Talk:FamilyVoice Australia

Suggestions

Hi there! I hate when people tag 'my' articles without even bothering to try to fix the reason for the tag (wikify, advert, no-links, etc), but from my experience this article is just begging for a few different tags (which I will NOT put on it out of respect).

First off there are no links to other Wikipedia articles even elementary ones. None of these people, places or things are notable enough to have a Wikipedia entry? Does the 'UK Festival of Light' have an entry?

Second, it's a little too preoccupied with the minutiae of details of it's history. The layout needs to be more in line with Wikipedia style. For Example:

• Synopsis
• History
• Mission
• Actions
• See Also
• Links

Thirdly, it reads like an advertisement and is very 'vague' (weasel words) about what EXACTLY this group does. Do they campaign for people running for office? Do they write letters to TV stations about indecency? Are they Political or Moral or Charitable or all of these or none of these? That vagueness/advertising style will bring down the 'tag masters' with a fury on you. And having those tags will bring in lots of people to scrutinize this article.

Fourthly, because of all the mistakes made so far I can tell the main author is new to Wikipedia. So before you get in a revert war with, for instance, someone who hates FOL-AU. You would help yourself by sticking to facts (who, what, when, why, where, or how) and have linked references to those facts from 'neutral' or 'unbiased' sources like newspapers, or magazines (and not known biased publications that have an agenda). Also be prepared to see things you may not like, like any controversy this group may be embroiled in (if any), added here sooner or later. Unless it's patently untrue or defamatory, if you remove it, then YOU will be breaking the Wikibedia Code of Conduct, not those who made a 'good faith' edit.

Anyway good luck, and it is better (at least a bit) than the stub that was here before.

Tiki God 00:36, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

It looks like the current version of the article was created on February 4 by Fola Nat Pres (talk · contribs) who has only edited this article and one edit summary was "Pasted in text provided by David Philips (National President)". It also included changing the disambiguation text from "lobby group" to "Advocacy Group" in the article name. --Scott Davis ^Talk 01:11, 1 March 2007 (UTC)

Can you spell bias? Is there anything in this article that's not copy-pasted from the FoL website? (I'm not, by the way, anti-FoL, just in the midst of writing an essay about the religious Right's comparative lack of success in Australia as opposed to America. This article does not give the whole story. The Mary Whitehouse tour, for instance, was not the roaring success it is described to be here - as I understand it, it was financially rather unsuccessful, did relatively little to mobilise people and was met with a number of counter-demonstrations.) 04:30, 8 June 2007 (UTC)

This is about tag cleanup. As all of the tags are more than a year old, there is no current discussion relating to them, and there is a great deal of editing done since the tags were placed, they will be removed. This is not a judgement of content. If there is cause to re-tag, then that of course may be done, with the necessary posting of a discussion as to why, and what improvements could be made. This is only an effort to clean out old tags, and permit them to be updated with current issues if warranted.Jjdon (talk) 20:51, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

Request for edit

Hi all. FamilyVoice Australia (formerly Festival of Light Australia) is wanting to update its Wikipedia page for FOLA. We've written up a document that includes multiple secondary references. We want to follow the Wikipedia guidelines when doing a major re-edit as we know this could be considered a Conflict of Interest and we would like to update the page in the correct way. Please see below for the new content we'd like to add. We welcome your suggestions:

History

The Australian Festival of Light was inspired by the UK Nationwide Festival of Light , which was founded by Mary Whitehouse, Malcolm Muggeridge and others in 1971. The Nationwide Festival of Light changed its name to CARE (Christian Action Research & Education) in 1983.

News of the UK Nationwide Festival of Light soon caught the attention of the Australian Community Standards Organisation (CSO), which had recently merged with the South Australian Moral Action Committee. Key members of the Moral Action Committee included Rev Lance Shilton, Rector of Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Adelaide and later Anglican Dean of Sydney; Dr John Court, then senior lecturer in psychology at Flinders University, and Peter Daniels. South Australian delegates at a CSO meeting in Melbourne in 1972 led the move to hold “a nationwide act of Christian witness, similar to that conducted in Britain last year (Festival of Light)”.

Rev Lance Shilton then initiated an interdenominational steering committee to establish the Australian Festival of Light at a meeting in Toorak Gardens, Adelaide, in November 1972. The committee appointed Dr Court as chairman; Rev Shilton and Mrs Roslyn Phillips as deputy chairmen, and Peter Daniels as publicity officer.

