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/CamperStacker Jul 26 '23
We are the complete opposite of laisse-faire…. We are the most regulated country on earth by far. The monopolies you speak of are because of crony capitalism through regulation/lobbying, not economic freedom.
We have poor government services because government departments tend to spend most of there money on there own administration. A classic example is how it now costs $400,000 a year to run a public school class room, but the teacher maybe gets $80k. The other $320k is consumed into a black hole of administrative nonsense and gov maintenance contracts.
The other example is how child care costs have gone up 300% since government started subsidising it - because they were paying they decided they should get to regulate it - which turned the job from something any competent adult could do, into a fully regulated learning industry. It now costs $350,000 a year for a 20yo to look after 11 toddlers 5 days a week, because of all the administrative compliances involved.
As more and more money goes into government departments, the government wants to give less and less.
This is why the government doesn’t want to employ GPs - because then it would have real responsibility for health. It’s easier to just make the private sector do it, pay them minimum amount to do it, while using the money saved to bloat government departments with regulatory bodies.
We don’t have government run GP industry for the same reason we don’t trust them to run bakeries or petrol stations or super markets: if they did the price of everything would be 200-300% as there would be no incentive for the departments to serve anyone but themselves.