u/Own_Oil7951

I don’t mean that Australia is literally turning into Britain, but I do wonder whether we’re starting to drift into a similar political and economic trap: low growth, high expectations, an ageing population, broken housing markets, stretched public services, and a political class that seems increasingly unable to make hard long-term decisions.

The UK’s problem seems to be that the old governing bargain has broken down. For decades, growth, rising wages, rising house prices and expanding public spending helped paper over a lot of tensions. But once growth slowed, every decision became zero-sum. More money for health means less for tax cuts. More support for pensioners means less for younger workers. More housing means upsetting existing homeowners. Everything becomes a fight between groups who all feel like they are already losing. For example; GDP per capita declined in the UK for a decade - with real wages expected to only about 0.3% per year on average resulting in stagnant living standards.

Australia feels like it could be heading in that direction. Housing is probably the clearest example. We say we want affordable homes, but we also protect existing property values, restrict supply, oppose density, and make it incredibly hard to build in the places people actually want to live. The result is a system that increasingly benefits older asset owners (via CGT / negative gearing grandfathering) while younger people are told to just work harder, move further out, or accept a permanently lower standard of living (lowered by mass immigration).

Public services are another parallel. Australians are paying a lot in tax, but many people still feel like Medicare is weaker, bulk billing is harder to find, infrastructure is lagging, universities are degraded & are visa mills, and the NDIS (growing at 10% pa), aged care and hospitals are under constant pressure. Like the UK, we risk ending up with the worst political combination: high taxes, expensive housing, strained services, and no strong sense that things are improving.

There’s also the broader issue of state capacity. Governments announce targets, reviews, schemes and strategies, but delivery often feels slow or underwhelming. Housing targets don’t translate into enough homes. Infrastructure blows out. Energy policy becomes a decade-long argument. Migration is used to prop up growth, but infrastructure and housing don’t keep up. You get the same cycle: big announcement, messy rollout, public frustration.

The political incentives make it worse. Any serious reform would create losers before it creates winners. Planning reform annoys homeowners. Tax reform annoys asset holders. Welfare reform annoys recipients. Migration reform annoys business or voters, depending on the direction. So governments tend to avoid the biggest structural problems and focus on smaller measures that sound practical but don’t really shift the system.

That’s why I think the UK comparison is worth discussing. The danger isn’t that Australia collapses overnight. It’s that we slowly become a richer-looking but lower-mobility, lower-growth, more frustrated country where everyone knows the system isn’t working, but no government can build a mandate to fix it. And also we aren't sure how the economy should look like:

- low tax, high earning society or an European style tax heavy, public-service heavy welfare system?

- building housing on national parks / green fringes or infill into existing areas

- mass immigration vs boosting the fertility rate

Maybe the real question is: are we still capable of making trade-offs honestly? Or are we going to keep pretending we can have cheap housing without building, strong services without higher taxes or reform, high migration without infrastructure pressure, rising living standards without productivity growth, and intergenerational fairness without upsetting asset owners? It seems many people want mutually incompatible things: Scandinavian-gov style services, low American-style taxes, cheap housing with quarter acre-blocks, higher job creation that only results from higher business dynamics, and high wages without higher prices and growth without disruption.

dont you know, cutting immigration is racist /s

Looks I had to enrol into an Employability Skills Training program. Is there anyway to get out of it since its likely going to be a waste of time?

Any Yarra residents here? Email / call your councillors for a more walkable / cycle-friendly Wellington St and register by 6:30pm today, and come along to the Richmond Town Hall to have your say: https://www.yarracity.vic.gov.au/about-us/council-and-committee-meetings/council-meetings/council-meeting-12-may-2026

I got checked by Opal inspectors today that said I should have a Blue Concession Card when they checked my grey Opal Card.

What's the point of the blue card if there's no photo ID and it takes 10 days to deliver & proof of Centrelink cards and you just need a Centrelink number to actually order a concession Opal card?

I also showed them I had a Low Income Health Card that comes with being on Centrelink which should suffice as proof.

It's so weird when its just doubling the bureaucracy.