The Festival of Light was formally launched in Adelaide in June 1973 with a media conference and the release of a new book by Dr Court and SA journalist Helen Caterer, Stand Up and Be Counted, which aimed to motivate readers to defend publicly their Christian faith and values.

Lance Shilton’s network of contacts through the Australian Evangelical Alliance and the Community Standards Organisation led to the formation of independent branches of Festival of Light (which later included the Community Standards Organisation) in all Australian states. Rev Fred Nile accepted leadership of the NSW branch in July 1973, becoming the full-time director in January 1974. Mr Nile greatly increased the organisation’s activity and public profile.

Rev Fred Nile was elected national co-ordinator of the Australian Festival of Light at a meeting of state branch representatives in late 1974, where Dr John Court was appointed the first national chairman. Dr David and Mrs Roslyn Phillips were appointed editors of the national magazine Light and the first edition in January 1975 featured the campaign against the controversial Family Law Bill. Light was published four times a year and mailed to supporters in all state branches.

In 1981 Nile was first elected to the NSW Legislative Council as leader of the Call to Australia Party, later renamed the Christian Democratic Party (CDP). Call to Australia and the CDP have always been independent of Festival of Light, which has never been a political party. Nile has continued as a member of the NSW parliament, but retired as director of the NSW Festival of Light in May 2007.

Aims

The aims of the Australian Festival of Light were first formulated at the meeting of state representatives in late 1974:
1. to mobilise Australians to support purity, love, and family life;
2. to proclaim the value of Christian standards of behaviour for family and community life;
3. to persuade national and community leaders to strengthen the family as the basic unit of society;
4. to resist influences that lower moral standards and threaten human dignity;
5. to research the social implications of Biblical ethics and the effects of modern trends on family and community life.

Publications

1. Light – a quarterly 12-page magazine sent to subscribers throughout Australia as well as some MPs and media outlets, from January 1975 to May 2008.
2. Festival Focus South Australia – a four-page newspaper initially sent to subscribers in SA seven times a year. From 2003, separate state editions were gradually published, beginning with SA and Queensland. In 2008 there were separate quarterly editions of Festival Focus for the five mainland Australian states.

Events

Festival of Light hosted many events including visits by overseas speakers such as:

1973 Mary Whitehouse

The first major event of the Australian Festival of Light was the visit by “Clean-up TV” campaigner Mary Whitehouse to Sydney and Adelaide in October 1973. It was Rev Shilton, while on a trip to Britain in May 1973, who invited Whitehouse to Australia. Whitehouse spoke to overflow crowds in the Sydney Town Hall and the Adelaide Festival Theatre, and led a march of 10,000 people to Light’s Vision in Adelaide on 14 October 1973, where the Festival of Light Proclamation setting out the breadth of its concerns was read out and endorsed by a total crowd of over 12,000.

Mary Whitehouse later recalled her first visit to Australia as one of the big events of her life. She told her biographer Max Caulfield that because of the intense media interest, “I became better known in Australia in three and a half weeks than I did in Britain in ten years.”

1976 Malcolm Muggeridge

Malcolm Muggeridge’s Australian Festival of Light speaking tour was equally successful in October 1976. An estimated 35,000 people heard his keynote address to the Family Celebration in Sydney’s Hyde Park on 10 October; he spoke to a capacity audience in Adelaide’s Festival Theatre on 14 October and significant crowds in other cities throughout Australia and New Zealand.

1978 Mary Whitehouse

Mary Whitehouse successfully toured Australia for a second time in September 1978, amid controversy over UK court action she had initiated against an offensive poem about Jesus published in a homosexual paper. Student demonstrators picketed her meetings and Brisbane police arrested two youths and five girls who threw strawberry pies at her.. Despite the protests, large crowds came out in support – including 5000 at an Adelaide march Mary led from Rymill Park to Parliament House on 10 September, 800 in Hobart, 1000 in Brisbane, 2000 in Melbourne, 1500 in Perth where she was welcomed by Premier Sir Charles Court, and 4000 in the Sydney Town Hall on 27 September.

1981 Mother Teresa

The Australian Festival of Light and some Catholic leaders invited Mother Teresa to Australia to mark the 1981 United Nations International Year of the Disabled Person. Mother Teresa was the guest speaker at the Festival of Light “The Handicapped Child in the Community” conference, attended by 800 people.

