Laws with teeth

Testing times for canned spammers
By Jeni Porter
November 27, 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/news/
Sauce/Testing-times-for-canned-spammers/2004/11/26/1101219746876.html

If nine months is a long time in politics it has proved almost a lifetime for the fledgling software company that John Howard's son Tim helped set up.

It seems that not even the patronage of the Liberal Party has saved the spammer Net Harbour from some radical surgery.

Net Harbour attracted considerable flak during the election for the unsolicited campaign emails it sent out on behalf of the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, Brendan Nelson, and the departed Parramatta MP, Ross Cameron.

But not long after the election Net Harbour vacated its King Street Wharf office and assumed such a low profile that this week no-one was answering phones or general emails.

It was only in February this year that the PM and other bigwigs toasted the launch of the small software company with big ideas set up by computer whiz-kid Brad Lancken about six months earlier.

Tim Howard had returned from London to be Net Harbour's founding director of business development.

They set up shop in a smart office with a barbeque and a balcony overlooking the sparkling city wharf and talked expansively about their "customer relationship management product".
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When we asked Net Harbour's chairman, Phil Kiely, what had happened he said there had been "some restructuring done with the whole company".

Kiely, a former chief of Oracle in Australia and a Net Harbour investor, assured Sauce that "the company is still in existence, but there has been some fundamental changes to how they do things".

Kiely couldn't give us an office phone number nor could he say what the changes were. "I would rather you get it straight from Brad," he said, offering to get Lancken to call us.

But Lancken didn't ring.

We were also unable to contact Tim Howard to find out how he fared in the restructure. His father's office was unable to help.

The NSW Liberal Party paid an undisclosed amount for Net Harbour's electronic campaigning, which exploited a loophole in the Government's anti-spam laws that ban companies from sending unsolicited bulk emails. But John Howard paid the costs of the Bennelong blitz out of his own pocket, by reimbursing the party the money it paid to Net Harbour.