Expensive polling and cheap spin doctoring used to justify ancient forest logging.
Still Wild Still Threatened has today accused Forestry Tasmania of push polling and lodged a complaint to the Market Research Society of Australia over alleged breaches in their Code of Professional Conduct.
The EMRS poll for Forestry Tasmania released earlier this week told respondents that an 'anti-forestry' group had carried out a 'coordinated attack' on major public buildings around the world.
Ed Hill of SWST said that this term is blatantly false and designed to achieve a negative result. Follow this link to the Still Wild Still Threatened website to view images of the so called "attack" http://www.stillwildstillthreatened.org/image-video-galleries/actions
He said the peaceful protests that had been carried out internationally by Still Wild Still Threatened could not be described as a coordinated attack on public buildings - a term which brings to mind images of September 11th. Forestry Tasmania is using distorted language to link forest protesters with terrorism, said Mr Hill.
"This is not only blatantly inaccurate and defamatory. It also cynically exploits public disgust with terrorism for Forestry Tasmania's benefit."
The use of the term attack on public buildings is a breach of the Code of Professional Conduct for Market Research, said Mr Hill. The Code states that the researcher must not make misleading and inaccurate statements in order to secure Respondents co-operation. This is clearly what has happened in this case as the researcher has inaccurately and misleadingly described the protest to respondents deliberately securing their negative response. Forestry Tasmania has resorted to expensive push polling, paid for with public money and cheap spin doctoring, to justify ancient forest logging. Said Mr Hill.
Mr Hill said that SWST had also written to EMRS to objecting to the terminology and to seek a public apology.
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