After Labor leader Anthony Albanese announced that his party would give Australians $300 jab bonus if they got fully vaccinated before the end of the year, there were jokes aplenty being thrown around as people started to think about what else costs roughly that much money.
The opposition leader released the proposal on Tuesday, pledging that his party would give every person a cash bonus if they got both COVID jabs before the end of 2021. It’s clearly a bid to try and incentivise people to protect themselves and others against the highly infectious Delta strain currently rampaging through Sydney, and you can’t blame ’em for trying anything to get people into vax clinics.
Look, we truly wish to know who crunched the numbers to come to the conclusion that $300 is the perfect amount to give people to put ~pharmaceuticals~ in their system, because it’s undeniably very funny.
It didn’t take long before people were making the link, and crafting jokes that’ll tickle your brain in just the right way.
Getting paid $300 to take a drug is some kind of sweet irony for many in Sydney’s East
— Michelle Stephenson (@MishStephenson) August 3, 2021
feeling deeply ashamed that @zacrellin had to make a $300 vaccine payment / bags joke before i even clocked it
— Alex Bruce-Smith (@alexbrucesmith) August 2, 2021
https://twitter.com/catcallxo/status/1422420941666099202?s=20
https://twitter.com/JamColley/status/1422420003421265922?s=20
this economic policy is now known as BagsSeeker.
— Lav Baj (@lavosaurus) August 3, 2021
Guess you could say there were bags of gags coming through about what people would go and spend their $300 jab bonus on. A real flurry of people trying to land the best joke about the Devil’s talcum powder.
Unsurprisingly, Prime Minister Scott Morrison slammed the idea of incentivising COVID vaccinations during Question Time on Tuesday, labelling the oppositions plans as “a bubble without a thought”.
Now I’m not sure if he’s just pissy that he didn’t think of this first or what, but considering the NSW lockdowns are costing approximately $700m a week, it seems like this is a pretty cheap way to get people vaccinated as quickly as possible?
Albanese snapped back to Morrison’s rubbishing of the idea during Question Time, asking him how the $300 jab bonus was any different from the ‘No Jab No Pay’ policy the Government introduced in 2015.
“Why did the Prime Minister just before Question Time claim to the Australian people that no jab no pay was not an incentive scheme to improve child immunisation rates?” Albanese asked.
“Can the Prime Minister confirm that when he personally introduced the legislation he said the following in the second sentence of his second reading speech. ‘This is an important initiative aimed at boosting child immunisation rates.’ Given the legal consequences of a second reading speech, was he wrong then or today?”
Morrison went on to say that there’s no comparison between wanting to boost immunisation rates of children and trying to vaccinate the entire country.
Look, you can’t blame Labor for throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks. And honestly, I’d gladly take that $300 for a jab.
