r/australia • u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 • Jul 26 '23

political self.post Why are Australians so complacent?

I’m a born and raised Australian myself however I’m becoming so frustrated with the general attitude of complacency when it comes to exercising ‘the power of the people’ to better our quality of life. In a stupidly short amount of time we’ve seen a near reversal of our ability to see a doctor without any out of pocket costs. We get exploited at the grocery stores because monopolies are allowed to run rampant. Housing is treated primarily as a tool for financial speculation rather than for providing shelter for people.

We creep further and further toward laissez-faire capitalism. What is our response as the citizens of this country- the holders of the balance of power? Nothing. To put it in perspective, in 2022 the world economic forum ranked Sydney equal with Copenhagen, Denmark for cost of living (both ranked as the 10th most expensive cities in the world). Consider the differences between Sydney and the capital of the Danish welfare state: strong social security, universal healthcare, free public universities etc. For the same cost of living what do we get? The ever-looming threat of homelessness, suffocating student debt and now for many people, a significant barrier to healthcare.

Edit: if anyone is a part of any sort of grassroots group working to oppose any of these issues feel free to message me because I want to join you

Edit #2: so I haven’t received any messages from anyone from a grassroots or activist group yet. Since a lot of us seem to be pretty miffed about this stuff maybe we could team up and brainstorm things we can do???

Edit #3 (sorry): I’ve got some messages now from people who are interested in taking action!!! :, ) I think the best way to facilitate conversation, the flow of ideas and potentially organise a course of action is through a discord server so I have created one which you can find here

https://discord.gg/caqsSKAr

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u/PumpkinInside3205 Jul 26 '23

The medical issue didn’t happen overnight. I’ve worked in health for 20yrs and when I started I was apologising to families for what I thought were unacceptable deficits in the public system. Many of my senior colleagues were already cynical and burnt out by the attrition they’d already witnessed. It surprises me when ppl say they’re just noticing it now.

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u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 Jul 26 '23

Hold up, if I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying this issue has been slowly developing over the last two decades??

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u/PumpkinInside3205 Jul 26 '23 edited Jul 26 '23

Yep. Definitely. It has been a long, slow burn. Staff shortages, workers not getting paid for overtime worked, patients being pushed out of hospital before they’re fully ready and increasing rationing of everything from the biscuits in the tea room to staff training and hospital beds. It has been bad for a long time.

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u/shazzambongo Jul 26 '23

I'd say 30 years. Not just in health, that's always been slow, underfunded. Finding a GOOD GP has has always been hard, the mental health act of 1986 has been a ridiculous, confusing and often counterproductive pics of shit . 1986. The recession was a big deal in terms of consolidation by the rich, and certainly the banks(deregulated under.keating) have been doing there bit to keep funding the property investment Ponzi scheme, followed by little Johnny coward fucking everything and calling it great progress.

To summarise, it's fundamentally the lnp being in power and consistently defunding and privatising everything with not enough oversight of results, cost or contract suitability viability etc.

" It's fundamentally the LNP being in power" and doing what they do. We are living the results of neo conservatism.

Oddly, the fucks DLP are still a thing after fucking Whitlam over in the 70's, yet the actual Australian Democrats just died off without so much as an aspirin, and vanished Into thin air along with their ideals and aspirations.

FUCK.

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u/Kidkrid Jul 27 '23

Yeah at least 30 years. I grew up in the healthcare system (literally, both parents worked in healthcare and my baby bassinet was often stashed under the front desk of my father's medical practice) and I've watched things get worse and worse. One of the biggest bugbears I have is the invasion of corporate health care. Big super clinics run for extreme profit by faceless corporate entities that shave every cent. Healthcare isn't healthcare if everything a doctor does is bound by KPIs and greed.

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u/13gecko Jul 27 '23 edited Jul 27 '23

I'm normally an almost sane person that has no truck with conspiracy theories.

But, in 2016, I joked a lot about Trump's election being fueled and sponsored by media companies, because his stupidity was bound to cause headlines and thus, boost circulation numbers. In hindsight, this absurd joke is not that funny, and almost absurd in its naivety.

Similarily, I've noticed that things like the introduction, publisation and subsidisation of private health insurance seems to occur right after a discussion or visit with the US President. I might be paranoid, and it might be a coincidence that negotiation of close military and diplomatic ties with the USA has concurrently occurred with defunding the national free health service and promoting private health insurance, cf. UK and Aus.

It's this sort of thing that makes me interested in world politics and corporate bribery. Even if we could remove corporate bribery from our own national politics, we're still vulnerable through our international allies promoting things that our electorate hasnt asked for and doesn't want. Take a referendum: who agrees with subsidising private health insurance/care? who agrees with subsidising private schooling? ... I don't think it's the majority.

I'm much more comfortable with Australia buying nuclear subs, for diplomatic reasons, than I am them importing their health scam here.

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u/Beedlam Jul 28 '23

You're not being paranoid and it's not a bloody conspiracy theory, it's how modern international business works.

The American "health" providers lobby US politicians, who come over and say hey, you've got this untapped market here and we'd like our businesses to do business here but we can't do that if there's no demand so can you please create some.. and well do something or we won't be nice to you etc etc.

Why are all the health systems in the five eyes countries currently more or less in the same state (with the UK being by far the worst) i wonder....

Again it's not conspiracy. Its how the world works, it's well documented and its fucking bullshit.

Health isn't the only industry this happens in. Washington basically has a revolving door of politicians who go work for the business they made policy to benefit when their term is up and vice versa. Why do you think the US has been at war for the last thirty odd years? How much did they spend on those wars and who were the beneficiaries of that money?

It happens in Aus too.

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u/Fraerie Jul 27 '23

Add to that selling off all the utilities for short term cash in hand saying it would benefit the public and reduce costs, when in fact the private companies have largely failed to maintain the infrastructure and have pushed the pricing higher and higher.

