Christian Porter (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

With respect to vaccinations, we're now at 18 million doses. That's 55 per cent of the Australian population with one dose and 32 per cent of people over the age of 16 who are fully vaccinated, and the rate—the pace—of vaccination is now surpassing the best measure of the pace of the vaccination program that ever existed in the United Kingdom or the United States. We're now exceeding the highest daily averages ever achieved per capita in the UK or the USA. If the proposition from members opposite is that that is somehow too slow or too little, then, obviously, they have got to suggest the way they would make that faster, or more. At least, to the credit of the Leader of the Opposition, he did put up a way. There has been one suggestion that has come from members opposite and from the Leader of the Opposition as to how they would speed up that vaccination process—which is now faster per capita than it ever was in the UK or the US—and that was, as described by the Leader of the Opposition, the idea of an incentive of $300.

An incentive is a very simple concept. It's very easily defined. It's a thing that motivates someone to do another thing. It's a very standard definition in economics. And there are two golden rules about incentives. First, you have to design them very, very carefully to make sure they don't have the opposite effect, that is, that they don't slow something down or demotivate people from doing the other thing. But, even before you get to that, the golden rule in economic management and economics about incentives is that you shouldn't pay someone to do a thing that they've already done—pretty simple stuff. The one proposal that the Leader of the Opposition has offered as to how you would make the vaccination rollout faster—noting that it's already faster per capita than it ever was in the United States or the United Kingdom—is this $300 incentive payment. The major problem with it is that it breaks both of those fundamental rules in economics about incentives. Essentially, it is a proposal to pay people to do things that they've already done. When you look at the scale and pace of the vaccination rollout now, that not only would have represented a complete lack of confidence in the Australian people to do what they're doing now, which is the right thing for public health and themselves and their family and community—getting vaccinated—but it also would have represented a waste of money on a scale that Australian public finances would never have seen before and that you could not possibly imagine.

Since the start of the vaccine rollout over 6.5 million people have been fully vaccinated. These are people who have already done the right thing. The Labor policy, the Leader of the Opposition's policy, of $300 per head for those people would have represented $2 billion of wasted taxpayers' money that could have been spent on other things, mental health or whatever it is that you think is important—and there are many of them. Since the announcement of the $300 incentive, which was on 3 August—that is, in the last 23 days—there have been 2,487,000 Australians fully vaccinated. If you were to pay them $300 to do the thing that they've already done, that would cost $746 million. That is $746 million of taxpayers' money to pay people to do a thing that they have already done. Yesterday, 152,996 Australians became fully vaccinated. If Labor were in government, and had the chance to institute the policy that they describe as constructive which is actually idiotic, yesterday they would have paid $46 million in one day—to pay people to do something that they had already done. That would represent one of the most shocking wastes of taxpayers' money, and it gives you precisely the idea that you need as to how the pandemic would have been managed under members opposite.

In public health particularly, it's been shown that incentive programs, for instance, for donating blood, can actually have the opposite effect—

An opposition member: Titmuss!

It can actually have the Titmuss effect; you've got it! When a journalist asked the Leader of the Opposition: 'How did you settle on this $300 payment? What is underpinning the advice?', he said, first, 'We gave consideration to it'—well, that's good to know!—and, second, 'It included consulting some economists'—that also is good to know—and, third—inspiring confidence—'I studied economics at university'. If you had, you wouldn't have come up with this.

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