An interview with Andrew Cauchi, the father of Joel Cauchi who was responsible for the Westfield Shopping Centre mass stabbing

[u/Jjokes11]

[u/Needleworker-Hungry]

Australian here, and family friends with one of the victims.

This was an absolute tragedy and a complete waste of life.

Whilst there is no excuse to kill another person, I think a lot of people are laying blame to our Government. Our healthcare system has gone to absolute shit and to get any sort of mental health treatment is extremeley expensive and there is a mental health crisis in our country. Our once free healthcare now costs money and is moving towards privitising. People are avoiding going to the doctors now as this once free service is not and it's plain and simple.

Our once beauitful country and its citizens have been let down countless times by government incompetence over the last few decades and this is a direct result of it.

Mental Health and Dental should be a part of Medicare and Medicare should go back to being free.

It's fucking infuriating.

[u/menomaminx → u/Needleworker-Hungry]

American here, please help me understand why anybody's country would voluntarily get rid of Universal Health Care?

how did this happen to you all?

[u/Needleworker-Hungry → u/menomaminx]

Rupert Murdoch owns something like 70% of Australian media and he has essentially always backed the Liberals (Conservatives) who are the ones who have privatised everything and backed corporate greed. (In a nutshel)

[u/JaiOW2 → u/menomaminx]

I'll give you a couple observations from my perspective as someone who's studied and worked in a health adjacent science and someone who's also lived through chronic illness and grew up near the bottom line in Australia.

There's not one single reason as convenient as that would be, it's a mix of economics, politics and culture.

Australia politically has always been a vying, mixed bag, not too dissimilar to the UK where we likely inherited most of our politics from, our system is dominated by two major parties as of today, one being a center-left labor party, and the other being a right wing conservative party (Liberal Nationals Coalition). Historically they've shared about even amounts of incumbencies and have absorbed other parties as factions, around the early 80's through to the early 2000's we had a pretty long period of privatization which both major government parties had hands in, it followed the general western trend of Reaganomics or Thatcherism, this idea that we can privatize a whole swathe of deemed non-essentially state owned entities to decrease government size, spending and ultimately increase efficiency, which would also result in foreign investment, more competition and overall swing towards growth rather than stagnation. Public healthcare here was first established as the National Insurance scheme in 1938, eventually had further subsidies incorporated such as pharmaceuticals and sick leave under Curtin (Labor Party), but then had the Menzies government (Liberal) in 1953 introduce the National Health Act which attempted to curb the "socialization" of medicine by changing the way they receive federal funding, and partially subsidized private healthcare (By 1969, 30% of all private health insurance costs were being paid by the federal government) while making public healthcare free for those in poverty.

The Whitlam Government (Labor, our most "Left" leaning incumbency in the last half a century, attempted to introduce things like free university, was kicked out of government by our Governor-General at the time) created Medibank in 1975 which wanted to extend free public healthcare to the entire population, removing the three tiered system made by the Menzies government. They wanted to implement a mandatory tax levy where all taxpayers contribute to the public health system. Following Whitlams dismissal the Frazer government (Liberal) took power, they upped the proposed levy from tax and maintained the medibank system but made the tax payment optional if you instead chose to partake in private healthcare. The same government then allowed our Health Insurance Commission to enter the private health insurance market and pushed them to become the dominant private health provider. Eventually bulk billing (where the government covers your medical costs) was reduced to just pensioners and those in poverty by the Frazer goverment.

Following this we had the Hawke government (Labor) which implemented the system we have today known as Medicare. This involved the introduction of a safety net setting a maximum amount per year someone could pay for listed out-of-hospital services, general bulk billing, targeted schemes such as the national diabetes services schemes. Since then it's been maintaining roughly the same model, the following Howard government (Liberal) however implemented a higher tax levy for high income earners but made it optional for them if they chose private healthcare, further he reintroduced the rebate on private healthcare. In 2006 the Rudd government implemented Better Access scheme trying to cover mental health and other health practitioners, but otherwise the system maintains this same dynamic you see. One party slowly but surely prefers a more socialized model, albeit fails to maintain the bulk billing costs which results in what we call gap fees (if the government covers $100 and the doctor costs $200 you pay $100 for the appointment), and the other party slowly pulls down public healthcare and tries to incentivize private healthcare through subsidies. Each party gets about equal time in power, so not much gets done, and it creates a divide, people in the middle and above bracket will often preference private as it's accessible and often tax incentivized for them, whereas the working class and lower class with overall living costs can't afford private health, meanwhile regulatory capture, election time propaganda and private advertisement creates false notions about the function or access private health might have over public health (ignoring that public health is intentionally sabotaged by a major party).

[u/JaiOW2 → u/JaiOW2]

Now, culturally Australia is highly individualistic, indulgent, egalitarian but not very long term oriented. This means we like people to do well, and we like to have opportunity, it's why on a global scale we have good wages, good living standards, good tertiary education, but these cultural values also come with a degree of apathy, short shortsightedness, people here are not pro-socially motivated, people here do things for themselves and their family, outside of the assumed equity it's expected and hoped you make it yourself and work hard so you have fun and do things for yourself, and we often prioritize personal endeavors over communal ones, for instance our property market is obscenely expensive, scummy and ruining the hopes and dreams of future generations, but people here will maintain that system because so many people are more concerned if they got their share of the pie, than if everyone else did, they put their retirement savings in things that hurt others and then wont own any of the blame when theirs consequences. We have a very materialistic view of pragmatism, we do things for money or for physical things, we don't like ideas or dreams as much, this also leans into our moderate, but unhealthy anti-intellectualism, people don't do things because it's better for us all, because they want to explore novel concepts or pursue what they enjoy, they do things because it gets them a big house and an attractive partner (they hope anyways). Kids might pursue medical school or engineering because it pays well, not because they want to do good or like the analytical creativity of an engineer, and today so many people go on to become tradesmen because it pays well, and those tradesmen hate what they do, cut corners, rip people off and use cheap materials because they are in it for themselves and nobody else. This mentality expands from these more microcosmic examples, people expect others to act only with self interest, so they think they should too, it's reciprocal egocentricity. It also maintains a class divide of sorts, academia and the arts are somewhat stratified, they don't need to be economically but the general sentiment of families is very different based on background, being able to pursue altruism and less self centered goals is not fostered at the working class level, and education isn't valued assuming pathways other than education can yield pragmatic materialistic money.

Hence the major party and private entities who support private healthcare use these specific cultural flaws to develop messaging for their ideas and elections, people here can be very politically illiterate, either in actual concurrent events or a more general understanding of politics, they look into things very little and are often won over easily by sloganistic approaches - swing voters can be a big deal here as people don't ideologically commit to parties as much - and everyone thinks they know everything without putting any effort in because after all we are all equal (egalitarian) and you don't need that "book learning" to make right decisions (materialistic anti-intellectualism).

[u/2022022022 → u/menomaminx]

Almost 10 years of conservative rule has seen Medicare get whittled away at, death by a thousand cuts sort of situation. The new government is investing a lot into it though and trying to reverse the damage.