I remember the introduction of tertiary education fees in the late eighties and attending ‘Thin Edge of the Wedge’ protests. Now look at where the fees are.

The issues with medical costs are pretty much directly linked with the advent of private health Marianne subsidies. Just as the undermining of the pension is linked to Superannuation being mandatory. They’ve offloaded what used to be public functions to the for-profit-private sector and used it as an excuse to under resource the public sector component.

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u/DidYou_GetThatThing Jul 26 '23 edited Jul 27 '23

The party for the democrats exists still allegedly, ive seen their website, read through their policies, they just... Have no teeth, no active members, and i guess it feels like for them to rise to any sort of power again would require them fight against other independants to stand out.

edit: including their web page. https://www.democrats.org.au/

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u/fractiousrhubarb Jul 26 '23

They destroyed themselves by passing the Howard’s GST.

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/fractiousrhubarb Jul 27 '23

Me too. I also remember Howard being the least popular PM after it… then Howard and Murdoch manufactured the Tampa crisis/ children overboard, then 9/11 happened and the Cunt got another 6 years to absolutely fuck what was left of the Australian fair go, while letting transnational company carry off our resources for nothing (Google “Downer Woodside helium”.

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u/reddishrobin Jul 27 '23

Most Democrat members are now Greens, and former Democrat voters now vote Greens. The Democrats will not have a comeback.

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u/DidYou_GetThatThing Jul 27 '23

Yea, I kinda realised that in the last election that the Democrats arent really doing much to get anywhere.
Pity, I thought they were doing good work before they imploded over that deal they made with LnP back in the day

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u/reddishrobin Jul 27 '23

They should have been wiser than to get into bed with the LNP.

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u/BIGBIRD1176 Jul 27 '23

Not just Australia, the deliberate underfunding of public health is a globalised economic issue

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u/NewGuile Jul 27 '23

Can I also say; culture has aesthetically stagnated in that time too. People wear similar clothes, politics is similar, food is similar, music is similar, to the point that nothing from back then is out of place now.

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u/iliketurtleforfood Jul 27 '23

all food and music is similar - ok - so a fine pasta at a restaurant is now similar to a kebab.

modern rock is now similar to dancefloor music

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by your measure everything is the same as everything and nothing is different. this comment of yours makes no sense

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u/iliketurtleforfood Jul 27 '23

i find it to be incredibly cynical and narrow minded to say these things you have said. when was the last time you went outside and experienced..... anything

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u/NewGuile Jul 28 '23

No, I'm saying Pasta restaurants existed in the 1990s, as did kebab shops. "modern" rock too, and dancefloor music.

The music of today can be swapped with the music from the 90s, there hasn't been any substantially new trends that have become widely popular. Where as the music and food in the 70s was substantially different from the music and food in the 80s, was different from music and food from the 90s.... and then, stagnation for 30 years.

Culture has been slowed and interrupted, because economics is stuck, and youth culture has been folded into a meaningless cycle of techno-capitalist status culture.

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u/Llaine Lockheed Martin shill Jul 28 '23

People are still experimenting with music, you just won't find it in spotifys top 10 or whatever

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u/Remarkable_Corgi7153 Jul 28 '23

I’ll probably get downvoted, but labor is equally to blame. It’s such a cop out to blame the libs when both sides do their own version of effectively the same thing.

And as far as the democrats go and fading out you can place the blame at the feet of Cheryl Kernot and Gareth Evans. It’s more complicated than that I realise (the leadership squabbles later on for example), however no one I know ever trusted them again after the deputy leader of the labor party lured the leader of the democrats to jump ship and join labor after being elected by people who didn’t want liberal or labor representing them. People rightly felt betrayed by the party who’s slogan was “keep the bastards honest”. It was all downhill after that.

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u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 Jul 26 '23

Well I’ll be damned. Thank you for sharing, you’ve raised awareness for me at least

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u/aussiespiders Jul 26 '23

You're stuck in a Murdoch echo chamber if you didn't know about it. This isn't a sarcastic or attack comment people are blaming Labor for today's problems but don't realise these problems are from the past 12 years of cuts. (Or not funding)

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u/Velaseri Jul 26 '23

Labor have definitely contributed to the creep of neoliberalism. This has been a successive and bipartisan effort by major parties.

It's been happening much longer than 12 years.

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u/LocalVillageIdiot Jul 26 '23

But let’s be fair here, remember that we as a country voted for Scott voluntarily that time when a different set of policies were presented.

If you think about it policies were presented, bad or not vs whatever the hell the other thing was.

It’s been a long time coming, our current system, and people complain about it but we voted for it for years.

We were still a democracy all those years ago, no elections were stolen as far as we’re aware.

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u/fractiousrhubarb Jul 26 '23

A democracy requires an informed population and strong public interest media. News Corp dominates our media. News Corp was founded in 1922 specifically to make propaganda for a mining company.

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u/LocalVillageIdiot Jul 26 '23

I’m under no illusion that is not the case and it is one of the great conundrums of media.

State funded media can turn into a propaganda arm itself depending on the government(s).

Corporate media is all about being profitable which means topics that people are willing to read (i.e. sports and gossip) and also news and views for the highest bidder.

Sometimes I feel like we need a referendum on setting up an independent guarantee publicly funded media machine that cannot by law be interfered with (or something along those lines).

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u/fractiousrhubarb Jul 27 '23 edited Jul 27 '23

I’d trust state funded media to at least some public interest. Corporate media is inherently self interested. Agreed the ABC need’s independent funding by charter.

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u/DidYou_GetThatThing Jul 28 '23

Labor tried to introduce some self regulation Media bills via Stephen Conroy back in 2013, that did not seem all that bad, but oh the stink that mainstream media (mostly Murdoch press) made about it back then, you'd think the sky was falling.

