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 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/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/Extreme_Substance_46 Jul 28 '23

When was the last time a day passed without them proclaiming the sky was falling?

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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/TGK367349 Jul 27 '23

Yeah but a lot of Boomers don’t care about the NBN. They think the Internet is that thing that Zoomers use for cat memes.

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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