Mr Justice Meeks, the Commissioner, summarised the Commission’s findings at a press conference this morning:
“When all’s said and done, it came down to the fact that there were just too many charities. From what we can see, it had gotten to the point, in the cancer sector for instance, where there were three cancer charities for every cancer sufferer in the country.”
Analysis that accompanies the reports suggests that the only way the sector could have remained viable was for there to be four dollars donated to charities for every dollar of GDP created.
Some of the submissions to the commission also make fascinating reading. Mr James Pennywhistle from the Australian Trademark Office:
“We were at the stage of refusing any more trademark applications that involved ribbons. Unimaginative charities kept trying to register ribbons for their cause but the field was so crowded that there was very little room to move. We had covered all colour combinations. We had ribbons in two colours, ribbons in three colours, ribbons with piping, ribbons with chequerboards and ribbons that had been tie-died. Then there was the shape. We had folded, bent, twisted, straight and going round and round in decreasing circles finally disappearing up the hole in the middle – which was a fair symbol of the state of the sector at that time.”
Dr Penny Harntnett from the Consumer Complaints Commission outlined some of the issues regulators were having with charity events:
“It was a bloody circus out there. Every weekend there was a ride, a run, a walk, a jump, a dance, a snog , a pub crawl or a shag-a-thon associated with some charity or another. There was nothing so stupid that people wouldn’t do it if they felt they were supporting a good cause. Was the cause even real? No-one knew. Bluge Di Tillios Syndrome, which raised half a million dollars, was revealed to be an anagram of “Gullible Idiots” – which was an embarrassment to many. We had one group running a ‘Ride for Cholera’. We only realised after the first ten deaths that the ride was in fact promoting cholera, not promoting eradication of it or treatment for sufferers. It turned out that the water bottles handed to riders at the half-way mark were a primordial soup of disease. Enquiries are still continuing into that one. We think there might be an Al Qaeda connection.”
Charities themselves were also finding the going tough. Ms X – whose identity has been protected by a court order:
“The pink thing wound up being a disaster for us. We got the pink ribbons, the pink cupcakes and the pink aeroplanes all being ways to raise money. Then people got the idea that buying pink stuff equalled making a charitable contribution. We had little girls colouring Santa in pink while listening to songs that just weren’t appropriate for their age, thinking they were helping, and every other shop owner was flogging pink stuff with no charitable connection to gullible do-gooders. We had no control; we couldn’t get a trademark over the colour pink.”
The report notes that the early warning signs that the sector was in trouble were ignored. The first such sign was the emergence of PECC, or the “Protect the Environment from Charities Collective”. This group realised that charities had surpassed the fast food and motor industries as being the worst polluters in the country. Bill Broomsdale from PECC explained to the commission:
“A few of us having a chat over a beer thought of it first. We had just been asked to buy pins to support some war veterans mob and one of us, I can’t remember who, asked ‘What happens to all the pins after you wear them?’ We realised that no-one keeps or, sometimes, even wears their charity pins – it’s not like military honours. If they ever get out of the cellophane, they last about a half-day on the lapel and then get binned. Doing some back-of-the-beer-mat calculations, we figured that charity pins alone were adding something like 1 million tonnes to local landfills every year – to say nothing of the environmental cost of production. Add to that the pens, pencils, noses, flowers, ribbons, fluffy toys and vibrators and the total was becoming frightening. None of it was recycled, none of the production was carbon-neutral or subject to any kind of environmental controls - it was all imported cheapo garbage. In the end we had to create a charity to help the country get over the damage done by all the charities.”
This concept of a meta-charity (a charity for charities) gained further momentum and culminated in the now infamous “Charity-a-thon” weekend which aimed to raise money to support starving charities. No-one noticed that the Australian Charity Support Agency, a registered charity and the promoter of the event, was, itself, the principal beneficiary of the money. Many Australians blew their entire charity budget for the year supporting a charity that was allegedly supporting other charities which were supporting needy people but instead just lined the pockets of the promoters.
The final report is yet to be delivered but it is clear that it will take a long, long time for the charity industry to bounce back from the disaster of the last few years.
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