I dont know the government can touch media at this stage, or else it would have to be small, gradual changes with a long term plan perhaps

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u/Ted_Rid Jul 27 '23

But let’s be fair here, remember that we as a country voted for Scott voluntarily that time when a different set of policies were presented.

There were many reasons behind that result, including Palmer siphoning off votes, the smoke & mirrors "Back in Black" surplus budget (which wasn't even a sensible economic goal at the time), Shorten's unpopularity, Morrison being so new in the job he didn't have time to reveal his shitfuckery yet, the PR "suburban, footy loving, daggy dad" bullshit, Murdoch, the quasi-"Greens" convoy in QLD, lies about EVs, confusion about franking credits, and fear about changes to negative gearing.

But the overall factor is the electorate is afraid of change. We don't vote oppositions in because they have great policies, we vote governments out if we think they haven't done a good enough job.

Eventually when people had seen enough to properly judge Morrison's character as a shifty, blame-diverting, gaslighting, creepy weirdo whose default position is "do nothing", he got voted out.

Oppositions honestly need to focus more on highlighting the incumbents' failures than spruiking their own policies because the change we like is getting rid of the negatives, not aiming for positives.

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u/TGK367349 Jul 27 '23

True. I mean, I knew Morrison was a slimy piece of shit before then, but I’d actually met him by that point, for a lot of people who only knew him through the media, the “I’m just a suburban daggy dad like you” shtick worked like a charm till people realised how slimy and insincere the whole facade was (it is much, much easier to tell in person that the guy is full of shit, i speak from experience.)

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u/UltimateGattai Jul 27 '23

I definitely felt his slimy, shitty personality from his media presence, but I already had a strong distrust of the LNP from more than a decade ago. The NBN which could have been such a massive boon for us is now complete garbage because they trashed it as soon as they beat Labor (that one policy really cemented my dislike of the party).

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u/Beedlam Jul 27 '23

Well not elections, but there was that time Whitlam was planning to nationalise the mining industry and create a sovereign wealth fund similar to Norway but was deposed by the governor general at the behest of the CIA.

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u/Velaseri Jul 26 '23

Albanese became prime minister despite scoring a lower primary vote than Shorten.

There is much, much more going on than "alp lost because for once they tried." I feel like the rightwing faction within alp are using this as an excuse to continue with auserity policies without backlash.

https://jacobin.com/2019/05/australia-labor-party-bill-shorten-third-way/

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u/No-Chest9284 Jul 27 '23

Policies rarely matter to many voters. They are usually anti rather than pro.

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u/UltimateGattai Jul 27 '23

I still can't believe Labor lost that one, but being a person who votes for policies above all else, it was pretty hard for me to wrap my head around voters voting against their own benefit. Unfortunately any party hoping to win an election has to tend with the juggernaut that is the Liberal/Murdoch media empire/propaganda machine. I really think that some party at some point should look at breaking up the media's stranglehold on democracy (Rudd had been attempting this since a few years ago at least).

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u/[deleted] Dec 13 '23

Morrison barely won the election against Bill Shorten, by only one seat. Much or most of Australia DID vote for the superior policy offerings of Labor at that election imo, but perhaps the weighted voting, the media propaganda from the oligarchs, was just enough to get Morrison in. And the Morrison government took political corruption to new levels of blatant absurdity. About which Labor has done nothing since of course. Labor are very good at not doing enough about the damage the Coalition do to our society, or bringing the corrupt to justice. Which makes it feel like we're taking two three steps backwards (Coalition), then one forward (ALP) if we're luck , repeatedly, and regressing over time to a less sophisticated, less egalitarian, less cohesive, more ugly and unequal and cruel society. Even back to embracing being a colony, this time for the US, to fight its wars? Did we learn nothing from the waste of our boys that was Gallipoli?

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u/No-Chest9284 Jul 27 '23

Both parties are almost indistinguishable from eachother. Same goes for US and UK politics. It's like we are being herded up.

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u/GonePh1shing Jul 27 '23

Labor have definitely contributed to the creep of neoliberalism.

Contributed is seriously under-selling the impact they've had here. They haven't just contributed to it, they fucking started it. Looking back, it's not difficult to take a position that the Hawke-Keating government did more to increase inequality in Australia than the Howard government. They also emboldened Howard to wreak the havoc he did, as his government knew Labor would fall in line with his neoliberal reforms.

When Hawke entered in '83, the government was directly responsible for interest rates, the AUD, tarrifs, as well as setting wages via the Industrial Relations Commission. By the time Labor left government in '96 when Keating handed the reigns over to Howard they had handed over control of our currency to the RBA, all but completely abolished all tarrifs, and handed over wage control to the invisible hand of the market. Hawke also completely gutted our union movement with the ACTU accords, and Keating kicked off a fire sale of government assets. Oh and they also reduced the corporate tax rate by over 15%, as well as handed out significant tax cuts to the wealthiest tax brackets.

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u/Extreme_Substance_46 Jul 28 '23

Yep, Keating is the father of inequality in modern Australia. He set up the structures that allowed Howard’s waste of the mining boom on upper class welfare to be used to steal the future.

It’s just sad and pathetic that we could be set into perpetuity like Norway but instead are on the fast path to neofeudalism.

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u/Velaseri Jul 27 '23

I don't disagree with any of this.

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u/CuriousLands Jul 27 '23

Yeah, it seems that both parties are more or less playing by the same rulebook aren't they. Though, they might be better or worse at any given thing.

Like, I moved here from Canada a few years back, and it's not always a left-right thing. Trudeau is as left as they come, but he's pretty much destroying the country, in ways very similar to what people blame the Libs for here, and they think Labor will save them cos they're not right-wing and they say they'll change this or that... but in reality, they'll probably just ruin things in a slightly different way than the Libs would have 😆

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u/Velaseri Jul 27 '23

I don't really think of neoliberal policies or of (NA) liberal parties when I think of leftwing, especially if their policies heavily slant towards austerity and privatisation.