1996 Gianna Jessen

Festival of Light Australia sponsored the Australian tour of US teenage singer and pro-life activist Gianna Jessen in February and March 1996. Jessen was born alive after an attempted saline abortion left her with brain damage and cerebral palsy. She spoke to packed venues in all states and territories.

Mixed response

The 1973 Proclamation of Australian Festival of Light reached out to “all people of good will”, but most of those who responded had a Christian background. In 1974 Flinders University historians Hilliard and Warhurst noted that supporters of Festival of Light were mainly Protestants of the Evangelical tradition and conservative Catholics, and that some other Christians tended to be critical of the organisation’s “overconfident presentation of complex moral issues in simple black and white terms”. Hilliard and Warhurst said that despite Festival of Light promotion among churches around South Australia, some clergy were unresponsive and many congregations did not get involved.

Sometimes there was open controversy. A week before the 1973 visit of Mary Whitehouse, students at the University of Adelaide, Flinders University and the South Australian Institute of Technology (now the University of South Australia) began a “Festival of Fright” campaign against the Australian Festival of Light events, saying: “These latter-day Calvins should be met by as much opposition as freedom-loving people can muster…”

In 1978, South Australian Attorney-General Peter Duncan criticised the Festival of Light, saying: “I believe there is a desperate need to develop a tolerant society… I don’t think this sort of hysteria and prejudging that is generated by the Festival of Light does anything to further this move.” Duncan also spoke out against the 1978 Festival of Light-sponsored visit to Australia by Mary Whitehouse, calling her “an agent of darkness” and an “opponent of freedom”.

Influence on legislation

Nevertheless the September 1978 Mary Whitehouse visit was influential in the Festival of Light campaign against hardcore pornography. On 12 September, following national media coverage of the pornography problem in relation to the Whitehouse tour, Victorian Liberal Premier Rupert Hamer announced that his government would move to tighten pornography laws, particularly in relation to children..

On 10 September 1978 at the Whitehouse rally in Adelaide’s Rymill Park, Festival of Light circulated a petition calling for tighter control of pornography, later signed by over 14,000 South Australians. On 20 September, Labor Premier Don Dunstan delivered a blistering attack on the Festival of Light in the South Australian House of Assembly, calling the petition pamphlet “disgraceful”. He said a graph accompanying the petition was “one of the most untruthful pieces of work that I have ever come across” – because it showed a rise in South Australian rates of reported rape following a 1974 law allowing the sale of hardcore pornography, compared with Queensland where hardcore pornography was banned and rape reports remained steady. Dunstan said rape convictions should have been used instead of reports, and the graph should have extended beyond 1975.

However on 27 September, Liberal MP Bruce Eastick defended the Festival of Light petition and graph, and said part of the Premier’s speech the week before had been a “blatant untruth”. Dr Eastick said rape report statistics from South Australia and Queensland after 1975 showed that “it is quite clear that the problem in South Australia is almost four times as serious as that which exists in Queensland”. Liberal MP Mrs Jennifer Adamson later fully documented the statistics in the Festival of Light petition pamphlet, and listed the academic credentials of the founding chairman Dr John Court..

Dr Eastick also pointed out that a child pornography magazine Just Boys had been banned in New South Wales, but had been classified for unrestricted sale in South Australia, “alongside the Women’s Weekly”.

On 28 September the Dunstan government introduced the Criminal Law (Prohibition of Child Pornography) Bill, which passed both houses of parliament without dissent on 21 November 1978 after Opposition amendments tightened its provisions. The passage of the bill in an amended form was widely seen as a response to the Festival of Light campaign. Liberal MP Keith Russack noted: “The many signatures on petitions presented to this Parliament is a significant indication of the South Australian public’s concern.””.

In recent years

In 2004 the national body Festival of Light Australia was formed under a new constitution, with a national office in Adelaide and branches in South Australia and Queensland. Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales branches followed in 2005-2007. Dr David Phillips, formerly chairman of the South Australian branch of Festival of Light, became national president of Festival of Light Australia.

Name change

On 1 July 2008, Festival of Light Australia formally changed its name to FamilyVoice Australia to distinguish the ministry from unrelated groups using the same name, and to give a better idea of its nature and purpose.”.

Light magazine was renamed VoxPoint and produced in colour with an updated format. Festival Focus was renamed VoxNews, again with separate editions for each mainland state.

Fola Nat Pres (talk) 00:05, 3 February 2011 (UTC)