Defence Ministry press secretary Ross Hampton. During Operation Relex (the children overboard affair), the department was besieged with media enquiries. Defence Minister Peter Reith ordered that defence personnel were forbidden to talk to the media and all enquiries had to be dealt with by Hampton. The aim was to ensure that coverage of the affair was always couched in terms favourable to the government and every statement was “on message”. Hampton had a dedicated phone line to Defence public affairs. Driven by the daily news cycle, he would ring them 10 to 15 times a day and get absolute priority. It was his job then to spin whatever comment, report and pictures Defence gave him. According to Ward, Hampton served on the front line of the Australian PR state.

The second flank is the media unit. Under the 1984 Members of Parliament (Staff) Act, governments can employ and assign media advisers as they see fit. This allowed them to create media units for gathering and disseminating information. The Hawke/Keating government set up the infamous National Media Liaison Service which the Press Gallery dubbed as the “aNiMaLS” in testimony both to the acronym and the group’s aggressive promotion of the government. The Howard government replaced the aNiMaLS with the toned down Government Member’s Secretariat (GMS) but the nature of the role remained the same: pumping out party propaganda.

Whatever the name, the media unit consists of over 20 former journalists helping governments publicise policy. While many are farmed out to junior ministers, they work closely with the Prime Minister’s office and routinely supply ministers with transcripts of opposition media interviews. They also provide media training, prepare news letters and issue political pamphlets that cross the border into campaigning activities which are beyond the boundaries of taxpayer-funded staff. As Ward says, the media unit has become an indispensable feature of the Australian PR state.

The third aspect is the departmentally-based public affairs section. Every government department has one and they vary in size and importance. These staff are public servants and supposedly do not fulfil a party political function. However Ward says it is difficult to imagine that the government of the day do not benefit from departmental PR programs that promote its policies. Through this mechanism governments can carry out public communication campaigns, commission polling, or contract ad firms to promote policy decisions. The Howard Government in particularly was notorious for the size of its ad budget including the “alert not alarmed” fridge magnet campaign, the private health insurance campaign and the unlamented Workchoices campaign. According to an Australian National Audit Office report (pdf) released in March this year, the Coalition spent $1.8 billion in advertising during its 12 years in power.

The final part of the government PR jigsaw is whole of government coordination of the first three arms. In 1982 the Fraser Government established the Ministerial Committee on Government Communications to ensure all information campaigns conformed to government priorities. The politically-controlled MCGC oversees all sensitive communications, approves major strategies, and vets the hiring of PR, advertising, marketing and research consultancies. Contracts are usually awarded to favoured party pollsters such as Hawker-Britten for Labor or Crosby Textor for the Coalition.

About 4,000 journalists were working for Australian state and Commonwealth governments in a public relations capacity in 2002. The number has probably gone up since then. Yet despite knowing the broad features of the apparatus we know surprisingly little about the detailed operation of the Australian PR state. Even the government acknowledges this. When Julia Gillard introduced the National Audit report to parliament in March she talked about “the shadowy work” of the MCGC. The field is crying out for research to drag it out of the shadows. As Ian Ward concludes “there remains a sizeable gap in our understanding of political communication in Australia”. This cannot be good for Australian democracy.

Amazon: a catalogue of fails and glitches

Amazon has publicly apologised overnight for blacklisting gay and lesbian books. Amazon spokesman Drew Herdener said it was an error and called it "embarrassing and ham-fisted.” Amazon claims they have now fixed the problem. The story began a few days ago when Amazon removed sales ranks for a number of its offerings, many of which were gay and feminist-related. Without a rank, books will not show up on Amazon's bestseller lists or recommendation engines. So you won’t see the words "If you like this book, you might also like this book based on what others have bought".

Over Easter thousands of books lost their sales rank. This is the number that Amazon uses to show how well one title sells compared with another. According to The Guardian, the change occurred as the company sought to make its bestseller lists more family friendly. It says the change of rules affected not only high profile writers such as Annie Proulx, EM Forster and Jeanette Winterson, but also thousands of other gay and lesbian titles regardless of their sexual content.

One of the authors affected was Mark R Probst. When he inquired about why his gay teen novel The Filly was stripped of its ranking, he was told by Amazon “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.” But Probst noted the hypocrisy of the move saying a multitude of “adult” literature was continuing to get a ranking including such authors as Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins. “[Amazon] are using categories THEY set up (gay and lesbian) to now target these books as somehow offensive,” claimed Probst.

