Thank you for offering your views to the Australia Defence Association.
Vibrant, informed and objective public debate is essential for Australia's defence and wider national security.
As Australia's longstanding independent, non-partisan, community-based, national public-interest watchdog organisation and think-tank on defence and wider national security issues, we naturally take great care with our contributions to informed public debate.
We welcome supportive or critical feedback on our efforts.
We also share the community expectation that your feedback needs to be informed and as carefully expressed too.
Your responsibilities when considering feedback
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If you are considering positive feedback please authorise it for publication as a letter-to-the-editor in our journal.
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If you are considering negative feedback, please first check that the facts actually correspond with your understanding of them.
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In particular, please check that you are not acting before you have discovered or understood what we have actually said in full, rather than just reacting to much briefer comments published or broadcast by news media where our comments have been edited to fit the space or time constraints of such media respectively.
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While great care is taken with ADA commentary, such media editing, and any resultant misquotion, misreporting or out-of-context reporting, is beyond our control.
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Long experience has taught us that misunderstandings can occur when our explanations or other commentary are unduly truncated by the media and reported incomplete, out of context or in a sensationalist or even biased manner.
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Please make sure in particular that you do not make the mistake of offering feedback based on a single — and especially a short — quote or "grab" in a media report without checking that your understanding of the whole issue involved, and of our actual position on the wider matter concerned, is complete and indeed reasonable in the circumstances.
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If, for example, you have misheard or misunderstood our position based on a single attributed comment or edited media quote you might actually agree rather than disagree with us about the issue concerned.
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While we make every attempt to answer genuine and reasonably expressed feedback, we cannot reply to you if your comments are anonymous, abusive, illegal, defamatory, unduly subjective or otherwise unreasonably deficient in meeting community standards for contributing to informed public debate.
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Any feedback that you wish to be published needs to conform with our terms and conditions for the supply of content. Your provision of feedback for publication signifies your agreement to be bound by these terms and conditions.
Your responsibilities when providing feedback
- Please note that in the interests of informed public debate, and to weed out fraudulent, mischievous and sadly some crank feedback, your email will be automatically filtered out as spam and fail to be delivered unless you:
- Fill in the subject line of your email with a specific and relevant entry that assists us in directing it to the best person to answer you;
- Explain your interest and/or claimed expertise concerning the subject you are commenting on adequately, reasonably and politely.
- Ensure that your comments are not personally derogatory, otherwise offensive or defamatory; are not in contempt of a court or otherwise illegal; and are not repetitious, meaningless or containing clear errors of fact that would or should be known by any reasonable person.
- Have the courtesy and integrity to identify yourself appropriately — as we do in our public comment and on this website — so you can verify your identity and credibility as an interlocutor. This also enables our consequent discussions to occur by the most effective and timely means, and for them not to be confined to unnecessarily delayed, time-consuming or subject-limiting email exchanges. This means you providing your:
- first name and family name,
- telephone number,
- postal address, and
- email address.
- Finally, please note that an alleged name, nickname and/or your email address alone are not sufficient identification to prove your bonafides. Especially if you are using a web-based generic email provider (hotmail, gmail, yahoo, etc).
Addresses for your feedback
- Our postal address for feedback is: Australia Defence Association, PO Box 320, Erindale Centre, ACT, 2903, Australia
- Your email feedback can be forwarded to ADA Feedback and will be processed if you have met your community discourse responsibilities as detailed above.
