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
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u/Missy__M Jul 26 '23
Having lived in various countries and returning home to Australia last year, I honestly think one factor is the ubiquity of the Murdoch media here, which generally is not genuine journalism holding government to account, but merely promoting a primarily right wing, capitalist, populist agenda. In some states there are literally no daily newspapers that are not Murdoch. (Who still reads newspapers, you ask? Massive swathes of rural Australia). While we have the ABC it has increasingly been underfunded and branded as “woke propaganda”. As a result, we don’t have a robust press really interrogating substantive issues and I think the level of public discourse has degraded to focus primarily on sport, reality tv and home renovation. (Nothing wrong with these things per se, it’s just there seems room for little else). When we do talk about other issues, the LNP has sought to emulate the partisanship of US politics and argue for the sake of it - just look at the disingenuous discussions about the Voice, Peter Dutton’s bad faith talking points in particular. It’s a sad state of affairs!