Christians campaign to prevent NMG funding
Members of the Melbourne-based Salt Shakers Christian ethics lobby group will petition the NSW government to revoke its funding of Mardi Gras on grounds of falsified crowd estimates and revenue figures.
Salt Shakers executive officer Peter Stokes said claims of 500,000 spectators were impossible, and says his own calculations estimate the crowd to be no more than 70,000.
We pointed out many years ago that these numbers were an absolute impossibility. You don’t need to be Einstein to work out how many people could be there, Stokes told Sydney Star Observer.
Mardi Gras sponsors and now the NSW government have been duped by this organisation and we will be encouraging our members to make sure that they are aware.
Stokes said the Salt Shakers would oppose any amount of funding, even a lesser figure, for religious reasons.
The organisation has previously petitioned Mardi Gras sponsors like Qantas and Ford to drop their event sponsorship.
We are opposed to the idea of government funding because the whole thing is a promotion of sexual immorality, but apart from that we are opposed to the gross exaggerations that are a fraud when it comes to selling Mardi Gras as a community event that brings in X amount of people, Stokes said.
New Mardi Gras general manager Anna McInnerney said crowd figures were generated by external organisations, making the suggestion that New Mardi Gras falsified its figures ludicrous.
The $30 million figure was not produced by Mardi Gras at all, it was done by Department of State Development economists, she said.
We had to submit ticketing data to them, extensive spread-sheets, our marketing and media plans and numbers of participants in the parade -” which are all then used to estimate the economic impact of Mardi Gras for the state and for Australia, so Mr Stokes might want to take it up with the state’s economists if he has a problem with that number.
In terms of crowd estimates, McInnerney said the figure was estimated each year in conjunction with the NSW Police Force, who patrol the route.
However a NSW Police spokesperson denied the organisation helped estimate crowd numbers.
We would develop our own estimates prior to the event and may on occasion do our own crowd estimates, but they are internal figures which would not be released, the spokesperson said.
Anna McInnerney seems to have forgotten the fiasco over the crowd numbers in 2006, when the parade organisers reduced their estimate of half a million, made on Saturday night, to 300,000 on Sunday morning. Yet Scott Gillespie could not tell the media how they estimated the figure – “something to do with so many heads per square mile or something”, he said!!!
The SMH also reported, “Police say they have given up estimating the size of the crowd… “Our estimates have always been very different to [the organisers’] numbers, and we don’t want to get into an issue with them over it,” a NSW Police spokeswoman said yesterday. “It’s their event, they can call the numbers.”
The police stopped -˜endorsing’ organiser figures in 2002. This followed 3 years of them trying to bring down the inflated figures -“ we know because we were talking to them about the exaggerations!!
Anna also fails to acknowledge that financial estimates also take into account crowd numbers for non ticket events like fair day, mardi gras parade and other community events. The 80,000 quoted by organisers, not the police, for Fair Day 2008 is a classic case of their gross exaggeration.
And they call themselves followers of Christ? Gimme a bucket!!!!
Saltshakers comprise two people with a website: Peter and Jenny Stokes, who hold extreme and misguided fundamentalist christian views and masquerade as some kind of grass roots organisation with a well of supporters.
Their intent is purely malicious.
Be wary, but ignore their comments and don’t take the bait.