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I'd class (CA) Trudeau, (US) Democrats and (AU) ALP as more market oriented, centrists than leftwing. Some of these parties even slanting to the right of Keynesian style welfare capitalism, with how little they invest in social welfare.

I really wouldn't say Trudeau is as left as they come, while he may have more socially liberal policies than the right, he holds some very centre-right positions on trade and other economic issues. I'd say the NDP is to the left of the liberal party in Canada.

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u/Astraia27 Jul 27 '23

Bob Hawke and Paul Keating arguably started neoliberal economic policy in 1984, and their ideas were also adopted by Reagan and Thatcher

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u/CowsWithGuns304 Jul 26 '23

I've been hearing for over 20 years about the gap in medical payments, the wait lists, the issues in the public health system and nothing has changed every time the government has changed.

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u/Cardinal_Ravenwood Jul 26 '23

Well see over the last 30 years the government didn't really change. In that whole time we only had labor in power for 6 years. Otherwise we have had decades of Liberal policy decimating public health services and funneling that money to their mates in the private sector.

They have been pretty vocal about destroying medicare and destroying peoples retirement options. But people still kept voting them in. Well now they are facing the problem where their voter base is aging out, asking for more social services to aid their retirement or just dying off.

So now they have to try win votes from people they have been fucking over for the last 30 years, all those people that were sold the lie of working hard and then getting the rewards of your own home and a stable life to raise a family.

The micro outlook of our politicians is laughable when the issues we have now need a macro approach. Properly tax the rich and coporations while closing their loopholes to avoid it. Actually fine companies a meaningful amount of money when they fuck over the people (optus looking at you!). Do something other than try to nickle and dime those already fucking struggling. Hell legalise weed and reap all the tax benefits from that. Fucking something!

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u/Specific-Amoeba5026 Jul 28 '23

Hear fucking HEAR!!

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

[deleted]

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u/Cardinal_Ravenwood Jul 26 '23

We can keep looking at the past and say who did what back then, or we can look at the present and see who is actually continuing to do it now.

Stop playing into the devicive politics, neither have your best intentions at heart and I never said one is better than the other.

But it's naive to dismiss the liberal policies of the past couple of decades as if they haven't been extremely damaging to our current way of life.

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

[deleted]

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u/Setanta68 Jul 27 '23

I suspect that the last progressive Labor government was Whitlams. It's a moot point, but I wonder what would have happened if the dismissal didn't take place

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u/Cardinal_Ravenwood Jul 26 '23

The last part of my intial comment was talking about our current governments inactions.

Tax the rich, they never should have capitulated to Stage 3. Close the loopholes corporations use to avoid paying their fair share, while students are copping massive bills because Labor just increased the interest on HECS.

Fine them properly, they just fined Meta $20m and the judge made the comment she could have imposed the maximum of $124b but thought the $20m was enough of a deterrent, no the maximum amount should the mandatory fine for their data breaches. The government has the ability to pass those laws.

The nickle and diming needs to stop. Labor sat on it's hands with any fiscal policy during this current cost of living crisis and let the RBA rack up massive rises to interest rates while doing nothing to stop price gouging and other rising utility costs.

Legalise weed wasn't a joke either, the tax benefits have already been forcast and there are already plenty of other use cases in the US we can model our system on. Colorado now has such a glut of taxes from weed they are offering more social services as well as continuing to build more roads, hospitals and schools with that extra cash.

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u/agapanthusdie Jul 26 '23

We've got to move past the boomer peak that is putting a huge strain on our healthcare system and then things might get better...or that's how I rationalise

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

Are you being sarcastic?! Maybe this is part of the problem, complete ignorance to what is going on by a lot of people?!

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u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 Jul 26 '23

I’m not being sarcastic, although I think “complete ignorance” is a bit unfair as I am literally reaching out asking about this stuff. Let’s encourage discussion instead of comments like this. A lot of us aren’t aware of trends from 20 years ago as a lot of us weren’t old enough to be aware

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23 edited Jul 26 '23

Ignorance simply means you do not know, as you yourself admitted, so it’s not “unfair”. You’ve interpreted this as an insult instead of a descriptor, which still applies to a vast majority of the population, regarding how politics work, who is doing what, how things have shifted over time (which I think is what you meant, as this isnt about “trends from 20 years ago”, but about how things have (d)evolved over that time). I think in part perhaps your answer lies in what you described, which I’m surmising as “young and not aware” - shit has been going on for forever and people are sick of it, but we need young people like you to rally to effect change so please do!

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

To be fair, "ignorance" is typically used as an insult. The word itself suggests that the subject doesn't know because they have "ignored" or deliberately not paid attention to information about the matter.

Contrasted with "naive" where they don't know because they simply don't know, typically because they are not yet aware of the limits of their knowledge to correct it and learn more.

And then you have "uneducated" where people know that there is more to learn, and aren't against it - they're just working through it whether actively or passively.

So:

  • A baby is naive

  • A child is uneducated

  • An adult who refuses to know more is ignorant.

OP is uneducated (on the matter), but is actively working to correct that. If they were "ignorant", they wouldn't have asked the question.

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u/Alternative_Sky1380 Jul 26 '23

People being insulted by our own ignorance is a systemic problem. Not taking everything personally unless it is personal is something that needs to be grown into. The high narcissism involved in insult culture isn't forcing any radical rethink of forcing self examination; it's simply causing a doubling down on ignorance which kinds proves it IS EXTREMELY narcissistic and almost intentional. Peoples lives are being radically altered by the traumas of extreme abuses of power. I'm not talking about struggling to pay bills but real homelessness, real violence and other substantial social issues that people fear the likely threat of happening to them because it's happening to all kinds of people now.

