These UQ Students Are Protesting The Tampon Tax With A Great Macklemore Parody

In May last year, Sydney University student Subeta Vimalarajah faced up to then-Treasurer Joe Hockey on national TV and successfully pressured him into action on the tampon tax. The move came in the wake of a hugely successful campaign run by Vimalarajah. Her petition ‘Don’t Tax My Period’, which asks the government to axe the GST on sanitary items, currently has more than 100,000 signatures.

A Student Basically Got Joe Hockey To Scrap The Tax On Periods On ‘Q&A’ Last Night

But since then, the issue has completely fallen off the radar. Hockey’s promise that he’d “raise it with the states” never amounted to anything. Further protests were ignored — including a tampon dance party on Tony Abbott’s front lawn. And this year, Labor leader Bill Shorten even went back on his word saying he likely couldn’t do anything about it either.

Now, it’s students who are pushing the issue once again. A group from the University of Queensland have just released a parody of Macklemore’s ‘Thrift Shop’ for their annual Law Revue. The skit is titled ‘Drip Shop’, it features two men dressed as giant tampons drinking blood (hopefully Ribena) from sippy cups, and about half a dozen women angry-dancing in the beauty isle of their local Coles.

Enjoy:

“If you want to change people’s minds, if you want to get them to pay attention, you have to make them laugh,” said the clip’s writer/director, Nicki Murray. It looks like she’s not wrong. Revue convenor Katie Wheatley said in a statement: “when we released the clip on the night, the audience went wild”. “Australians are happy to talk about these issues if you can break the ice first.”

The video has only been on YouTube for one day and is already one of the most viewed clips from the past four years of the revue. Murray’s clearly shooting for greater heights though; she also told us she’s “contacted Macklemore’s people for comment”. Though she hasn’t heard anything back yet, I personally cannot wait for the US Grammy Award-winner to become personally involved in an Australian taxation debate about sanitary items.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen something like this either. Last year Tony Abbott’s own sister Christine Forster starred in a similar clip on the tampon tax which parodied Snoop Dogg’s ‘Drop It Like It’s Hot’.

While I’m keen on the prospect of more dorky Australian rap about periods, it’d probably be better to get this thing sorted once and for all, hey?

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Read more about the problems with the tampon tax here or sign Subeta Vimalarajah’s petition here.