Vic, I take my hat off to the rhetoric. A few questions:

1) did you (or some mythical third party) make a commitment to a 'client'
   about when the domain delegation would take place?

2) you do have a complete record of all communications on this matter between
   yourself, the client and the org.au process don't you? Because if you start
   making this kind of noise, you better have the audit trail to back the
   assertions. 

3) why is there a TXT record, and a whois page for lifeline.org.au dating back
   over 1 year, with no substantive delegation?  If you wanted to alledge that
   lack of speed by org.au was causing grief here, you'd be on stronger ground
   if there was some evidence regarding the history of prior attempts to
   reserve, and delegate the name were known. I suspect that the truth of the
   matter here is a bit more complex, and less in your favour than you wish.

4) Can we see the youth suicide website now please? After all, the pages do
   exist online somewhere, in an ISP, and are reachable under a transitional
   name aren't they?

I'm very unimpressed by your approach. I think the client is suffering, but
as much from bad advice as from anything else. and I certainly don't see any
fault in what Robert does to run a jobqueue on requests. I have had to deal
with him both as a delegate and as an administrator, and I find he responds 
much as he is treated: with respect and clarity, and best intentions.

Please don't get me wrong: I loathe real-world problems as much as the next
person, but to sink to the depth of labelling people as part of the problem
because the planning of a release like this is lagging is a bit obscene. From
what I can see, lifeline have had over a year to persue delegation of an
initial lodgement, and have had considerably more than one week to ramp up
the process of getting online, and if the REAL delay on service release is
DNS, it suggests some bad planning somewhere. I seem to recall hearing some
news stories about youth suicide initiatives online well over a week ago. 
Several weeks ago in fact. Why was lodgement delayed until last week?

Can I suggest that a phonecall, confirming delegation is safely expected based
on proof of ownership would permit the printrun to proceed? I mean that you
check that somebody, proving they ARE entitled to lifeline.org.au, can expect
to get it, and that on that basis, the URL will apply at some stage?

If the website hosting the service is motivated, (and if they are NS anyway)
they can make the name function for local users. That should suffice for making
web pages and URL's self-consistent (although if you used base-relative URLs
that wouldn't be a problem)

-George
--
George Michaelson         |  DSTC Pty Ltd
Email: ggm§dstc.edu.au    |  University of Qld 4072
Phone: +61 7 3365 4310    |  Australia
  Fax: +61 7 3365 4311    |  http://www.dstc.edu.au