this might not technically be politics but where do you put stories about goverment services?Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Anyway i was going to call this "stupid bloody yank" but thats not really fair because its not just US celebrities which do this. The Australian TV band Bardot did a very similar thing. Anyway on to the story: Now i admit this is a) not the best story to highlight the problem and b) sounds like a great PR excercise. The reality is that less than 2 days before his ride he puts it on twitter that he wants everyone to met him at x location and ride with him. What he DOESNT do is call the council or the police and inform them so they were left with no warning that this was happerning. Aparently the police suspected he would pull a stupid stunt like this and so were prepared but the council didnt have any warning because even if they suspected he could have done it ANYWHERE. Now i was complaining about this to a guy at work and he was like "so what? whats wrong with that, its great he wants to ride with his fans". I dont think most people realise how much planning behind the sceens actually goes into public events. There are road closures and organising police escorts which means shuffling what duties police are on but from a council perspective its even more work. They have to organsie aditional toilets, bins, food, water, first aid and everything else which people just take for granted. The first aid is generally st john Ambulance which is the organistation im a member of and as off 17:00 we hadnt been informed about this. Now we are not paid staff who sit around waiting for an event, we are 100% vollenteers which means we have our own lives, jobs ect. It takes at least 1 week to organise enough people to be on duty at a minor event, for a big one like Amy's ride where we had 4 teams of 2 plus a vechile crew it takes at least 1 month so people can reorganise there work rosters. Now we have one group of people who can be called upon on short notice, that is the emergency responce teams who are there to provide first aid during bushfires, floods and other disasters. For most of us on these, just like the CFS it means loss of pay because we have to skip work to go to these emergency call outs. We arnt there to play to some stupid celebrites vanity and stupidity. Further more there are events already organised that he has compleatly overriden. There has been the national cadet sailing championships going all week where the road had to be blocked off for his stupid race. That ment that all those kids and there parents with there sailing boats on the back of the car couldnt actually get through to the sailing club where they were ment to be launching from and they couldnt race this afternoon because the conditions on the water were going to be to dangerious. These kids have come from all over the country for this and some stupid head up his ass american has just screwed them over.
