I was born in 1990, and the only people in my age group that I know who are buying houses are doing so with the help of family wealth. So long social mobility.

To call it whiteness mentality is missing the fact that racism is a trait that can exist amongst any nationality. It may be predominantly white in Australia, but we have a white colonial history. Other non-white countries have it too.

Well AIDS was scary as fuck but Australia didn’t have to worry too much about the cold war. Life in the 80s was generally pretty cruisy.

It’s true. But I think the point is that more opportunities were available to that generation. For example, both my boomer parents grew up in poverty. Dad was an orphan. They moved to the city with no money and made careers for themselves. Housing was cheap. That’s not possible today without family wealth (in Australia at least). I’m a software engineer with an electrical engineering degree and I’ll never own a house or retire. They bought houses on public service wages without degrees.

Yes, which is why I find it hard to play games these days. Even reading books is a challenge after reading code all day, but my current down time activity is trying to read through the complete works of George Orwell. Reading Homage to Catalonia and really enjoying it.

Australia sucks at recycling. When I lived in Germany the residential streets had separate bins for green, brown and clear glass. So it can be recycled while maintaining quality. Separating waste is a matter of social conscience.

Those balls ain’t right.

I remember going to a doof in gippsland in 2010 (noise poison) and cops were searching cars on the way in (unusual for the party size) because another doof at the same site 2 weeks prior had a violent incident that was blamed on GHB. It had a bad reputation amongst people I knew at doofs.

The media used to refer to it as grievous bodily harm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-ZFEhBPS9E

Do a barrel roll!

Absolutely, and that sheds some light on the commonality between our countries, even if the politics are a bit different. Major parties have abandoned the working class. Which requires better political engagement so we can vote ourselves out of this situation to get a fair deal and avoid what looks like the inevitable rise of right wing populism, which won’t help progress the situation at all.

The government spends money, and takes that money back through taxation. If the government spends money, incurs debt, and doesn’t get the money back, it’s due to a failure of taxation policy. Government money spent on services that are valuable to the public is not wasteful, which is the key point you are not understanding. They don’t need to generate a profit, like Apple does. They need to ensure that the wealth flows through the appropriate channels, which they have neglected to do since the advent of neoliberal policies. The government has no imperative to further technological innovation, like Apple does. It’s not their business. They are in the business of maintaining a basic quality of life for the population.

The key thing to recognise here is that we’re not talking about high income earners. We’re talking about people who are wealthy due to owning massive amounts of assets which generate passive wealth, and they acquire that wealth because they belong to wealthy families. They don’t contribute to the dynamism of the economy. These people don’t earn money from working, they suck up all the money from the productive workers. If you’re grinding it out and earning 200K that’s fine, more power to you. Those people aren’t the people I’m talking about.

So advocate for better government services, taxing the ultra wealthy to pay for it, and recognising that private industry is incentivised towards benefiting shareholder profits instead of the public good. If we can drive down wealth inequality through fair taxation policy, everyone benefits and society becomes healthier and the economy becomes more dynamic. Winner winner chicken dinner.

“government funded services tend to lead to monopoly” I don’t think you understand the concept of monopoly lol. We are talking about a service provided by the government, not a privately owned service subsidized by the government.

Look, I’m not going to argue with you on this anymore since you seem to be fairly dead set on this idea of private industry and market forces being superior, which they are demonstrably not. The overarching point is that basic human needs like health care, aged care etc. should not have a profit incentive. The only way to remedy that is to invest properly in government services and also hold the political class to account when those services are not adequately delivered.

It’s not a willingness of all people to pay those exorbitant amounts, they don’t have a choice. I was hit by a car a few years ago and had to have ankle surgery and metal plates installed. I’ve also had to have hand surgery for a broken metacarpal. I didn’t pay anything for those surgeries. It was provided on the public dime, which is not a significant hit to my pay check in terms of income tax. If I lived in the states, I would be in massive debt. I have private health care since I work for an American company, but I didn’t even need it for life saving healthcare since I live in a country which still has some semblance of universal care for low and medium income citizens.

Dude, the last 30 years in Australia have proved that private industry does not handle public services better than the government. Since you do not live in Australia, you cannot claim to be as informed on this as a local. I wish Americans would stop chiming in on the state of Australia as though they are experts. Your country has the worst healthcare system in the developed world.

Taxation is not theft if the money is spent properly on services that benefit tax payers. Poor taxation policy is theft, since public service quality will diminish over time. Like what we are currently seeing with lack of investment in public services, combined with an asset owning class that doesn’t pay tax on its passive wealth, using that wealth to purchase more assets, which drives up prices and shrinks the middle class. If these people had better critical thinking they would rebel against that instead.