Is Australia the new 'Murica? (Has Australia become shit)

silentbutdeadly said:
Perhaps you should ask your parents or older relatives for their perspective.
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My parents are both first generation immigrants and both claim that life was better in their own respective home countries.
Pure nostalgia same as anyone.

Worse now is people have nostalgia over the present. Where they believe things could be so much worse than now so they want nothing to change lest it upset "the balance". But things are changing and they are slowly getting worse... much faster for the poor and the working class.
 
gillyske said:
My parents are both first generation immigrants and both claim that life was better in their own respective home countries.
Pure nostalgia same as anyone.

Worse now is people have nostalgia over the present. Where they believe things could be so much worse than now so they want nothing to change lest it upset "the balance". But things are changing and they are slowly getting worse... much faster for the poor and the working class.
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They all say that because it's their birth country, I visited a town where my Mum was born in Europe and the way most people lived there was horrible and it's not even a 3rd world country. Australia has done pretty well for such a young country, I've never really got how we want to follow the US because we are a country with our own identity and it's a lot better than the US if you have a good look at it.
 
Scotty T said:
I wouldn't be so glowing in my praise. It was in the interest of the nation to go to Iraq? The guy still did his fair share of self interested stuff, and IMO you don't stay leader for that long without looking after the party room interests. Capital gains tax concessions, middle class welfare, increased fed funding to private education, WorkChoices, tax breaks for wealthy people. All that stuff increased inequality. How about all the money we didn't get as a nation from the mining boom? That was just a different set of cronies to the ones Labor had before Howard.

Wouldn't even apologise to the stolen generation. I'm not saying anyone was much better, maybe given the chance Gillard would have been, I think so. She apologised, and how about the thing she did that put his pedo mate in jail?

Sure, lots of good stuff happened for all us middle class or richer people but I would say he wasn't ever thinking about the whole of the nation, except for the gun laws. He said "for all of us" and perhaps he had a bit of a go at that with some of the policies that have served us well but he also did some of the shittiest things in the history of Australian prime ministers.
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Fair call Scotty - I'm by no means a fan of everything Howard did, the point was more that he was competent and effective as a PM whether you agree with his policies and decisions or not. I don't know that you could say the same of anyone since - perhaps Gillard under different circumstances ie. not knifing Rudd and having to deal with Abbot in opposition. Howard probably benefited from being the last PM to exist in a pre-social media world too, without the distraction of the prickly 24 hour news cycle. Maybe that puts him in that era of politicians being perceived as more statesmen-like because there was less celebrity in the job back then, and they're actually all just as shit as each other but it's just more obvious now?!

I thought that the resources boom largely allowed the Coalition to pay down ~$100b of inherited debt when they came to office. They paid off the credit card that Fraser, Hawke and Keating went to town with (not that they shouldn't have - sometimes you gotta spend). Then Rudd went and bought everyone TVs.
 
My father's father was Irish. Moved here before the war to end all wars, part one. Several years ago i visited my distant cousins. Fuck me. Dirt floors in farm house kitchens, I shit you not. They are happy because that is their lot. Work the farm all hours and then get smashed at the pub and repeat. Tough life but they want nothing else. Cannot believe what it is like here. My grandfather was a railway fettler, did hard manual labour and worked many hours. He bought his own farm, built his own house and still had it 100x better than his family who stayed in Eire.

As for the main topic, yeah nah. Stop watching so much shit american tv and social media.

Time for a good laugh. I am going to sell tickets to @moorey buying his 29er in nov if we haven't died from snake flu by then.
 
gillyske said:
My parents are both first generation immigrants and both claim that life was better in their own respective home countries.
Pure nostalgia same as anyone.

Worse now is people have nostalgia over the present. Where they believe things could be so much worse than now so they want nothing to change lest it upset "the balance". But things are changing and they are slowly getting worse... much faster for the poor and the working class.
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Yep, I'm hearing alot of this in the last 2 years. Many that came across are now going back to their respective countries.
 
Nambra said:
I thought that the resources boom largely allowed the Coalition to pay down ~$100b of inherited debt when they came to office. They paid off the credit card that Fraser, Hawke and Keating went to town with (not that they shouldn't have - sometimes you gotta spend). Then Rudd went and bought everyone TVs.
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They payed off debt by selling assets like telstra and our gold reserve, not with good management. They then used the surplus from the firesale to fund tax cuts which eroded the countries income even more than just selling things that made a profit would have. Fuck Howard, seriously he was one of our crappiest.
 
