Last night, an event emerged on Facebook called ‘Mike Baird Removal Day’, after the above photo was posted by New South Wales Premier Mike Baird and went on to be called “arrogant” by punters on social media.
Now, that frustration has been channeled into the ‘Mike Baird Removal Day’ event, which has set a date on which to celebrate Mike Baird’s removal in 2019, which is when the next state election will be.
In less than 24 hours, ‘Mike Baird Removal Day’ has garnered over 3,300 interested individuals and another 2,500 people who say they’re definitely attending, and that’s just at the time of writing.
The event was created by Sydney event promoter Anthony Skinner, who says he was also responsible for starting the hashtag #CasinoMike, which has flooded Baird’s social media channels ever since.
Skinner tells Music Feeds that he’s given himself “plenty of time to plan” for ‘Mike Baird Removal Day’ in March 2019, so he can “make it as big as it needs to be”.
Skinner says he’s looking at throwing a mini-festival or party, and is hoping to get Keep Sydney Open and Reclaim The Streets involved, as well as some musicians. He’s already asking punters who he should book as entertainment for the day, and you can vote for who you want to see on the event page.
It’s a pretty hard choice too. You’ve got to choose between Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, Shannon Noll and Midnight Oil right now:
Skinner says he “had an idea” that his ‘Mike Baird Removal Day’ event might go viral very, very quickly.
“I started #CasinoMike and then thought of this last night when Labor sent me an email with the removal date so I thought yeah I better make a date for that. And it just took off,” he says.
Skinner has long been a social media pest for the NSW Premier, and he’s been banned from commenting on Baird’s Facebook page “for a long time”.
“I was blocked before I started #CasinoMike. I said I couldn’t post on there so I got everyone to go over there and post #CasinoMike. They started doing it and then everyone started doing it because they saw others doing it,” he says, adding that there are at least 50 other people he knows who have been blocked from Baird’s page.
For Skinner, his hatred of Baird is mostly tied to Sydney’s controversial lockout laws. He is friends with Murat Kilic, who ran and owned Sydney club Spice — “A major casualty of the lockout laws,” in the words of Skinner.
“He lost his business pretty much. The police followed him everywhere he went. Every venue he was a part of,” he says.
“I’ve had quite a few of my friends lose jobs. I had a friend that couldn’t afford to pay rent and she couldn’t get a job because the market was too saturated,” he added, explaining that by implementing a 3am cease of service, people who used to work on Fridays and Saturdays have lost six hours of their weekly pay because they can no longer work between 3am and 6am.”
You can check out Skinner’s viral ‘Mike Baird Removal Day’ Facebook event right here.
