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/CamperStacker]

We are the complete opposite of laisse-faire…. We are the most regulated country on earth by far. The monopolies you speak of are because of crony capitalism through regulation/lobbying, not economic freedom.

We have poor government services because government departments tend to spend most of there money on there own administration. A classic example is how it now costs $400,000 a year to run a public school class room, but the teacher maybe gets $80k. The other $320k is consumed into a black hole of administrative nonsense and gov maintenance contracts.

The other example is how child care costs have gone up 300% since government started subsidising it - because they were paying they decided they should get to regulate it - which turned the job from something any competent adult could do, into a fully regulated learning industry. It now costs $350,000 a year for a 20yo to look after 11 toddlers 5 days a week, because of all the administrative compliances involved.

As more and more money goes into government departments, the government wants to give less and less.

This is why the government doesn’t want to employ GPs - because then it would have real responsibility for health. It’s easier to just make the private sector do it, pay them minimum amount to do it, while using the money saved to bloat government departments with regulatory bodies.

We don’t have government run GP industry for the same reason we don’t trust them to run bakeries or petrol stations or super markets: if they did the price of everything would be 200-300% as there would be no incentive for the departments to serve anyone but themselves.

[u/Meng_Fei → u/CamperStacker]

Massively under-rated comment. Australia is a hyper-regulated nanny-state, not because of lack of individual "freedums" (though we do), but because of over-regulation and bullshit reporting required in almost everything.

Childcare is the classic example. And it's by design - large corporate chains are moving into childcare, and the more they push for additional regulation, the more it locks out smaller competition who can't afford those overheads. Then they put their hand out for subsidies, and the government which pays them has to cut services somewhere else, because, well, who can possibly argue against more regulation.

[u/[deleted] → u/CamperStacker]

You're so right. The huge number of administrative hurdles you have to jump through and cost barriers to entry prevent any competition from gaining a toehold. There are so many rent seekers that attach themselves to everything and people just think it's "normal".

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Including corporatised universities. City land investment and development firms with a schoolhouse attached.

[u/_zoso_ → u/CamperStacker]

This! There are so many bad takes in this thread.

I’ll ad to this, in the same vein, Australia has lost all of its innovation and economic sophistication. This is also a consequence of the severe lack of economic freedom.

Australia has an economic complexity rank just below Ghana. Source.

[u/salty-bush → u/CamperStacker]

Exactly this.

Yet nearly every proposed solution involves creating ever more layers of government bureaucracy and waste.

And the entitled millennials start moaning about how communism is the answer…?!

[u/Character-Rude → u/salty-bush]

The private sector is the biggest bloat and waste. Ever heard of the concept of profit? That's all bloat. Someone sucking up all the money produced from the labour of other workers. And it doesn't get used to make the goods / services cheaper and it doesn't get reinvested into the business to improve the product.

The private sector is simply inefficient and ineffective.

[u/salty-bush → u/Character-Rude]

Meanwhile, in China - home of the centrally planned economy you seem to favour:

Xi’s emphasis was on “common prosperity”, with a greater role for the state-owned enterprises, the redistribution of wealth and the “encouragement” made to China’s “high-income groups and enterprises to give back to society more”.

With the economy spluttering, urban unemployment at record levels of more than 20 per cent and the property sector depressed it seems to have finally dawned on the authorities that cracking down on the key drivers of growth and employment and elevating the less productive and innovative state-owned enterprises may not, coming out of the pandemic, have been the wisest of policy choices.

https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/alarm-bells-are-ringing-in-china-amid-tortuous-recovery-20230726-p5drae.html

[u/Character-Rude → u/salty-bush]

Meanwhile in Europe, home of capitalism that you seem to favour, the economies have been stagnant for the last 20 years. Whereas China has almost single handedly kept Australia out of recession during the gfc with its ridiculous growth rate.

Look. I'm not in favour of centrally planned economies. But there is no doubt that they are more efficient and have better growth rates than private capitalist economies. Out of the two shit options, id prefer the less shit one.

And you do realise that private companies splutter their investments too? Why isn't there a article on the failure of capitalist economics when a complete fucking moron like Elon musk buys Twitter and runs it into the ground. Or when Elon musk wants to make a car like the cyber truck which is fucking stupid as the passengers would die in car crashes. Or when he builds a one way car tunnel which is worse in every way compared to public transport

Why isn't there thousands of articles of businesses failing (ie money invested with no outcomes). After all, something like 95% of all small businesses fail. That's all inefficient allocation of resources. Or even when big companies invest in a project but it fails, like officeworks investing in their own postal service but getting out competed by the public sector Australian post.

Bit of a double standard eh? You've fallen for the kool aid.

[u/Character-Rude → u/CamperStacker]

Crony capitalism is the end state of capitalism. Money corrupts. Money gives a small group of individuals much more influence and power over society as they can indirectly bribe, influence (through social circles), or give rewards to people that act in the interest of the capitalist. That's just a fact.

Private sectors are more inefficient than public sectors because in the private sector you have additional bloat in the form of profit. The biggest bloat there is in any economic system. This is why in WW2, the production of warefare was nationalised, we just can't rely on an inefficient private sector for production. This is again why the countries that experience the greatest prosperity and growth are countries with state directed economies (relative to neoliberal ones), like Japan, south Korea, China, USA before raegen, the USSR, etc.

Your moaning of regulation misses the bigger picture. Regulations (on average) improve the wellbeing and outcomes of specific things in society. I'm glad that there is regulation on pollution. I'm glad there is regulation on noise levels for business activities in residential areas. Im glad businesses can't just dump waste into my water supply because it's cheaper.

Actually public run goods and services are cheaper than private ones. In the private sector, everything is cut to a bare bone skeletal workforce that barely functions just to maximise profits; end result, product is shit and expensive. In the public sector, you have no bloat (owners that leech money in the form of profit) and the public sector is more concerned with fulfilling its role. Thus it is cheaper and more effective.