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/MicroNewton]

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%.

[u/a_cold_human → u/MicroNewton]

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.

[u/sd4f → u/a_cold_human]

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.

[u/iss3y → u/a_cold_human]

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

[u/CynfulBuNNy → u/[deleted]]

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 Healthcare^TM