We don't have any of those things now, despite being one of the more highly-taxed, developed countries.
The hospital system is pumped, been to an ER lately? How's the ramping situation?
Roads and highways up to snuff where you are? I'll buy a ticket there.
The best aged care in the country is private. Always will be.
Childcare is a government supported rort. The prices are outrageous and, besides, that industry only exists so they can entice more women back to work to pump up the tax balloon instead of incentivising and supporting them to stay home.
Infrastructure? how're the reviews of the public transport systems around the majors going? How's the building sector? Approvals up are they?
The education system is broken. The bottom of the bucket has fallen out and they can't fill classrooms. What's more is the state bodies have their heads up their own proverbials, wishing for a educational utopia and grinding their workforce into the dust to do it. Believe me, I'm one of them.
So those points are completely moot. The models of Australian soft-socialism that used to function well are a shambles.
Power is not more expensive now because it is privatised. It is more expensive because the renewables push is artificially squeezing the public at both ends of the spectrum under governments such as ours that are beholden to global bodies, particularly on things like emissions.
The carbon taxes being levied, rightly or wrongly, against big companies is just being passed on down, yet feed in tariffs for those who did the 'right thing' and got solar panels, are being slashed. Meaning that not only are you getting forced into renewables, you're also getting less and less back for doing so, then paying out the nose for night time use or a battery technology that is woefully underdeveloped for the price point and return on investment that you currently get.
Well everything there could be improved with more investment.
I'd have our hospitals, healthcare system, roads & infrastructure over that of the US any day! Have you seen or heard how bad it is over there? Yet they have 60 times our population!!
By way of comparison, you'd have to go to smaller relatively rich European countries with higher taxes to get better than what we have here considering how huge a place it is and our small, spread out population.
Power prices started going up WELL before the push for renewables. I should know, both I and an ex Fiance used to work for what was then the Sydney County Council, now part of Energy Australia in the mid to late eighties.
Prices rose almost immediately (after we were all told they'd be cheaper) after privatisation.
Blackouts became more common as infrastructure such as transmission lines, insulators and even transformers failed, with a spate of transformer explosions and/or fires hit multiple substations across the network.
Beholden to Global Bodies? That are trying to preserve a livable planet for those younger than us to the yet to be born? Or you'd rather be beholden to mostly foreign conglomerates that have had a hold on us for years and don't want to relinquish the money & power that comes with it?
Even if I didn't care about the environment, I'm saving a packet having "green solar" power
Public education has been bled dry whilst so called "private" schools have received record funding thanks mainly due to Coalition governments, with Howard being the catalyst for that.
If successive governments didn't squander what little dividends they got from the resources sector or more importantly taxed the big multinationals more for OUR resources they are digging up or drilling for rediculously low cost is near on criminal. Qatar, Norway & other nations have the multinationals pay a fair share of tax and establishing sovereign wealth funds. We have governments (usually of certain a political stripe) that want to give the Reinharts, Forrests, Chevrons, Woodsides, Shells etc of the world a TAX CUT.
Tax the big corporations at a fair rate, reduce what they can use to claim deductions like internal loans, setting up an office in a tax haven for profits made here and all the other dodgy crap they get away with then we'd have much more money to fix what we are already lucky to have compared to most countries when it comes to hospitals, roads & other infrastructure. Just imagine how much money the Mining Super Profits Tax (the ones the Coalition said would raise no money so they dumped it) would have made in the last decade, most of it a mining boom.
Income Tax cuts for the wealthy was the Coalitions plan, luckily someone fixed that and everyone got a cut. However wouldn't that money have been better off spent on health or infrastructure?
