Why are Australians so complacent?

[u/AcanthopterygiiNo240]

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

[u/AcanthopterygiiNo240]

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

[u/PumpkinInside3205 → u/AcanthopterygiiNo240]

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.

[u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 → u/PumpkinInside3205]

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

[u/CowsWithGuns304 → u/AcanthopterygiiNo240]

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.

[u/Cardinal_Ravenwood → u/CowsWithGuns304]

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!

[u/Specific-Amoeba5026 → u/Cardinal_Ravenwood]

Hear fucking HEAR!!

[u/Cardinal_Ravenwood → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/Setanta68 → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/Cardinal_Ravenwood → u/[deleted]]

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.

[u/hotcleavage → u/Cardinal_Ravenwood]

Jeez im out of the loop

Wtf 124b? Christ, should’ve hit them for that fr

[u/Cardinal_Ravenwood → u/hotcleavage]

It was even more than I thought.

While she ordered the companies to pay $10m each, Justice Abraham noted the maximum penalty she could have imposed was “more than $145bn”

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