Glenn Milne seemed very het up with GetUp, Australia’s very own MoveOn.org in his Australian column on Monday.

“Serious
questions are being asked about the latest political organisation to
emerge in Australia: the activist website GetUp, self-described on its
home-page as ‘a new political movement to build a more progressive
Australia’,” he wrote.

Milne questioned GetUp’s self
proclaimed “non-partisan” status – then went on to add “There is an
eerie similarity between GetUp’s company structure and One Nation – a
structure that could have allowed Pauline Hanson and her fellow company
directors to walk away with millions in donations from supporters. And
there are questions about the level of personal detail required by
GetUp from new members – detail that involves financial information and
profiling tailor-made to establish a database for use in direct-mail
campaigns during elections. Or for commercial purposes.”

It
was a typical over the top performance from the little fella that
overlooked the real grey area GetUp is occupying. GetUp does not force
anyone to provide more than is required to register on any site to get
mail outs or similar material. Anyone who registers to get newspaper
updates or other email subscriptions usually has to provide name,
address and email address details and a password. The email is then
used to send a validation email that checks that at least someone who
has access to that address has registered for the service.

One
can fill out Part 1 of the GetUp web form then hit “Submit” and
register. The only mandatory information is the email address – and it
says so in red lettering on the site. Where Get Up is too clever by
half is in the way in pushes registrants to go on to Part 2 of the web
form and provide other contact emails of friends and then pushes them
again to head on to the Part 3 and make donations. This might be in
breach of the Trade Practices Act (but probably isn’t) or it might
breach the advertising standards code (voluntary anyway – but maybe
not).

And, if you haven’t read The Reader from
yesterday, there are serious question over whether the whole thing
works. GetUp’s email campaigns – like others that are web-form
generated – are spam. We may as well remove the voter from the middle
and just have the computers chat to each other. That’s pretty much what
happens anyway. There’s no alternative way to manage large volumes of
email.

GetUp is essentially a feel good site for armchair
activism. If you want to really whinge about GetUp, it might be better
to say that it’s just a new form of petition that uses new and quicker
ways to get lots of names and send them in, but accomplishes sod-all.

Yes,
it might also be a good way to raise money – but if they’re going to do
anything with it, GetUp will have to be very careful to follow both
corporations and electoral laws. And the political parties – not just
Glenn Milne – will be watching that closely.

Read more on the site here.