Australians are about to be jilted.
There is a very widespread disenchantment and disillusionment with politics, the media, any given person being reported on or even doing the reporting, and a pervasive sense of ‘this country is increasingly stuffed’ on the streets. The politicians pollsters and pundits so fakely concerned about them yesterday, will be telling them tomorrow they were consulted and have voted. Three more years of incoherent policy captured by vested interests spruiked by a pawned mainstream media will follow. And it is difficult to see how anger and despair will not continue to mount.
The issues at the core of that are issues which both mainstream sides of politics are essentially united on, and for the most part not believed on.
They are:-
Housing prices, rent prices, and an economy addicted to a real estate cancer. Both ALP and LNP have done essentially nothing about it for a generation. The ALP wants to reduce insurance costs for more affluent first time buyers, or those with a bigger bank of mum and dad. The LNP wants to trash the super system and enable tax write off of mortgages for the same people. Neither side want to look at population and demand, or immigration, both want to shove Australian families into expensive apartments, both want to grow the second largest housing construction sector in relation to the economy, in the OECD. They both want to import more migrants to add to building ‘supply’. It doesn’t get any crazier.
Energy prices, and the pure political decision policy idiocy of a nation being a major global energy exporter with amongst the worlds most expensive domestic energy. The simple and certain answer is ‘Reserve our gas!’ The ALP want to bamboozle the electorate with netback nonsense, designed to ensure you continue to be reamed every time you flick on a switch, anchoring price gouging for energy exporters who contribute essentially nothing but your power bills to Australia. The LNP had a single moment of savant like policy lucidity the night the election was called, but started walking that back immediately, and simply arent believed on the subject anyway. If they had been serious they would have been telling us for months.
Neither party is serious and neither party is believable. Both parties want to add to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by clearing more land for new suburbs, and export Australian fossil fuels to nations who will burn them, through companies who pay no tax on them, while pricing Australians out of using them and preaching to them about being ‘green’ and telling them to toughen up whenever it is cold or hot.
Incomes and growth of incomes. In a nation where every last household excepting the oldest and most affluent is paying the housing costs – mortgages or rents – and the energy costs implied above, rising costs are an issue. But Australia has experienced an incomes growth shock which has basically lasted since the GFC. The ways around this are to pay less tax (small business and trades for starters) be in a profession protected (see medical specialists) or to try and move up the food chain in large organisations (become more indulgent of narcissistic psychopaths, and a corporate world where integrity has left the building). Short of doing this the electorate is penned into an economy where the only jobs growth is government funded. The government funds these by taxing people and trumpeting low taxing credentials to virtually all business, especially those extracting Australian resources.
An economy featuring the worlds most expensive people, land and buildings, energy, and internet costs is one sure fire way to guarantee we dont develop any import competing or exporting sectors of the economy any time soon. The LNP want to resurrect tax cuts for the uber set and the ALP want to throw taxpayer funds at subsidising assembly of something in Australia – both courses are doomed from the get go. No one else has any ideas because proposing ideas begs asking how we got here and who benefitted from the journey. Both mainstream sides of politics and their backers in the corporate and media world would rather you thought about Palestine or Russian bases, or were outraged by mushroom murders, gender pay gaps, or the Mount Gambier Neo-Nazis.
Costs of living – food, school costs, rates, public transport costs, toll charges, rates, health care costs, aged care costs, entertainment costs, fuel, government charges. In that pen where the electorate is penned, with the exception of the more affluent not paying rent and with solar on the roof and super coming in, the rest of us are being harvested, every time we do……anything. A little dip into the pockets here, an eye glazing service charge there, or an out of pocket frisson or a life deforming educational expense for the young. As payers pull their hands from their pocket they may notice the smell of urea from vendors who often pee into those pockets. Both the ALP and the LNP have their own urea bouquet which is indistinguishable from any other vendor, many of which often provide funding for mainstream political parties.
Mr Albanese talked about ‘piss taking’ grocery retailers, but never was capable of extending the concept to energy retailers, gas exporters, private health insurers. Mr Dutton is babbling on about tax cuts. Go figure.
Immigration numbers. All of the above – the retail costs, the low incomes, the house prices and rents, the opportunity devoid economy, and the ability to purvey specious nonsense on almost any subject – is cemented in by some of the worlds heaviest immigration volumes, and the ease with which barefaced bullshit can be asserted and thought credible by those with lesser lived experience of Australian politicians, bureaucrats, corporates, and media, than Australians born here. About 30% of Australians were born somewhere else.
This is not about race or their beliefs or their views on anything (notwithstanding concerns about fraudulent academies, machetes, or homicidal drivers who skip bail) – just their preparedness or understandable desperation to do whatever work they can at whatever wage they can get, and the implication this has for incomes growth in Australia. Then there is their obvious effects on housing demand, consumer margins achievable in the retail sector, public transport and roads, and of course the tertiary education experience, and the implications their arrival has for a political dichotomy which has manifestly stuffed the circumstances of their arrival, and spews lies at Australians about this, and the policy can kicking their arrival enables Australia’s elites in terms of doing nothing about the concerns of the electorate.
The tragedy is that if Australia doesn’t address those concerns then Australia is failing those migrants and their children every bit as much as it is failing all other Australians.
Neither the ALP or LNP or Greens or One Nation or Clive, are doing anything about the above.
…..and that makes todays election surrealist performance art but nothing more