We know it is happening.
Several lives have been lost and many more are being put at risk due to a toxic culture of harassment, poor management, burnout and a resourcing crisis in Ambulance Victoria, a parliamentary inquiry has heard.
Submissions filed by paramedics, patients and their families to the Victorian parliament’s inquiry into the ambulance service expose escalating concerns as new figures show WorkCover payouts at the agency are soaring.
The inquiry has also been warned that ramping – ambulances parked outside emergency departments for hours at a time while patients wait for hospital treatment – has cost several lives and endangers more.
The 2024 Productivity Commission report into frontline services was pretty damning.
Ambo response times through the roof, even after COVID.
Sworn police officers per capita are the lowest in ten years after a brief overstaffing during COVID as the population shrank.
These two charts are not because of a “toxic culture of harassment, poor management, and burnout”, though doubtless, these things are happening.
They are the result of force-growing your population at speeds that essential services cannot cope with.
Especially when they add extra complications such as language barriers, severely damaged and war-torn refugees, and corruption of home governments.
The real problem is the stupid immigration-led labour market growth economic model doing what it does best: capital shallowing, as much as in public investment as in private, meaning there is less equipment and personnel per person in service provision.
It is this that results in a “toxic culture of harassment, poor management, and burnout” as front-line workers are exploited, underpaid, and treated like garbage by politicians.
There is also the structural problem of horizontal fiscal imbalance in which the federal government pumps immigration to benefit its budget while the states can’t tax but must pay for the services.
That said, to be honest, the state governments are as captured by the immigration model as the feds. They rarely object and just keep borrowing.
Our best people are being treated the worst by governments that couldn’t run a piss-up in a brewery as the crushload everything economic model erodes living standards year after year.
Once was Australia is increasingly no country for old men.
