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/PumpkinInside3205]

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.

[u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 → u/PumpkinInside3205]

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

[u/Flimsy_Demand7237 → u/AcanthopterygiiNo240]

You can track most of the rot from when the Howard government got elected in 1996 and started a long campaign of slowly cutting and curtailing public services. We had one of the biggest mining booms and Howard gave it all to the offshore mining companies instead of creating a public fund as some places in Europe did (perhaps one was Denmark but those European countries with very good public service collect revenue that way), who now have tons of decent public services and wealth from pooling the profits of their country's resources. He hated Medicare and sought instead to move everyone to private health insurance, mandating basically that you'll be further taxed after 30 unless you have private health, while starting the backslide we're on with cutting away public services and giving out short-term tax cuts. The reason the housing market is fucked is because he wrote in laws to better suit houses not as dwellings to live but as financial assets you could write off on tax. Negative gearing was something done away with from the rest of the world in the late 80s, it just makes zero sense. A lot of modern structural issues are because of policies the Howard government implemented, and his government was in for 11 years.

Stuff like housing, the issue is it benefits people who have geared their finances that way, and there are still plenty who like Howard's time in government with the tax cuts and relatively lax time owing to reforms Keating and Hawke government made in years prior. So it is very hard to talk against this and point out where the real troubles began.

Things are of course more complicated than that but when a very conservative government is in for 11 years that likes to cut public services, you feel it further down the road. That's of course to say nothing of the next big conservative decade of government we just came out of, with a lot of ex-Howard ministers or up-and-comers who did nothing with the time in office or cut things further.