People are raising money to send a thousand rainbow potatoes to the Australian PM
A bizarre crowdfunding campaign has launched, to send a thousand rainbow potatoes to Australia’s anti-gay marriage PM Tony Abbott.
The Liberal PM, who is a strong opponent of same-sex marriage, threatened to sack any ministers who voted for same-sex marriage when it was set to come to a vote last month.
He later moved to avert a showdown with his own MPs over the issue, by proposing a plebiscite (public vote) instead and avoiding a Parliamentary debate.
Mr Abbott now wants to lock in a vote after the next federal election in 2017 – which means same-sex weddings will likely not begin for a number of years, thanks to his political manoeuvring.
However, equality activists aren’t taking the slight lying down – with a campaign launching to send a thousand rainbow-coloured potatoes to the PM.
Will Richards and Dan Buttson, the co-creators of Potato Messenger – which allows you to send messages on hand-delivered potatoes – launched their new Political Potatoes initiative on Kickstarter.
The pair wrote: “After successfully running PotatoMessenger.com for just over two weeks and receiving media exposure, we decided to use our newly gained influence to address a real issue that affects our nations justice!
“We want to send 1000 potatoes covered in LGBT colours to Mr Tony Abbott in Canberra as a statement against injustice!”
They added: “We have now gained a number of connections that enable us to have the supply and media courage to allow for the delivery of mass LGBT themed potatoes to be a big enough success for most of Australia to find out about it, thus hopefully raising more discussion for Tony Abbott to see the injustice he is causing.
“Our ultimate goal is to have enough attention around the delivery of LGBT potatoes for Australia to even more clearly see how absurd our government is acting and truly show how the people obviously feel.
“We want to be able to have enough funds to cover at least 1000 potatoes delivered to Tony, with each potato equating to $15. If our funding goal surpasses the initial goal, we will simply just get adding more potatoes to the delivery.”
The pair are looking to raise $15,000 (£6800) for the project… but unsurprisingly, so far they’ve raised just $65, from three backers.
Others remain sceptical about the cost of $15 per potato.
