As an active campaigner for animal rights myself, I am aware that Australian slaughterhouses do NOT use the 'stun-kill' method as used in most other parts of the world. In fact, it is illegal in all states and territories. Therefore, Mcdonald's Australia is NOT guilty of cruelty to animals.Secondly, Australian beef IS organic. Legislation passed 6 years ago ensures that all commercial beef and beef products remain chemical free and 100% pure. In fact, beef remains one of our biggest exports because of this fact.
Perhaps the judges in the McLibel case found that Maccas crew in most countries 'do badly in terms of pay and conditions', but it cannot be refuted that Australian working pay and conditions are among the highest in the world, and as you yourself have read, most staff in this country are more than happy with their wages and working environment. We have one of the highest standards of living in the world because of legilsation that promotes and enforces fair pay and working conditions for all employees.
You would know all of this had you bothered to do some research of your own instead of basing all of your 'evidence' on findings from one single judgement gross in its generalisations and not relevant to every single McDonald's franchise.
And finally, if McDonald's was so ruthless in silencing its critics, why the hell is this web site still in operation??
--
McSpotlight: This web site exists because the McLibel defendants decided to stand up to the threats McDonald's threw at them; and dedicated 5 years of their lives to fighting them in court, rather than stifle their conscience and apologise. That's why McDonald's suffered "The biggest PR disaster of all time" (Marketing Week).
Since then, they haven't tried to issue any writs for libel; they obviously now realise that they cannot just dictate to people. They're now trying to pretend that the McLibel trial never happened.
However, if they try anything, we're ready; McSpotlight exists as mirrored servers in five or six countries; to shut us down, McDonald's would have to mount a simultaneous assault on us in all of those countries; which would mean the cost of obtaining court orders under five different judicial systems, some of which expressly permit criticism of the type McSpotlight is doing. We also have backup countries ready; we could have McSpotlight back up and working within about 12 hours of such an assault; McSpotlight has also been put onto CD-ROM and copies of that exist all over the world.
For McDonald's to attempt such a thing would also cause outrage among the 'net community; there is actually a lot of goodwill out there towards us; and such a crude attempt at censorship would be yet another PR disaster for McDonald's. They dare not risk it; it's bad for business.
Furthermore, it would probably trigger counterstrikes by activists and crackers on McDonald's own Web presence and network; as far as we're aware, they run Netscape Enterprise server v3.0K on a Sun Solaris box to power their Web site; and their corporate network consisted of an ATM backbone running Cisco Lightstream boxes last time we heard.
If McDonald's tried to close us down, they might find that they'd bitten off rather more than they can chew; we have fallback positions ready to go and waiting; they don't.