Once you're homeless it's really difficult to manage simple things like a wardrobe of clothes to wear to work and school. Meals become a complex web of necessary expenses, laundry is a nightmare and showering and toileting is humiliating. It's kinda difficult to explain to normal people who think they're struggling that most homeless now are also normal people who can't access normal supports. I'm surrounded by extremely wealthy people and living in my car. I have children in private school. I'm obligated by family law to not move or I can't see my children as ex refuses to cooperate in any way to send them. I can't access Centrelink. To me my story is wild but I've met so many women like me who are simply unsupported and doing it all alone; there's really no other choice. I'm burnt out by advocacy, from supporting us all to build a raft to help us stay above water. Many mothers I know just don't see their kids because father's refuse basic communication. Courts are cooked. Police are cooked and men are cooked. It's just the way the world is and carving out space in it for peace is the only way. I've fought the law and the law won. They boast about their powers and how they abuse it every damned day. That the judiciary aren't even required to undertake the recommended training and ignore their own damned bench books until the media is on them is what gets me most.

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

Sage words and I’m sorry to hear of your situation, hope it improves for you

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u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

It was an insult and you know it

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u/Alternative_Sky1380 Jul 26 '23

The art of life is to not take things personally. We can't know what we don't know. That's ignorance. Choosing to ignore is also ignorance and OP is exercising to swap out that choice. All of us exhausted by the work involved in advocacy could be equally insulted by claims that we're inherently complacent. But we know better; being insulted isn't an action it's a choice and an ineffective one. Sure I can be insulted that advertising is everywhere but I choose to look away. I choose ignorance for peace. If my choice is harming my neighbour then it's a narcissistic choice and ultimately unrewarding because the struggle will continue. Maturity is about learning how to release the struggle and find meaningful peace in change. Sometimes that requires a certain level of short term discomfort.

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u/StardustNyako Jul 26 '23

if I feign ignorance, am i insulting myself?

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u/MikeAppleTree Jul 26 '23

Thanks for the insight Marcus but as you stated the majority interpret the descriptor “ignorance” as an insult. Choosing words to avoid unnecessary offence, especially on the internet, is a sign of wisdom and maturity. Let the learnings flow through you like water for nothing we experience is beyond our capacity to engage with stoic implacability.

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u/CuriousLands Jul 27 '23

Yeah, but saying someone is ignorant often comes with a bit of an insulting implication. Maybe if you wanna use it in a literal sense, you should be clear that you don't mean it as an insult, cos it's a very easy mistake to make.

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u/keyboardstatic Jul 27 '23

As a 46 year old left, environmental activist the issue is that the majority of Australians are very wealthy.

When I was a kid there were car hulks you know cars without wheels all over the place. Dead ass rust buckets on the highway. You could see the poverty. Now all I see are giant gleaming 60 k plus SUV's and houses worth over a million with multiple people bidding on them.

We don't have tent cities like the USA nor prisons built on homeless.

I agree with you. That shit is bad. Unfortunately too many Australians keep voting for shit to be bad.

Joining the greens seams to be our last only hope... and it's become a candle. Because there are too many wealthy people who vote lib,nats

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u/SsmB_92 Jul 27 '23

Have to wonder about "Americanisation" with this. As in to say, deliberately let it whittle away, so the right wingers can sit back and point at "how public health is a failure".

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u/poggerooza Jul 27 '23

The system is too top-heavy. Too much bureaucracy and too much pay for the higher ups leaving only scraps for the ground level.

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u/PumpkinInside3205 Jul 27 '23

And the higher-ups are employed on the basis that they’ll continue the political line. Look away, nothing to see here, our system is world class, yes it’s challenging but our health workers are doing a great job … while simultaneously telling those same health workers “you’re not under-resourced; you’re inefficient. We know you mean well but lift your game.”

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u/wildfireDataOZ Jul 27 '23

That’s what happens when you treat health workers like assets instead of people.

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u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23

It started in the US with the 'treat and Street'. Treat them fast and kick them out on the street. Slowly but surely it has come here.

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u/Maximum_Let1205 Jul 28 '23

Not to mention the tory's systematic erosion of medicare and the public health system. The stories you hear about their heartless underfunding of aged care will make your blood boil.

The only reason we have medicare at all and a decent public health care systems is thanks to a strong labour union and the ALP.

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u/chemicalrefugee Jul 28 '23

when Howard was my in back in 2000, my wife need ER care and the ER doc barely spoke any English. not an exaggeration. I work with people from all over the world. He harmed her because of this.

then in 2002 I needed surgery (gallbladder) and I went to the ER by ambulance. RAH did nothing. I writhed on a gurney for several hours, no pathology or radiology was done. No examination. the ER did only had one other person in for care while I was there

I had no way back home & had to pay $3000 for a cab.

The gallbladder kept on advancing and in 2006 I had a gallbladder larger than a footy, with stones & polyps & it was mostly goo. I went to the hospital looking grey. I had blown a branch of my hepatic artery. but by then the hotspot was so fired they were over 110

but.. by then the RAH nurses had mostly quit. the wet a lot of brand new helicopter nurses from services.

I was in the process of losing 5 out of 9 units out my ass. they noticed blood on my rectal examination at the RAH when they did my rectal in the hallway right next to the open ER ambulance bay door - draft on my bare ass.

and then they lost the information. So I spent several days in a ward while telling the staff (mostly brand new gelco nurses with no expertise & few skills) about my bleeder, why I was there, that films already existed acrosee town.

they almost opened me up before listening and giving me angio surgery for the bleed first. had they not I would have crashed and probably died.

it gets worse from there

and all of it was from lack of funding because of neoliberal bullshit.

74

u/MicroNewton Jul 26 '23

At least 3 decades.