The LA Times blog Jacket Copy contacted Amazon Director of Corporate Communications Patty Smith for an explanation. Smith told the blog there was a glitch with the sales rank feature which was “in the process of being fixed.” Jacket Copy then asked whether Smith had a comment on why gay and lesbian authors were unduly affected by the “glitch’. But Smith had nothing to say. “Unfortunately, I'm not able to comment further,” she said. “We're working to resolve the issue, but I don't have any further information.”

Smith’s unconvincing defence of the “glitch” did not wash and it didn’t take long for a backlash to occur. Before the weekend was out Amazon had a PR disaster on its hands. People using the #amazonfail hashtag inundated Twitter with calls for Amazon boycotts. Many users say they have cancelled existing orders, and others are threatening to close their Amazon accounts. As The Inquisitr writes, Amazon could lose millions. “Even if Amazon spins their heart out now, the damage has already been done, and there will be no stopping lost orders; the only possibility is to mitigate the flood,” it says.

Even though the release of subsequent information backs up the ‘glitch’ thesis, it remains a PR disaster for Amazon. It will be interesting to see it will have the serious financial impact predicted by The Inquisitr. Up to this weekend, Amazon had continued to defy the economic downturn. Their Kindle 2 product is starting to take off after it was released to fanfare in February. Version 2 is a significant change from the original and supports text to speech threatening the lucrative audio book industry. It didn’t hurt when Oprah Winfrey announced that the new Kindle e-book reader was her "favourite new gadget" and said it was not only "life-changing" but also "the wave of the future."

This would have been music to the ears of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The 45 year old Bezos continues to be the CEO and the leading shareholder with 24 percent of the stock. Bezos took Amazon public in 1997 and it was one of the few companies to survive the dot com crash. Books continue to drive the virtual mall's $14.8 billion sales and Bezos was worth $8.2 billion last year. He was Time’s person of the year in 1999 and he was still on their top 100 list in 2008. Bezos claims his mantra is: “Try to give your customers the biggest selection at the best prices, delivered cheaply and easily.” After this weekend, he will find out whether best prices are the only thing that drives customer behaviour.

defamation and free speech: impacts for public relations

Defamation is a published statement which damages someone’s reputation or holds them up to ridicule. A person’s reputation is a fundamental human right which must be balanced against the public interest of freedom of speech. This post will examine how these conflicting rights collide and what are the positive and negative implications for public relations.

Defamation law is costly in terms of reputation, time and money. Libel is a permanent form of defamation where the burden of proof is entirely on the defendant. In the McLibel case, defendants had to prove every point from primary sources such as official documents and direct witnesses. Such onerous requirements meant that most McDonalds’ critics backed down and apologised rather than go through the prohibitive expense of libel action. But the McLibel Two fought the case as a freedom of speech issue. They forced McDonalds to defend their operations in great and embarrassing detail. Although McDonalds won the three year case on a semantic judgement, they were refused costs and the case became the biggest corporate PR disaster in history. A newspaper headline of the day best captured their dilemma: “Big Mac pays high price for win over small fries”.

But defamation law need not always prevent free speech. Organisations get more of what they want when they give up some of what they want. Grunig and Hunt’s two-way symmetrical model is the most effective model for public relations because targeted publics benefit as much as the programs’ sponsors. The model is underpinned by the PRIA code of ethics whose first point says members “shall deal fairly and honestly” with all their publics. Reputations are integral to contemporary public relations. Defamation law is a vehicle to guard practitioners and clients reputations. But it should also be best PR practice to maintain the reputation of their publics when publishing any material about them.

Nonetheless, good intention is no defence to defamation. The test for defamation is whether an ordinary, reasonable person would consider a publication to be defamatory. Ordinary, reasonable people so found in the Nixon v Slater & Gordon case. The plaintiffs were identified in a digitally altered photograph (ironically used to promote the dangers of growing litigation). The photo imputed an unintentional meaning of malpractice. Media releases are the most frequently used public relations tactic. The public relations industry exists largely to manipulate news media and claim authorship of the news. Therefore public relations officers need to be guard against defamatory content in their published releases. Australia does not have a bill of rights or statutory protection of free speech which can lead to a “chilling effect”. Defamation action is extremely expensive, especially if appealed, and can cost hundreds of thousand dollars in legal fees for both parties. Practitioners need to be aware of the three valid defences to defamation: truth, fair comment and privilege. But as the McLibel case showed, a legal win is not always a public relations win.

