The campaign to sway politicians’ opinions on marriage equality escalated over the weekend with lobby groups from both sides of politics enthusiastically promoting their own separate email campaigns.
The validity of the campaign promoted by the Australian Christian Lobby has been called into question with suggestions that their email campaign may have been auto-generated to some extent.
Lyle Shelton the Managing Director of the Australian Christian Lobby has denied that their campaign involved any automation.
Australian Marriage Equality National Director Rodney Croome reported that 13,232 individuals sent 1,773,088 emails through AME’s free vote website ahead of the Liberal party room meeting this morning.
Australian Marriage Equality said 3123 individuals sent emails through the Get Up! website, and 28,373 people signed its free vote petition.
Additionally the organisation has been running a telephone message campaign since February which has received 1217 calls. The service records people’s messages and then directs voice messages to local MPs and Senators.
Mr Croome questioned the Australian Christian Lobby claim that 20,000 people sent 2,000,000 emails through its website.
“Unlike our webform, the ACL’s doesn’t have an inbuilt validation device, opening up the possibility for its email count to be corrupted by computer-generated manipulation.”
Speaking to the Star Observer Mr Croome shared feedback from Canberra that the ACL’s emails arrive like clockwork.
“We have been told by observers in Parliament House that the ACL’s emails arrive like clockwork, without any peaks or troughs, suggesting at least some are being automatically generated.” Mr Croome said.
Lyle Shelton, the Managing Director the Australian Christian Lobby, has responded that he is sure that the process was not automated, but understand how it may have been perceived as involving automation.
“It wasn’t automated. We would never do that, it would be unethical.” Mr Shelton told OUTinPerth.
Mr Shelton explained that the reason the ACL’s emails were arriving “like clockwork” was because of the way they’d set up their online campaign platform.
“To minimise the potential of our emails getting caught up in the Australian Parliament House spam filters, we had supporters emails coming through on a trickle feed at various intervals so they wouldn’t get caught in the spam filters.”
Mr Shelton did concede that he couldn’t guarantee that 100% of the emails were in support of the Australian Christian Lobby’s position as the form allowed respondents to write whatever they chose. Mr Shelton said he was confident that the majority of respondents agreed with the organisation.
“That’s always the risk,” said Mr Shelton, “that’s why we didn’t advertise our web link to our preserving marriage campaign on the internet, we sent it out via email because we have had situations in the past where people who don’t support our views do use our campaign platform.”
“Nothing’s ever foolproof, but I’d be very confident.” Mr Shelton said of the campaign, noting that he’d also received positive feedback from members of parliament.
Mr Shelton agreed that today’s result was not the end of the matter, acknowledging that the call for a conscience vote could be raised at the next party room meeting.
“It could do, anything can happen in politics,” Mr Shelton said, “Now I hope that it doesn’t, and that’s the reason that we became very active because there was certainly a very strong push lead by The Greens, lead by Senator Leyonjhelm, lead by those who want to redefine marriage to try to get the Liberal party to cave in on it’s position on having a party vote.
“If we had not of responded I think there would have been a different outcome in today’s party room meeting.”
Recently the ABC program ‘Four Corners’ reported that an email campaign by conservative group the National Civic Council had been very effective in swaying Liberal politicians to support Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s leadership.
Graeme Watson
