The Greens MP Stephen Bates has joined OnlyFans – a first for an Australian politician – as the party pushes to make the HIV prevention drugs PrEP and PEP free.
It may normally be a career-ending move for a politician to be joining a site known for pornography, but Bates has joined the site with the first video on his free-to-subscribe page announcing the Greens’ push to make PrEP and PEP prescriptions free to anyone with a script.
Bates does not intend to post not-safe-for-work content on the platform.
OnlyFans does not exclusively host adult content, but adult creators have flocked to the site that allows people to subscribe and access free or paid content. OnlyFans takes a 20% cut on each transaction.
At the end of 2023, OnlyFans reported 4.1m creator accounts and 305m fan accounts registered, with gross payments in 2023 of US$6.6bn. Social Rise claimed in January 2024 there were 28m visits to OnlyFans from Australia.
Along with the OnlyFans launch, the gay MP for Brisbane has repeated his 2022 election campaign tactic of advertising on the gay and bisexual hookup app Grindr.
“Ending HIV is too important to fly under the radar,” he said. “I campaign on OnlyFans and Grindr because it gets attention. Sometimes you have to make a splash to make people pay attention to the things that matter.”
The antiretroviral drug PrEP is taken by people at high risk of HIV transmission, which if used every day has an efficacy rate of 99% among gay and bisexual men. It is a key component of the federal government’s goal to eliminate HIV transmission in Australia by 2030.
Currently PrEP prescriptions, if taken daily, can cost $31.60 a month on the PBS, though Labor’s policy is to reduce this to $25 a month if re-elected. About 100,000 people in Australia use PrEP and PEP.
The Greens argued that the gap between what the PBS cost is and what people pay at the pharmacy has increased – meaning people have begun paying more for the drug in the past few years.
The Greens’ policy, according to parliamentary budget office costings, would cost taxpayers $18.4m over forward estimates.
Last year there was a temporary shortage of the drug in Australia that resulted in the Therapeutics Goods Administration allowing the import of the drug from overseas.
There were 722 diagnoses of HIV in 2023 in Australia, which was up on the previous year, but still lower than pre-Covid levels and a continued trend of overall decline in diagnoses.
While potentially the first Australian politician on OnlyFans, disgraced US Republican former congressman George Santos briefly joined last year, but said he too would not post adult content on the site. Santos’s account has since been deactivated.