Mining lobbyists adrift on a Rising Tide

The NSW Mineral Council (NSWMC) has failed in their clumsy attempt to squash a small climate change advocacy group. Little known Newcastle protest group Rising Tide raised the hackles of the powerful Australian mining industry lobbyist over a parody of its recent mining PR campaign. When the NSWMC launched a website ad to promote mining, Rising Tide struck back with a parody website pointing out mining’s impact on climate change. The council were not impressed and forced Rising Tide’s ISP to shut down the website twice. Now Rising Tide have taken revenge by re-launching their site offshore and challenging the NSWMC to show just cause for their action.

Founded in 2004, Rising Tide is a small activist group based in Newcastle. They are part of a global grassroots movement campaigning against the root causes of human-induced climate change. Their real website states that Newcastle is “the largest coal port (by export volume) in the world”. Rising Tide is now campaigning against the proposed expansion of Newcastle coal exports. The heavy-handed action by the NSW Mineral Council has given them invaluable publicity and provided a useful filter for alternative opinions to enter the mainstream.

None of this would have happened if the NSW Mineral Council had ignored the parody site. But instead they claimed the site infringed their copyright and brought their full legal force to bear. Although Australian copyright law allows for fair use of an original work when mimicked for parody or caricature, it was modified in 2004 to forces ISP to remove potentially infringing sites whenever challenged.

But Rising Tide refused to be intimidated and moved the site to an off-shore host to keep the information in the public domain. The parody site is now on servers hosted in Afghanistan, which place it outside the jurisdiction of Australian law. The revamped website was officially relaunched yesterday to national media attention. Steve Phillips, spokesperson for Rising Tide Newcastle said, "we have issued a counter-notice rejecting the Minerals Council's spurious claims. The Minerals Council now has ten days in which to take the matter further."

Phillips told Woolly Days that NSWMC abused a clause in the copyright laws that were introduced by the 2004 Free Trade Agreement with the US. This clause is an automatic takedown procedure. If a website is accused of plagiarism, the ISP must remove the website even on suspicion of an infringement and before the claim can be validated by a court decision. In other words, Australian law says that any party accused of plagiarism is guilty until proven innocent.

The drama began on 19 February when the NSW Minerals Council launched an advertising campaign to promote the mining industry. Called “Life. Brought to you by Mining”, the campaign lauded the industry’s contribution to”modern life, from employment and the economy to electricity and consumer items”. NSW Minerals Council Chief Executive Dr Nikki Williams said the campaign would provide much needed balance to the intense debate around mining and the environment. Dr Williams claimed the public discussion on global warming has been “railroaded by agenda driven scaremongering, when what we desperately need is logic, innovation and collaboration”.

NSWMC’s idea of logic, innovation and collaboration was an advertising blitz in the mining regions of Newcastle and Wollongong. It featured billboards, TV commercials, press releases and a website. They used the symbol of an asterisk to highlight what they described as “the countless things which are created with a contribution from mining”. NSW Mineral council‘s website invited their audience to “dig a little deeper and find out all the great things that the mining industry has to offer”.

In response Rising Tide put up a parody site. The parody site was a mirror image of the NSWMC site except for some additional satirical text. Rising Tide’s site stated “the NSW Minerals Council is now running a spin campaign to fool you into thinking that we need the coal mining industry” and they invited their audience to “dig a little deeper and find out the real facts”.

NSWMC dug a little deeper themselves and within 24 hours their lawyers contacted the hosts of the parody website. They cited the relevant clause of the Commonwealth Copyright Regulations and forced the ISP to remove the site. Although the site is probably legal under the Copyright Act's Fair Dealing clause as a parody, the hosts were legally required to remove the site pending a response to the Minerals Council's claim of copyright infringement, which did not specify the articles of alleged copyright.

Rising Tide then relaunched the site with a new and original layout to remove the possibility of copyright infringement. Or so they thought. Once again council lawyers contacted the ISP within 24 hours with a similar claim letter that forced the hosts to remove the site a second time. Undaunted, Rising Tide relaunched their site a third time this week from Afghanistan. They also issued a counter-notice, rejecting the allegations of the council. If the NSWMC does not respond within 10 days, Rising Tide will be able to re-host the site in Australia.

NWSMC's best bet at this stage is to avoid all further response. This is proving a public relations nightmare for the mining lobbyists and any further action on their part will only serve to lift all boats of the Rising Tide.