Petition Signed By 120,000 People Who Have Never Personally Been Welcomed To Country Demands End To Welcomes To Country

SYDNEY, NSW – A petition launched by lobby group Advance hours after Aboriginal Elders were booed at multiple Anzac Day Dawn Services has now passed 120,000 signatures – a substantial chunk of which appear to come from Australians whose total lifetime exposure to a Welcome to Country can be measured in seconds, mostly while they were waiting for the actual game to start.

The petition, which calls on the Prime Minister to stop using “taxpayer money” to fund Welcomes to Country, frames the practice as both divisive and expensive – despite the fact that the typical fee for a Welcome to Country sits roughly in the same bracket as a mid-tier Sky News op-ed contributor who hasn’t paid tax in three years.

A Senior Lobby Group Strategist told Gammon News the petition was an organic grassroots response.

“What we’re seeing is everyday Australians demanding their voices be heard” the strategist said. “The fact that we wrote the petition before the booing started, paid Meta to deliver it to the booing, and had the URL ready to launch by the time the boos finished – that’s just good event planning.”

The strategist confirmed signatories had been thoroughly vetted to ensure each represented a genuine Australian concern.

“We did the maths. If you total up the cost of every Welcome to Country in Australian history – every one ever performed, at every level of government, school, club and corporate event since 1976 – you arrive at roughly the cost of a single defence procurement scoping study that delivered no defence and no procurement,” the strategist said. “But that’s not the point. The point is the Aboriginal man cost something. We can’t have that.”

A Senior Productivity Commission Analyst confirmed the cost of producing a single Australian senator for one year exceeded the entire combined cost of every Welcome to Country ever performed at federal level – including the catering.

“We don’t run that calculation publicly,” the analyst said. “It tends to upset the petition signatories.”

The strategist noted the petition would soon be expanded to include a second campaign demanding the removal of all Acknowledgements of Country – a practice they have helpfully been informed is even older than the modern Welcome to Country, has been performed at virtually every Australian school assembly for two decades and which i(f removed) would save the Australian taxpayer the truly astronomical sum of zero dollars.

“Zero dollars” the strategist confirmed “is a really significant saving when you’re not very good at maths.”

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Lobby group Advance declined to disclose its own annual operating budget, citing concerns that it might be perceived as somewhat expensive given its actual contribution to the country.