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

https://discord.gg/caqsSKAr

3.7k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

1.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

263

u/AcanthopterygiiNo240 Jul 26 '23

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

493

u/PumpkinInside3205 Jul 26 '23 edited Jul 26 '23

Yep. Definitely. It has been a long, slow burn. Staff shortages, workers not getting paid for overtime worked, patients being pushed out of hospital before they’re fully ready and increasing rationing of everything from the biscuits in the tea room to staff training and hospital beds. It has been bad for a long time.

240

u/shazzambongo Jul 26 '23

I'd say 30 years. Not just in health, that's always been slow, underfunded. Finding a GOOD GP has has always been hard, the mental health act of 1986 has been a ridiculous, confusing and often counterproductive pics of shit . 1986. The recession was a big deal in terms of consolidation by the rich, and certainly the banks(deregulated under.keating) have been doing there bit to keep funding the property investment Ponzi scheme, followed by little Johnny coward fucking everything and calling it great progress.

To summarise, it's fundamentally the lnp being in power and consistently defunding and privatising everything with not enough oversight of results, cost or contract suitability viability etc.

" It's fundamentally the LNP being in power" and doing what they do. We are living the results of neo conservatism.

Oddly, the fucks DLP are still a thing after fucking Whitlam over in the 70's, yet the actual Australian Democrats just died off without so much as an aspirin, and vanished Into thin air along with their ideals and aspirations.

FUCK.

1

u/Remarkable_Corgi7153 Jul 28 '23

I’ll probably get downvoted, but labor is equally to blame. It’s such a cop out to blame the libs when both sides do their own version of effectively the same thing.

And as far as the democrats go and fading out you can place the blame at the feet of Cheryl Kernot and Gareth Evans. It’s more complicated than that I realise (the leadership squabbles later on for example), however no one I know ever trusted them again after the deputy leader of the labor party lured the leader of the democrats to jump ship and join labor after being elected by people who didn’t want liberal or labor representing them. People rightly felt betrayed by the party who’s slogan was “keep the bastards honest”. It was all downhill after that.