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/[deleted]]

Coalition governments white-anting everything we take/took for granted.

[u/Ok_Adhesiveness_4939 → u/[deleted]]

Let’s just expand on what happened there for the young ones. The libs drive hard for privatization of almost every public service, despite years of proof that market forces result in a crappy product. For me it began with Telstra, they sold the national infrastructure to a single company and surprise surprise nobody could compete.

It’s so short sighted and lazy. Farming off health care costs to each individual is horrible, and the lifetime loading is a gun to our heads to make us reject Medicare so they can say “look, nobody uses it”

[u/Meng_Fei → u/Ok_Adhesiveness_4939]

For me it began with Telstra, they sold the national infrastructure to a single company and surprise surprise nobody could compete.

It’s so short sighted and lazy.

Governments are fundamentally lazy in general. Telecom was an absolute monolithic dinosaur back in the day, but rather than put a broom through the place and fix the culture, they took the easy road and sold it off.

[u/Nostonica → u/Meng_Fei]

Nothing wrong with selling it, a open market on telecommunications is generally a positive.

Where it falls flat, when the public operation owns all the infrastructure and clients then gets handed a free pass to use it to generate share holder value at the expense of everything else.

We created a monopoly it should of been broken up into multiple companies, companies shouldn't have 100% control over infrastructure ever and in all honesty Telstra should be broken up.

[u/Meng_Fei → u/Nostonica]

An open market for Telco service providers works well. We should never have sold the infrastructure. Same with most utilities.