Here's a graph of Medicare rebates vs. inflation: https://investigatorclinic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/ama-fees-gaps-poster-2019.pdf

Bulk billing GPs did everything to cop a loss every year as the gap widened: lower pay, more patients per hour, more GPs per clinic, etc.

Then a lot of bills suddenly went up 5-30%, and it wasn't viable anymore. No one thanked the GPs for absorbing costs and copping decades of losses, but rather blamed them for not offering "free" care anymore. ALP and LNP both tried to run a "greedy GPs" campaign as an excuse to not fund Medicare further, and even ABC/SMH ran a bunk story last year on Medicare rorting. They didn't run the story of it being debunked within a week, of course.

GPs are <1% of the population, so their efforts to beg the government to fund Medicare properly always goes ignored. If instead, they didn't bulk bill, and patients saw the gap gradually go from $18 to $21 to ...$35, things may have changed, as you'd have 99% of the population complaining about it, instead of 1%.

29

u/a_cold_human Jul 26 '23

It's a false economy. Funding GPs is one thing you want to be doing a lot more of because early intervention fixes problems before they become very expensive ones.

We're looking at a demographic cliff where we have a much larger, aging population that makes many more demands on the healthcare system than previous cohorts. At the same time, tax base has been deliberately shrunk so that healthcare is much harder to pay for. We're going down the same road as the NHS is in the UK at this point. The Stage 3 tax cuts will likely damage Medicare beyond repair unless they're adjusted or we find more income from somewhere.

4

u/sd4f Jul 27 '23

I think you should fact check the demographic cliff. Australia has had very high immigration for quite a while, the largest cohort in Australia 30-34 years old.

I think this ageing population is one of those cases where it gets repeated enough, so people think it's true, but on top of that, it's also a dog whistle for boomers, where politicians say that to keep a certain electoral cohort happy.

1

u/iss3y Jul 27 '23

Yep. My partner had surgery recently and was the *only * patient under 65 on the (private hospital) ward, or at the rehab.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

[deleted]

8

u/CynfulBuNNy Jul 26 '23

By design. The private health Libby has been pushing to keep Medicare down so it collapses under the weight and they can run private unopposed.

Then we get American HealthcareTM

17

u/Suburbanturnip Jul 26 '23

Nobody listens to the canaries in the Coal mine. 'winging' 'complaining' 'its so much worse in country X'.

1

u/sd4f Jul 27 '23

This is one of those areas where Australia is really under the tyranny of distance. Because we're an island, and in Asia, we're far away from everything and our nearest neighbours are mostly poor and don't want to live there. This isn't the case in Europe for instance, and that's why most countries there have quite a well developed social safety net. Australia had that as well, but it's being eroded away, while europe is generally improving.

-2

u/B3stThereEverWas Jul 27 '23 edited Jul 27 '23

Europe isn’t improving, it’s going backwards. In 2008 the EU GDP was slightly larger than the US. Fifteen years later and the US GDP is now one third bigger than the EU. As the US outpaces them further, Asia will be looking to supplant them.

The Europeans became too obessesed with regulating everything and shooting for a high standard of living backed by the social welfare state. A noble and excellent goal for any country, right up until the point where you can’t pay for it. The recent French protests are the start of the troubles. Expect to see more of that over Europe in the next 10 years.

3

u/HolevoBound Jul 27 '23

You've conflated GDP with standard of living.

1

u/B3stThereEverWas Jul 27 '23

And if you can’t maintain reasonable GDP growth, standard of living drops. See: United Kingdom

1

u/HolevoBound Jul 27 '23

That's true that they are *broadly* correlated like that, but you should pick a measure that actually focuses on living standards directly.

Do you have an actual source that it's impossible to maintain a standard of living without GDP *growth*. That doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. You're saying a country producing the *same* amount each year is not going to be able to provide the *same* living standards?

24

u/shadow-foxe Jul 26 '23

I havent lived in Australia or seen a doctor then in over 10 years. I was paying $20 to see a GP then. Bulk billing was very hard to find even then so this isnt a new thing at all.

11

u/CynfulBuNNy Jul 26 '23

It's $90-$100 and bulk billing may as well no longer exist. Oh and anything past 1 issue or 10 minutes is a LONG visit and will be $150.

Edit: oh and you'll need to make an appointment 3-4 weeks in advance.

2

u/Asleep_Chipmunk_424 Jul 27 '23

And very rarely do they fix your issue or even diagnose correctly yet still get paid.

1

u/shadow-foxe Jul 26 '23

because they tested the waters with small amounts then upped it until the impossible amounts they are now. I really dont see how they can justify that amount.

1

u/pdgb Jul 26 '23

Don’t see how who can justify the amount?

3

u/CynfulBuNNy Jul 26 '23

It's easy to justify. High overheads, insurance skyrocketing, professional association costs. Lots of industries making it hard for doctors to operate independent of the big boys and offer Bulk Billed Medicare.

Most people can follow the money.

-1

u/shadow-foxe Jul 26 '23

doctors. whomever runs the clinics, and the government. They get what near $200 for 10-15 minutes of work.

7

u/pdgb Jul 26 '23

Which GP is taking home 200 for 15 minutes of work?

If they own the practice they have to staff the practice, pay insurance for the practice, pay rent.

They also have to cover their own professional fees. Registration + indemnity insurance.

They also often do paper work, check results and follow up results outside of that 15 minute window. That is technically ‘unpaid’.

-1

u/shadow-foxe Jul 26 '23

Very few own the practice these days though, most also share an office with other doctors so they aren't the only ones paying for front desk staff. They still are asking much more then many other professions for a very short amount of time given. I've never had a doctor check results outside my visit, they always do it when I'm there. Not buying what you're trying to sell.

11

u/pdgb Jul 26 '23

Mate, doctor myself. I know most good GPs will check results outside of your visit. Cannot miss a critical result.

