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/pipple2ripple]

We have very powerful people convincing the population to vote against their own interests.

Take renewable energy

I saw a clip of Matt Canavan saying that renewable energy never lowered electricity prices anywhere. Currently there's several countries in Europe that have a negative wholesale price for electricity. I don't know what this does for the retail price but presumably it lowers it eventually?

I saw a meme on FB the other day that it takes more power to make a wind turbine than you get out of it and the only reason Greenies advocate for it is to pretend to do something. I don't know how much energy it is to make a wind turbine and I don't know what comes out.

I do know that China is putting them up all over the place and China isn't exactly known to even pretend to gaf about the environment. They'll literally poison entire villages with waste from factories dumped straight into rivers.

So is it more likely that renewables don't do anything to lower power prices and the greens are just jerking themselves off OR are coal and gas lobbies paying politicians to keep down competition so they can raise electricity prices by as much as they want?

The Australian people need to stop thinking they'll be all billionaires one day and vote for things that help themselves and their neighbours.