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AN AUSTRALIAN FATHER so fed up with the taxpayer-funded travel perks given to politicians that he asked them to fund his family’s holiday has received an overwhelming response — from the public.
Father-of-three Stephen Callaghan established a GoFundMe page, entitled “Please Pay For My Kids’ Holiday” asking federal politicians to give his children the same travel entitlements their own receive.
Callaghan was not asking for donations from the public, but they have now contributed more than Aus$6,000 (€3,880) to his cause, well above his Aus$5,000 (€3,290) target.
“Bloody hell. You people have put EVERY Australian Politician to SHAME,” he wrote on the page on Tuesday.
On his blog, Callaghan wrote that community anger over the travel entitlements given to Australian politicians had been kicked off by then speaker Bronwyn Bishop using a helicopter for a short journey at a cost of Aus$5,000 (€3,290), but grew as other entitlements came to light.
“Angry at the casualness with which politicians spend our money jetting their kids around in business class I started the above mentioned GoFundMe and it garnered a bit of interest,” he wrote.
“I have raised a lot more than I expected… given that I did not expect to raise any money at all,” he said, adding that most donations came from ordinary people “just as pissed off as I am”.
He said he would keep some of the money so he could take his three children on a trip to Uluru in central Australia as long planned and would invest in safer tyres for the long car journey.
“But we will be making a substantial donation (more than 50 percent) on your behalf to Stewart House,” he said, referring to a Sydney charity which gives school children in need a break from their everyday life.
Callaghan says the trip to Uluru with family friends will still go ahead, and has promised his social media followers updates on the journey of four adults and seven kids with “one portable chemical dunny between the lot of us”.
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Well done on completing the film. Will seek it out.
The unfortunate thing is, politicians only pretend to care what people think at one time. Election time. The rest of the time, people are an annoyance to be kept at a distance. They have police keeping the public well away from the public servants and a media to keep them dumb. No amount of protest was going to stop that, or any other war. As long as there’s profit to be made, the march of war will continue.
It didn’t make a blind bit of difference which shows that it is a mirage of democKracy that those who we ‘elect’ to be in charge or ‘represent’ our view are not in charge at all. It is the military-industrial might that is and it doesn’t give a tinker’s curse about civilisation.
That was the first protest I took any of my children. It felt like a special day. If it didn’t stop the war, it did help people understand that public mobilisation in large scale is possible, and it helped unmask the true interests of politicians, which are not the same as the public’s.
It’s people like this that allow groups like ISIS or Al Qaeda to grow with their attitudes of appeasement.
More like a continuous cosying up to the wrong type of dictator, interfering in internal conflict and arming the wrong sides, making ‘Hitlers’ out of local bullies and waging illegitimate wars and continuously bombing a region for it’s natural resources facilitates organisations like ISIS or Al Qaeda to warp alienated and confused people into committing atrocities.
Anti-War = Pro-ISIS ?? Good one Darryl..
Nah, I prefer to remember staying up all night watching shock & awe rock Baghdad. Nothing special about a bunch of crusties and easily swayed people gathering in one large group.
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