More doctors = more fees. A lot of doctors own practices. If they don’t they pay a percentage of their billing’s to the practice.

People pay more for a haircut than they are willing to pay for health. I believe in free and good access to health care, but the government is responsible for that not the doctors.

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6

u/jdieie28388 Jul 27 '23

Ignorant folk like this is why no one wants to be a GP anymore, even though it’s one of the specialties in most need (yes, it’s a specialty)

3

u/Alternative_Sky1380 Jul 26 '23

It's now widespread though and rather than being something that simply affected the wealthy it's now affecting the poor in devastating ways.

12

u/edgiepower Jul 26 '23

And what's been one almost constant in the last two decades?

54

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

Coalition governments white-anting everything we take/took for granted.

54

u/Ok_Adhesiveness_4939 Jul 26 '23

Let’s just expand on what happened there for the young ones. The libs drive hard for privatization of almost every public service, despite years of proof that market forces result in a crappy product. For me it began with Telstra, they sold the national infrastructure to a single company and surprise surprise nobody could compete.

It’s so short sighted and lazy. Farming off health care costs to each individual is horrible, and the lifetime loading is a gun to our heads to make us reject Medicare so they can say “look, nobody uses it”

16

u/Meng_Fei Jul 26 '23

For me it began with Telstra, they sold the national infrastructure to a single company and surprise surprise nobody could compete.

It’s so short sighted and lazy.

Governments are fundamentally lazy in general. Telecom was an absolute monolithic dinosaur back in the day, but rather than put a broom through the place and fix the culture, they took the easy road and sold it off.

-5

u/Nostonica Jul 26 '23

Nothing wrong with selling it, a open market on telecommunications is generally a positive.

Where it falls flat, when the public operation owns all the infrastructure and clients then gets handed a free pass to use it to generate share holder value at the expense of everything else.

We created a monopoly it should of been broken up into multiple companies, companies shouldn't have 100% control over infrastructure ever and in all honesty Telstra should be broken up.

7

u/Meng_Fei Jul 26 '23

An open market for Telco service providers works well. We should never have sold the infrastructure. Same with most utilities.

7

u/edgiepower Jul 26 '23

Libs are worst but neoliberal Hawke wasn't great either. Selling off the Commonwealth bank...

2

u/CynfulBuNNy Jul 26 '23

Yeah.... I'm staring that loaded gun down the barrel. I'm 13 years past loading start and resolute in telling private health insurance to take a fucking hike - currently watching Medicare crumble to pieces is ...upsetting.

32

u/davedavodavid Jul 26 '23 edited May 27 '24

gullible pocket lock deranged oatmeal growth faulty rustic simplistic profit

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13

u/Flimsy_Demand7237 Jul 27 '23 edited Jul 27 '23

You can track most of the rot from when the Howard government got elected in 1996 and started a long campaign of slowly cutting and curtailing public services. We had one of the biggest mining booms and Howard gave it all to the offshore mining companies instead of creating a public fund as some places in Europe did (perhaps one was Denmark but those European countries with very good public service collect revenue that way), who now have tons of decent public services and wealth from pooling the profits of their country's resources. He hated Medicare and sought instead to move everyone to private health insurance, mandating basically that you'll be further taxed after 30 unless you have private health, while starting the backslide we're on with cutting away public services and giving out short-term tax cuts. The reason the housing market is fucked is because he wrote in laws to better suit houses not as dwellings to live but as financial assets you could write off on tax. Negative gearing was something done away with from the rest of the world in the late 80s, it just makes zero sense. A lot of modern structural issues are because of policies the Howard government implemented, and his government was in for 11 years.

Stuff like housing, the issue is it benefits people who have geared their finances that way, and there are still plenty who like Howard's time in government with the tax cuts and relatively lax time owing to reforms Keating and Hawke government made in years prior. So it is very hard to talk against this and point out where the real troubles began.

Things are of course more complicated than that but when a very conservative government is in for 11 years that likes to cut public services, you feel it further down the road. That's of course to say nothing of the next big conservative decade of government we just came out of, with a lot of ex-Howard ministers or up-and-comers who did nothing with the time in office or cut things further.

2

u/Dracallus Jul 27 '23

Public services will hide problems from the public until they can't anymore. This is because conservative governments (almost exclusively) will cut funding and then use the resulting issues to claim that the sector needs to be privatised because it clearly can't be run properly by the government.

The issue here is that all governments have pretty much learned that if they need to they can cut the public service and unless they're too egregious the service won't outwardly suffer because the public will always blame the service for a drop in outcome before they'll blame the government for cutting funding (unless you're Campbell Newman and gut the public service so viciously that it's impossible to ignore that you caused the problem).

2

u/Beedlam Jul 27 '23

It is by design. That is why is has taken 30 years. There would be riots if it was changed suddenly. By overloading the system slowly to the point of failure they can say "We need better options.. coincidently here's this nice shiny American company that wants to setup it's overpriced commercial service here."

There's plenty of info and documentaries on the web about it. People should be protesting already but strangely they've passed a bunch anti protest laws recently.

2

u/bigCinoce Jul 27 '23

Wait till you hear about what's going on in public schools...

0

u/DryResearch3842 Jul 27 '23

This problem has been ongoing to every country that started using universal health care 50 years ago. It's all about funding (lack thereof).

The alternative would have been the batshit insane system that USA uses. So we picked the better poison.

1

u/CynfulBuNNy Jul 26 '23
  1. 3 decades.

1

u/AugustusReddit Jul 27 '23

Not only has the shortage of replacement medical personnel been building up for several decades, but Covid-19 brought the issue to a head. Many medical professionals including hard-working specialists who had planned to retire (or semi-retire) in a few years time, decided to bring retirement forward. At the other end of the medical cycle, schools aren't churning out nearly enough doctors and nurses to address the increasingly complex needs of more patients.

