Politics

Craig Kelly Wasted Taxpayer Dollars On A Bunch Of Fake Money To Show The Government Is In Debt

We love prop comedy at Budget time.

by Michelle Rennex  11 May 2021
craig kelly budget fake money trillion

Want more Junkee in your life? Sign up to our newsletter, and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook so you always know where to find us.

It’s the Budget, baby! And that means money is on everyone’s mind.

Sadly this “everyone” includes federal independent MP Craig Kelly, who has pulled the most baffling Budget stunt imaginable: Printing a comical pile of fake money to represent how much net debt the government is allegedly in.

“Wouldn’t you love to have this much money? Well you do!!,” Craig Kelly, who had his Facebook account deleted last month for spreading COVID misinformation, tweeted this morning.

“This represents close to $1 TRILLION of Federal and State Government net DEBT that YOU and future generations need to pay off.”

The gag? Well, Craig Kelly actually used over $1000 of real, taxpayer money to fund his pallet of fake money in an attempt to prove how much money the government wastes. Yes. We paid for this waste. Ironic, no?

The incredibly unnecessary stunt was funded out of his taxpayer-funded printing allowance, with The New Daily political editor Josh Butler reporting that Craig Kelly claimed the move was “better than a business card” because his details were on the back of the fake bills.

Along with the cost of printing the “Neds” reaching “over $1,000”, Kelly apparently also had to shell out for the licensing of the photo of Ned Kelly in “a tribute to the gangsters and villains of the past”. The MP explained that his pallet full of fake money was created to “teach the kids about debt” by visualising what the government’s record debt would look like.

“If this was $100 bills, stacked tight, it would be $100 million dollars. So ten of these pallets would be a billion. But we would need 10,000 of these pallets — it would go for 10km long — to be a trillion dollars,” Kelly waffled on, while failing to recognise that this misuse of taxpayer dollars only adds to the debt he’s complaining about.

“That’s the debt this nation, both state and Federal governments are headed towards.”

But there are just so many questions we have about this stunt. First, and most importantly, why the fuck has Craig Kelly done this? What does the independent MP actually gain from trying to show what the debt looks like? And why the hell is Ned Kelly, of all people, on the bill?!

Moreover, why couldn’t Craig Kelly fit the $1,000,000,000,000 all on the one line? And why did Kelly decide to make the “trillion dollar” note the exact same colour as a normal $100 note?

Plus, if the government is only in “close to one trillion” in debt then why has the MP printed a pallet of the fake bills? One single trillion dollar bill would easily represent the debt. Seriously. The world doesn’t even have as much money Kelly’s pallet of trillions represents.

It’s estimated that there is just over $90 trillion of broad money circulating in the world currently. In Kelly’s world, this could be represented by 90 single “trillion dollar” notes. Bands of money, that are held together by currency straps, are always made in packages of 100 notes. This means all the money that is currently in the world would fit in a single band of Craig Kelly’s trillion dollar notes.

Basically, what I’m asking is why the fuck has he printed an entire pallet when one bill would have proved his point very easily?

In typical Craig Kelly fashion, nothing make sense. But back-peddling a little, Craig Kelly told 9 News that he actually hadn’t invoiced his print expenses yet and suggested that he “should actually pay for this myself”.

So let’s hope and pray that he does follow his own advice here.