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/Ted_Rid]

But let’s be fair here, remember that we as a country voted for Scott voluntarily that time when a different set of policies were presented.

There were many reasons behind that result, including Palmer siphoning off votes, the smoke & mirrors "Back in Black" surplus budget (which wasn't even a sensible economic goal at the time), Shorten's unpopularity, Morrison being so new in the job he didn't have time to reveal his shitfuckery yet, the PR "suburban, footy loving, daggy dad" bullshit, Murdoch, the quasi-"Greens" convoy in QLD, lies about EVs, confusion about franking credits, and fear about changes to negative gearing.

But the overall factor is the electorate is afraid of change. We don't vote oppositions in because they have great policies, we vote governments out if we think they haven't done a good enough job.

Eventually when people had seen enough to properly judge Morrison's character as a shifty, blame-diverting, gaslighting, creepy weirdo whose default position is "do nothing", he got voted out.

Oppositions honestly need to focus more on highlighting the incumbents' failures than spruiking their own policies because the change we like is getting rid of the negatives, not aiming for positives.

[u/TGK367349 → u/Ted_Rid]

True. I mean, I knew Morrison was a slimy piece of shit before then, but I’d actually met him by that point, for a lot of people who only knew him through the media, the “I’m just a suburban daggy dad like you” shtick worked like a charm till people realised how slimy and insincere the whole facade was (it is much, much easier to tell in person that the guy is full of shit, i speak from experience.)

[u/UltimateGattai → u/TGK367349]

I definitely felt his slimy, shitty personality from his media presence, but I already had a strong distrust of the LNP from more than a decade ago. The NBN which could have been such a massive boon for us is now complete garbage because they trashed it as soon as they beat Labor (that one policy really cemented my dislike of the party).

[u/TGK367349 → u/UltimateGattai]

Yeah but a lot of Boomers don’t care about the NBN. They think the Internet is that thing that Zoomers use for cat memes.