Ambos, police, doctors, nurses, mental health workers: wage claims, strikes, walkouts, burnouts, suicide.
All of these crises are linked in several different ways.
Paramount is the federal immigration-led economic model that piles people upon people—often from a Third World where life is cheap—while the states that govern most of the front-line services are left to pick up the tab.
Yet they do not have the money to do so. Which leads to multiple dimensions of dislocation.
Ambulance, police and ER response times blow out. The professionalism of front-line workers is stressed beyond breaking point, and standards fall. Frontline workers themselves are driven to geographic fringes to afford a dwelling or put food on the table
The abuse generates anger and despair among the most giving of our people.
Second, COVID has stressed this stressed system to breaking point.
There were many policy mismanagement points during COVID, but it was a pandemic, so that is to be expected.
Yet some mismanagement should not be tolerated and allowed to fester afterwards.
Frontline workers were the military of the pandemic. They put their bodies on the line against an unknown enemy for the nation, were mercilessly left out of income support as they did so, and were immediately thrown to the immigration wolves afterwards.
These services, these people, have been shot to pieces, then trampled by crushloading, now burdened with foreign wars, and, finally, treated as scum as they sought basic compensation for superhuman efforts.
This is falling living standards distilled to their most basic. When trouble strikes you assume those taxes you paid will bail you out.
But will they? These are government services, smashed by policy neglect, executive entitlement, and galloping corruption.
Good people go into these professions to do good for the community. They are very low-paid relative to the good that they do in crisis scenarios that most of us would never dream of.
And this is where the betrayal of government is deepest.
These are the greatest Aussies. Ignored. Abused. Used. Yet empathetic, highly trained, courageous, and committed in a way most of us will never know.
Government has betrayed this greatest Aussie spirit with an immigration sinkhole that is a systemic violation without end.
I hope nobody reading this post will ever require the need for these services. For they only arrive when happiness, peace, health, and calm depart.
This was my 2024, and I cannot tell you how fucked I would have been without the support of these front-line workers.
Payrises are a classic kick of the can. These people need investment and less pressure. We need a new economic model beyond Canberra’s broken crushloading model.
Or there, but for the grace of god, goes you.
