Oddbean new post about login | logout I'm not going to tell you anything about your own country, but at the turn of the century, when I was studying in Tokyo, I met an Australian for the first time. A fantastic girl, truly awesome. Very progressive, but so was I, as a libertarian. I remember laughing at her because she was majoring in "gender studies" and she went on to write her PhD thesis on something like women's treatment in Japanese folk stories of something like that. I had never heard such bullshit, but I simply dismissed it as a harmless oddity. My point being, shit doesn't happen all of a sudden.
Yeah I’m under no illusions that our problems have come about suddenly. I can remember in the early 2000s a family friend who was a tiler, explaining how he was levering up to buy properties and using negative gearing. He had 4 and was getting a 5th. I didn’t understand how it worked but I knew it sounded like a scam and that’s when I first became aware of some of this stuff. That was by no means the start, it goes back decades but because we’ve been isolated, never under threat of war, and fortunate with commodities booms, our “leaders” have just been lazy and each new one coming up is worst than the last. I’ve met a bunch of them - in the private sector there are good and smart people, in Gov and the bureaucracy they are truly pathetic specimens who wouldn’t last a month in true free markets. It just has to play out now. Let it all burn because it won’t be fixed without a complete flush of the parasite class.
I'm curious to know your point of view of the current relationship with China. Well, specifically, with the CCP. Mine, from outside and with not a lot of inside relationships in AUS anymore, is that your elites, politicians first but not only, have completely sold out to the CCP. And a lot of your troubles stem from there. (A similar case to Germany since the uber-corrupt Schröder, who ended being a literal employee of Putin).
For sure Labor has sold out to the CCP. They’re all commies and always have been, they mostly hide it but it’s there if you look. The previous PM had to intervene and scrapped the Vic Labor Gov’s agreement for Belt and Road in the state - signed by probably the biggest commie of them all in Dan Andrews. https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/apr/21/federal-government-tears-up-victorias-belt-and-road-agreements-with-china The right-side of politics is not as fervently aligned but they’ve sold out and accept the floods of cash coming in to our housing ponzi, and they realise we need them as an export partner because we can’t value-add anything in this country. But they tend to be more US-aligned generally. Realistically we’re a security vassal of the US and an economic vassal of China at this point.
You are far too kind. Not decades, it goes back to the start of British rule. Economically, our elites have always preferred the "Rum Corps" economic model - use privileged access to government permits to import finished goods and export raw materials. Markup and on sell, no need for capital investment or talent. Live off the margins. This was rudely interupted by WW1, which cut off supplies of finished goods and drove rapid economic complexification. That was regulated-monopolied out of existence after the war and back to business as usual for the Depression, leaving us to be caught with our pants down again for WW2. Frightened govt permitted rapid economic complexification again - https://download.library.lol/main/481000/cd14dce28bcc99c759c79ae127b802c8/David%20P%20Mellor%20-%20The%20role%20of%20science%20and%20industry%20%28Australia%20in%20the%20war%20of%201939-1945%29%20%281958%29.pdf This took longer to dismantle afterwards, but financialising, monopolising, subsidising and regulating also profited a faction of local elites and eventually led to industries so inefficient the public was willing to see them sold off and shut down. Our current relationship with China neatly mirrors our relationship with Germany before WW1 and then again before WW2. Our elites are able to learn, but they don't care. Like Sir Robert Menzies in WW2, they intend to be first ones out the door when the bill comes due.