Few people will be surprised at the news coming out of the RC in to Aged Care.
When I was growing up, provision of public transport, water and electricity and many other ‘services’ was in the hands of some level of government.
It was not perfect, there were many grumbles, but it worked.
Plus, if the government provided the service, it also had the capacity to more readily subsidise it for those of more limited means.
More recently, governments have taken on provision of heavily subsidised hospital and medical services, while additional private health cover is an optional extra – as long as you can afford it!
Some Aged Care services are run by not-for-profit (NFP) organisations but a majority would be run by corporations – all of which have a duty to make a profit for their shareholders.
Provision of services has at times been seen as the responsibility of governments to ensure that every member of the community can be provided with basic needs.
Privatising has the immediate effect of increasing cost to the user of the service in order to accommodate shareholders’ dividends. Many would claim that a private organisation runs things more efficiently. This needs to be examined.
Both government and corporation have to employ people to run the service organisation. Cutting wage and salary expenses may reduce costs, (and increase dividends) but also may reduce the standards of the organisation.
Fewer reviews and less frequent maintenance have the same effect.
We all need a water supply, electricity or other source of power, medical services and education, so having a central, regulated provision by government surely makes more sense than expecting the least able to pay more in order to provide better incomes for shareholders?
And the latest disaster is when the most essential commodity – water – is being drawn by corporations to ‘purify’, bottle and sell while aquifers in more remote communities are running dry.
The only way privatisation can possibly work is if there is strict and realistic regulation.
That there is not has been and is being amply demonstrated in the Financial Institutions/Banking and Aged Care RCs, as well as in the privatisation of Centrelink services, which are destroying the lives of job seekers and Centrelink benefit recipients alike.
Those who make a career in politics seem to lack empathy, experience of life in the raw and a vision for the future.
Many people grumble about paying taxes, but if you look around the world, most of the citizens of the most heavily taxed countries are also the most contented. They willingly trade some of their earnings to ensure that everyone has a safety-net, there are no beggars, the sick get necessary treatment, education is available to all and necessary assistance in finding work is available.
This is not socialism in its derogatory context. It is essential humanity – which is MIA in Australia!
I am usually an optimist.
In a conversation today with a friend, she mentioned how things might be in 200 years’ time.
I expressed doubt whether our descendants will still be around in 200 years’ time!
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Perhaps some people use an anus as a self inflating microscope, when a better view of life is to use the soul as a telescope.
So agree with every word you’ve said.. and no we won’t be here in two hundred years time, perhaps it’s just as well as neither will Scott Morrison and his band of cruel and ugly men and women. If they had hearts or brains to take aim at, I would fire cannon balls loaded with uranium, coal and methane at the lot of them!
Yes, it is no wonder when governments give away the power that they were elected for to serve the people and give it to their mates and corporates to make their fortune whilst the majority are left behind. However, we have to all take responsibility for this because the energy that harms/lies/abuses/no heart etc. has to be constantly fed – by us, firstly by electing them.
There is another energy that doesn’t need to be fed and it is healing/truth/love/hearfilled and that energy is always within us in our bodies as seen in babies (divine/love energy) but as we get older and have to fit in with a society with not much love but plenty of abuse children are even educated to live from their heads and not their bodies and hearts. For most it doesn’t take long to join the ‘maddening crowd’ that exist in the harming/lying/separative/abusive/no heart/supremacist energy of seeking recognition and identity.
Until we understand that we express and move from the energy that we align to and there are only two choices as above, nothing will change.
So what do we do? Firstly come back to our bodies and listen to its constant messages i.e. pain – stop, suffering – what do I keep doing that is causing this? Our bodies have the intelligence of the universe as it flows through us, whilst our head’s intelligence comes from recall and that means doing the same things and getting the same results whilst expecting a change – insanity and recall – so we need to listen to our bodies, as mentioned.
Also we need to understand and take responsibility for everything that happens in our lives because we have created it – good, bad and the ugly. Again if we want to change that we need to re-evaluate where our intelligence is coming from – brotherhood that we are all one family or separativeness/division/supemacist etc.
After re-connecting to our body and inner-heart and then breathing in and out through our nose gently we can begin to return to ourselves and simplicity to stop feeding the energy that has us imprisoned in the world of lies and so-called intelligence in our heads and giving our power away to others.
All of the services that are a necessity for a decent life for all should NEVER have been privatised. I read some comments recently about the NHS in the UK – people saying that their tax should not be spent on providing healthcare for others, just their own. It’s the Yankee road, and we are well on the way down it.
Fascism is alive and well in Canberra these days. I quietly hope that the planet is dying, as surely in a few short years most of those who aren’t wealthy on this planet WILL be dead.
Too many Australian voters believed the political propaganda in the Murdoch owned MSM that the Liberals were the better money managers, that the nat$ represented the interests of family farmers and that corporations had the best interests of everyday Australians at heart, when the reality was almost the complete opposite.
The candidates pre-selected by the unelected political hacks of the Liarbral Party were self-serving individuals pursuing personal pecuniary interests by exploiting the Parliamentary Allowances Scheme, the nat$ were frequently found to prefer extra-curricular skirt chasing to formulating policies that would decentralise government jobs to urban regional centres and since 1972 Murdoch directed an editorial policy, “I don’t care what you write, make [Labor} look bad”.
Meanwhile the foreign owned multinational corporations circled this paradise and OUR natural wealth, encouraging unthinking politicians in their careers to favour policies that would be detrimental to the best interests of Australian voters.
And the rest is expensive history that all Australian voters and their grandchildren are paying for and will continue to pay for many years to come.
Australian voters get the politicians they vote for and the government policies purchased by any corporate interest prepared to contribute to party funds.
Spot on New England Cocky.
Also,sadly many people are aware of the needs of others,but they don’t care,because they are greedy heartless selfish arseholes.
Ultimately,the government is so terrible,because most of the public are too. From the stupid gullible,to the greedy selfish.
Poor fellow my country.
Libertine or neo-libralism views have definitely permeated from the US. But I think that these views have been reflected for decades via Current Affairs, 60 Minutes and similar programs on commercial TV. They focused largley on the working class “bludgers” and street crime and rarely on the shortcomings of of big business. This has fuelled long held resentments within our working and middle class, along with the coverage of the Murdoch press against the ALP, Greens and unions. You only have to look at the most viewed programs and the readership of these newspapers to guage the immense power of popular media.
Trump has announced, in one of his imperial flourishes, that he will take the USA out of the Paris Climate Accord.
Don’t they have a Congress in the USA any more, is everything done by imperial decree ?
[That’s a serious question]
Re Trump and Paris Climate Accord
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/trump-formal-process-leave-paris-climate-accords/
That the last day is after the next presidential election offers some hope given:
Note also:
The Constitution provides that the president “shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senators present concur” (Article II, section 2).
When you lock up people for trying to save the planet and put other people on a pedestal for destroying the planet then you have the society you deserve.
As for the power to withdraw:
Seems like the power of the President is virtually “what he/she want it to be – unlimited”, particularly if the President has the Supreme Court onside. Impeachment can happen nevertheless.
MN: Seems like the power of the President is virtually “what he/she want it to be – unlimited”, particularly if the President has the Supreme Court onside. Impeachment can happen nevertheless.
Until it is challenged.