John Linton
...or is it just marketing money being invested to promote the company as 'this month's new idea' way?
I was sent an email yesterday from our Optus account manager titled "a new corporate initiative" with this link:
http://optuswildlife.sites.optin.com.au/index.php
It's always good to see more money going to the endless work required to protect and regenerate Australia's ever dwindling fauna and flora species and I imagine that a huge company like Optus would make a sizable commitment based on the mini web site they have created. Personally, I have always detested Optus' use of pictures of endangered species and cartoon animals which both debase and demean particular animals and animals generally and trivialise their essential natures by the anthropomorphism of their characteristics. Doubtless some d***head in some agency or other thought it was a 'fun' way of communicating with the airheads who are their target residential customers.
Somehow I doubt that there has been some sort of epiphany within Optus senior management that has brought a new level of understanding that commercial companies that provide the means of destroying the habitat of the non-human inhabitants of Australia should pay people who actually care and are competent to make some realistic attempts to repair some of the damage they cause by making money out of the human destruction they assist - if only at one or two levels removed. Whatever the reason the money that big corporations donate does make some very real differences on many occasions.
So Optus is to be applauded for making the effort of having a small sub web site that, hopefully, is visited by a percentage of their main site visitors and in turn will make more Australians aware of the perilous situation of Australia's most endangered species and perhaps even encourage them to do something about it themselves - even if it is only to make a small financial contribution. If every other major commercial enterprise in Australia did the same the current problems would disappear within a decade.
I understand that my views are far from 'mainstream' in believing that human folly, stupidity and greed make the damage being done by "global warming" an irrelevancy in comparison to all other aspects of human raping and looting of the planet for pointless purposes. The Australian Federal and State governments do practically nothing and what they actually do is often counter-productive in that they seldom (never?) fund the projects they do start to a realistic completion. The current 'Federal minister for the destruction of the Australian environment' (the totally clueless and hypocritical Peter Garret, another show - another sell out, as one commentator so accurately described his environmental decisions since reaching his ultimate level of incompetence) is symptomatic of how awful Australian government association with the environmental issues of today has become. There is no hope of any Australian, State or Territory government doing anything worth a damn so if Australia's ecology and its denizens are to be saved the money is going to have to come from corporate profits.
After Krazy Kevin's mindless tens of billions of dollars give aways (to save all working families from the horrors of the non-existent "GFC") you can be sure that cuts in federal funding will start with irrelevancies relating to conservation ("no voters there Whine"). Mind you - "it's full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes" when it comes to laughably stupid military spending where the budget to waste money just 'grows and grows'. Can someone tell me why Australia needs submarines at all? Apparently not even the personnel in the Australian Navy want to sail in them and even if they did - what on Earth would be the purpose. I suppose a more realistic question would be what on Earth is the purpose of the Australian armed forces at all?
My view is that Australian governments since Federation have become so removed from reality (and let's face it they have all been, almost without exception talentless and often stupid people whose only reason for entering politics was to make themselves wealthier than they could do by holding a real job) that almost no action contemplated by any one of them is actually designed to help the people of Australia - it's designed to keep their personal noses in the trough of graft and corruption for as long as possible.
All Australia's health, education and transport problems together with the alleviation of congenital poverty could be solved by reducing the military to a coast guard and a CMF within ten years and diverting the Defence budget to real problems in Australian's daily lives.
All problems solved - The government gets another 20 billion or so a year to spend giving Australia's human inhabitants more hospitals, universities and roads without raising any taxes and stops encouraging young men to go and get themselves killed while trying to kill citizens of other countries and Australia's business organisations pay dedicated people to roll back the effects of human ravaging of Australia's non human inhabitants.
...or is it too much to expect 'Australia's decision makers to accept its the 21st Century in the Southern Hemisphere - not the late 19th century in Europe?