PLATO Media Release 28 June 2006 -- for immediate release

"PLATO Celebrates Milestone"

Despite being dissatisfied with the Government's so-called "OBE Compromise Plan", the anti-OBE lobby group PLATO will pause briefly today to celebrate a milestone.

PLATO spokesman Steve Kessell announced that they will reach visitor number 100,000 to their website home page today.

"The website traffic has increased exponentially over the past two months," Kessell said. He noted: "The 100,000 figure is hits on the home page alone, from more than 30,000 different computers, since September. During that period, 870,000 individual pages were downloaded from our web site - 187,000 this month alone."

Kessell vows that the celebration will be short-lived. "We anticipate a new wave of anti-OBE sentiment when parents receive school reports in a couple of weeks. Already hundreds of parents, unhappy with the new OBE Year 11 English course, have downloaded our petition to the State Parliament," he said.

"The petition requests that the government delay all new Year 11-12 courses, and not proceed into Year 12 with those started this year, until they have been approved by a majority of the teachers who will be teaching them," he said.