Was immigration policy the only factor driving people's votes? Do you believe that over 50% of the UK population harbors ill will towards immigrant populations? What about the democratic arguments against the European Commission or the arguments against protectionist trade barriers? To distill the entire vote into a single issue is foolish.
I think it's easy to say that immigration and underlying racism or xenophobia were the cause for the result if you don't agree with the result. Comparing 5% of Australian voters electing Pauline Hanson is a far stretch considering that one vote was a general election, the other was a referendum and one result was 5% of the population and the other is over 50%.
Anecdotes of some campaigners citing Australia's immigration policy is not a strong enough argument to refute other fundamental issues that went into people's votes and is not proof of "Yet another example that immigration policy trumps pretty well all other concerns".
One issue with the argument you presented is that a not-for-profit or charitable entity by definition does not have profit in its interest. For-profit entities also have the liberty to freely move their capital to satisfy their business requirements.
Although there is no law against a charity or not-for-profit deciding to remove funding for a program they, by definition, are not motivated by the money flow of the program. Sure they are interested in making the program run efficiently and that there is enough funding to begin the program and see the program through but profit is not their core motivation and thus, I would argue, are more committed in their programs and investments. Those exploiting inefficiencies for gain should be reprimanded by the system granting these special business types.
I have been seeing more and more discussion of fundamental issues occurring in the online advertising industry which are acknowledged to cause backlash which harms the bottom line (ad-blockers, decreased viewership, etc).
The fact that these patterns are being spoken about to such a large audience - I have no link to the advertising industry and have seen loud messages from large publications outlining some issues:
- Relevance: showing an ad of something you just searched on eBay on your news site was novel at first but over time people have learned to tune out because seeing your search for soccer ball while reading about terrorism just taught people to blank out the irrelevant ads.
- Performance: tracking scripts, social sharing, multimedia ads. Refer to the series of VPAID Google+ posts outlining the detrimental effects of a single ad loaded into the user's view.
Companies targeting contextualisation and performance, and accepting that users are no longer willing to accept the poor quality of current popular methods may be in the minority at the moment but the niche will most likely expand. They will be economically rewarded for investing their time into newer, more effective methods, and current popular methods will slowly be overtaken by those methods that obtain a better ROI.
A good question is how long will the industry ignore the rising walls of ad-blocking? Walls seem a lot hard to take down than build in these types of situations. It would be wrong to expect people to turn off their ad-blockers because the industry pinky-swears not to overstep the boundaries again.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism
>"When goods cannot cross borders, armies will."
I think it would be interesting to see how many protectionist schemes have lead to wars vs. free trade.