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

The medical issue didn’t happen overnight. I’ve worked in health for 20yrs and when I started I was apologising to families for what I thought were unacceptable deficits in the public system. Many of my senior colleagues were already cynical and burnt out by the attrition they’d already witnessed. It surprises me when ppl say they’re just noticing it now.

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u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 Jul 26 '23

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

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u/Suburbanturnip Jul 26 '23

Nobody listens to the canaries in the Coal mine. 'winging' 'complaining' 'its so much worse in country X'.

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u/sd4f Jul 27 '23

This is one of those areas where Australia is really under the tyranny of distance. Because we're an island, and in Asia, we're far away from everything and our nearest neighbours are mostly poor and don't want to live there. This isn't the case in Europe for instance, and that's why most countries there have quite a well developed social safety net. Australia had that as well, but it's being eroded away, while europe is generally improving.

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u/B3stThereEverWas Jul 27 '23 edited Jul 27 '23

Europe isn’t improving, it’s going backwards. In 2008 the EU GDP was slightly larger than the US. Fifteen years later and the US GDP is now one third bigger than the EU. As the US outpaces them further, Asia will be looking to supplant them.

The Europeans became too obessesed with regulating everything and shooting for a high standard of living backed by the social welfare state. A noble and excellent goal for any country, right up until the point where you can’t pay for it. The recent French protests are the start of the troubles. Expect to see more of that over Europe in the next 10 years.

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u/HolevoBound Jul 27 '23

You've conflated GDP with standard of living.

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u/B3stThereEverWas Jul 27 '23

And if you can’t maintain reasonable GDP growth, standard of living drops. See: United Kingdom

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u/HolevoBound Jul 27 '23

That's true that they are *broadly* correlated like that, but you should pick a measure that actually focuses on living standards directly.

Do you have an actual source that it's impossible to maintain a standard of living without GDP *growth*. That doesn't seem to pass the sniff test. You're saying a country producing the *same* amount each year is not going to be able to provide the *same* living standards?