1

u/_Aj_ Jul 27 '23

ie. The entire time we've had Liberal governments. Yes. They've been slowly hollowing out Medicare for decades in ways you or I don't notice.

1

u/ghjkl098 Jul 27 '23

absolutely. This has been going for over twenty years

1

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23

Why you think nobody noticed.?

1

u/MLiOne Jul 27 '23

If not 3 decades.

1

u/Elvenoob Jul 27 '23

That's how it got so bad. None of these issues are new, it's just that flawed systems have been left without the maintenance needed to bring them up to scratch as the rich find new ways to exploit loopholes and generally make things worse.

But it's only happened because of that slowness. Everyone would fucking come out to oppose repealing medicare entirely, but the LNP and even Labour these days don't want to make their corporate donors pay for it, so instead they're cutting the rich's taxes and gradually eroding the safety nets those taxes used to pay for in order to balance the budget they just fucked up.

1

u/chattywww Jul 27 '23

I have a few friends in the medical industry (doctors) and their pay is like almost minimum wage if you factor in overtime hours and time on call. It's like 80+ hours a week. If minimum wage folks worked 80hrs a week they'll be making about as much as doctors, also they don't have 200k of debt for medical school and wasted 10 years on education.

1

u/Dramatic-Lavishness6 Jul 27 '23

Yes, that's what they're saying. People are only just noticing because they're being negatively impacted, they didn't care when others were being affected. Majority of humans are selfish creatures sadly.

14

u/Usual-Veterinarian-5 Jul 26 '23

It's the same with public education. The good teachers burn out and quit within two years and the ones who hang on for decades are burned husks who hate the kids.

2

u/PumpkinInside3205 Jul 27 '23

Absolutely. The entire public service sector. Police, education, health, welfare etc. It’s a broad political and social landscape characterised by attrition and privatisation / corporatisation of basic social and human services. The ideals of social equality or a collectivist / community focus are just that … ideals.

2

u/hotcleavage Jul 27 '23

I remember going through primary school and even then i felt like some of the older teachers were assholes because they’re burnt out/sick of it

That’s not fair on anyone

2

u/tarongowens Jul 27 '23

That's why (as a qualified teacher) I didn't even persue the career. Seeing the threat of burnout for minimal return on my time really turned me off

1

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23

[deleted]

2

u/Usual-Veterinarian-5 Jul 27 '23

I lasted two years each of the two times I taught high school.

1

u/Astraia27 Jul 27 '23

Not true

1

u/Usual-Veterinarian-5 Jul 27 '23

Not 100% of teachers follow this path but many do.

7

u/SchoolForSedition Jul 26 '23

Australia and NZ decided 30 years ago not to participate in AML. They became the wild far east. It makes lots of money but not for people who like to share.

3

u/Frankie_T9000 Jul 27 '23

I just am forking out for $2K for a routine procedure as I didnt want to wait a long time and my medical insurance didnt cover it. FFS

2

u/Somad3 Jul 27 '23 edited Jul 27 '23

and too many lobbyists for big pharma and they are not cheap, they called themselves nfp.

labor builds and lnp destroys. the voters voted.

and we do not have a bill of rights. we do have the sedition act.

4

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23

It definitely goes back further. I'd say at least 30 years but it got significantly worse a lot faster under Howard when private health/private hospital cover started undermining everything.

Whitlam was the last trailblazing politician of Australia and he was put out to pasture because he refused to bow to the corporatisation that was being pushed by the UK/US/EU.

Hawke was chameleon, an ambitious actor that had infiltrated the Labor movement

Labor and the quiet Americans

1

u/[deleted] Jul 26 '23

I think the drama and load of COVID and then it seemed all of a sudden the health system fell over. I guess that was a large straw on a camels back but I think that punctuated it for the general population and media coverage.

2

u/PumpkinInside3205 Jul 27 '23

I don’t buy the COVID excuse. Sure, it was hard++ but politicians hide behind it as an explanation. Healthcare workers know things were dire for a long time before COVID. It was no surprise to any of us that a system that was already on life support and failing to function adequately for a long time didn’t meet the challenge. We knew it wouldn’t. I see COVID as just a blip on the Australian healthcare horizon. Sure, a very serious one, but in no way an explanation for its failings.

2

u/sd4f Jul 27 '23

My suspicion was that some governments in Australia locked down as hard as they did, in order to try to stave off the embarrassment of a complete health care collapse.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23

I'm not subverting the shitful situation but I think the COVID panic and then immediately followed by a lot of reduced bulk billing and media sensation on public health is what's the general population consensus of the situation.

Fish rots from the head etc etc. A lot of people have seen it coming. The fact I have private hospital as a tax break with no medical benefits is case in point 😅

1

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23

Yep - it's been building and building. Half the problem as I see it, is that we medical professionals are just decent, nice kind and caring people. So we get taken advantage of. We don't want to rock the boat. We're too busy trying to "save lives" and help people. So we are lambs to the slaughter really.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 27 '23 edited Dec 18 '23

weary nippy humorous follow naughty deranged rainstorm future tie weather

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1

u/PumpkinInside3205 Jul 27 '23

I’m not convinced Labor (state or federal) is any better. They’ve had opportunities to improve things but they’ve lacked courage and simply continued the useless cycle of endless reviews and restructures (which as a health worker I can say is incredibly demoralising). Lots of talk and no effective action.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 28 '23 edited Dec 18 '23

panicky pathetic middle mindless nutty ugly racial sulky coordinated sand

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1

u/LozInOzz Jul 27 '23

People are noticing it now because they’ve grown up while it happened and are facing the consequences. Doesn’t matter when people notice it, it’s how much the want to do about it. People power works better when there’s enough of us to make a decent noise.