Australia is shit house. Was awesome 10 year ago. But everywhere is shit because it’s a global trophy for everyone agenda... except rural Russia. That’s where I want to be with some sought of identity that I choose, not chosen for me
 
Freediver said:
They payed off debt by selling assets like telstra and our gold reserve, not with good management. They then used the surplus from the firesale to fund tax cuts which eroded the countries income even more than just selling things that made a profit would have. Fuck Howard, seriously he was one of our crappiest.
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Privatisation isn't an exclusively Howard or an Australian thing - it was happening in many countries in the 90's. CSL, CommBank, Qantas - all sold off by Labor before Howard became PM.
 
Nambra said:
Privatisation isn't an exclusively Howard or an Australian thing - it was happening in many countries in the 90's. CSL, CommBank, Qantas - all sold off by Labor before Howard became PM.
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You might want to check that, your examples may have had their privatisation started under Keating but they were completed by Howard who had most of the money come to his government.
 
silentbutdeadly said:
There are many places and cultures in a worse state than ours and there are perhaps ones that are better.

I feel that the reality is that we typically lack sufficient perspective and it's actually unlikely that we've ever had it so good (in general terms).

Sure there are a multitude of different pressures but there has always been something in here or out there that one could perceive as a threat to your current lifestyle. The internet just helps make it a longer and even more meaningless list.

There is not more shit. Just different shit. And the depth rarely varies...even across the decades.
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Agreed. Cultural osmosis aside we've got a long way to go before we're in as shitful a state as The States.
Public transport, roads, crime rates and healthcare here are light years better than that of the US and I'm always mystified by Americans when they harp on about how great everything is over there as my experience of the place is that it's buggered!
My stepfather is American and we used to holiday there a lot when I was a kid. Back then it was like a different world. They had amazing theme parks like Disneyworld and Universal Studios, they got all the movies 6 months before we did, they had all the best toys and the weather was amazing (I only had Scotland as a frame of reference mind you).
Fast forward a few decades and the technological and cultural advantages have been negated by the internet and a sharp increase in quality of life everywhere else whereas my last few trips to the US have involved 3rd world levels of airport and airline service, shocking sights of mass homelessness (complete with the stench of human shit wafting through the air) and a whole continents worth of driving on roads and bridges that look like they're the setting for a post-apocalyptic drama.

That said, if everyone in Australia could follow the Americans example and learn how to drive properly on the freeway, we'd be a lot better off as a nation!
 
360829
 
Yep, compared to the States we're still pretty rosy, but I feel like there's been a definite erosion in general liveability and social provision in Australia over the last 15 years. 15 years ago I went to Melbourne Uni, and lived a series of sharehouses with 2-3 mates within a 10km radius of the campus, and could afford to do so by working around 20-25 hours a week on the side. There'd be no way in hell a student could do that now. However, decreasing liveability isn't an exclusively Australian phenomenon. I travel semi regularly (every couple of years) to the States for work, as well as the UK to see family, and lived in the UK for a fair while in the late 2000's. Things have definitely gone downhill in both countries, homelessness has massively increased as well as visible signs of poverty, and family experiences in the NHS over the past few years have been far from ideal (in contrast to the sterling service I received when I lived there).

What fucks me off greatly is the continual adherence to the neoliberal/ let the markets decide attitude when the level of subsidy/ bail outs from the taxpayer is ever increasing. America has the highest per capital cost of healthcare in the world so why are we heading down that path? Similarly the whole treatment of tax in Australia is a con of the highest order. And this is coming from someone who is fortunate enough to be able to salary sacrifice into super, and yet I receive a tax break for doing so. Moral of the story clearly is if you have some wealth you'll get handouts.
 
The general quality of produce in the US is shit compared to Australia.

Plus there's far more morons and people that would happily shit on you to get ahead over there too.

That said I did like regional Washington state.
 
HamboCairns said:
Plus there's far more morons and people that would happily shit on you to get ahead over there too.
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Only because there are simply more of them..... Our "society" is rapidly heading in that direction - take the current dunny roll fiasco for example - and that more than anything is what's turning our country to shit. The stereotype of the easy-going "she'll be right mate" Aussie is a rapidly-fading memory, with an aggressive, selfish, everyone-else's-fault-but-mine attitude becoming the ugly social norm.
 
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