Thank you for offering your views to the ADA — Australia's longstanding independent, non-partisan and community-based, national public-interest watchdog on strategic security, defence and wider national security issues.
Vibrant, informed and objective public debate is essential for Australia's strategic security. Providing measured input to such debate is one of our six core public-interest watchdog functions.
We naturally take great care with our comments and welcome both supportive and critical feedback on our efforts.
Please note, however, that we share the general community expectation that any feedback you provide also needs to be factual, informed and carefully expressed.
Your responsibilities when considering feedback
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If you are considering positive feedback, please authorise it for publication as an on-line comment or a letter-to-the-editor.
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If you are considering negative feedback, please first check that what has prompted you to consider this is actually true, rather than a factual error or a conceptual or contextual misunderstanding on your part.
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In particular, please avoid rushing to respond to brief comments published or broadcast by news media (where our comments have been edited to fit space or time constraints) before first finding out what the ADA has actually said in full and in context.
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While great care is taken with ADA commentary, 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 mistakenly offer 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, brief, comment or edited media quote it may be that you actually agree more than disagree with us about the whole issue concerned.
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We make every attempt to answer genuine and reasonably expressed feedback. We cannot reply to you, however, 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 "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 enables us to direct it to the person best qualified to reply to you;
- Explain your interest — and/or any claimed experience or knowledge of the subject concerned — clearly, reasonably and politely.
- Ensure that your comments are not :
- personally derogatory, otherwise offensive or defamatory;
- in contempt of a court or otherwise illegal; or
- repetitious, meaningless or containing clear errors of fact or interpretation 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 any 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.
