Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
The EU crisis continues. Major protests and demonstrations are ongoing in many EU countries; France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Belgium and Czechia. Minor or localized protests have occurred in Austria, Denmark, Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Poland. EU adjacent countries like Albania, Bosnia, Serbia and Switzerland have also been experiencing significant unrest.
Matters have escalated in Spain in the last 24 to 48 hrs with a nationwide general strike, its first in 14 years. This strike is mainly driven by massive public anger over soaring housing costs and high living expenses.
In a nutshell, what we are seeing is that the great majority of the people, meaning workers, unemployed, dependents and pensioners, simply cannot see how they continue to live above the poverty line and afford accommodation and general living costs under a continuance of neoliberal capitalism. This is the end stage of this system. It cannot survive since the people in it cannot survive at any worthwhile and decent living standard. They will rapidly see mass immiseration if current trends continue.
Australia is not far behind in this process. Neoliberalism is more slowly but equally surely delivering the coup de grace to decent and sustainable living standards in Australia for the majority of its people. Excessive reliance on mining in general and exporting climate-destroying coal in particular, plus excessive reliance on immigration to bring in “skills” and money have carried Australia thus far. These unsustainable trends are near the end point cannot carry us much further.
The state I live in, Queensland, is rapidly heading towards disaster. Our state governments, past and present, have idiotically committed us to delivering the Olympic games for 2032 at a current projected basic cost of $7.1 billion. The eventual costs will go far beyond this. The official state budget for the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, venues and infrastructure program is capped at $7.1 billion, while broader combined state budget estimates—including athlete villages and other related infrastructure—sit around $15.5 billion.
Independent economists and analysts warn that total costs could even escalate significantly higher. It is not unrealistic at this stage, with inflation as rampant as it is in Australia, to suggest that these games could end up costing us $20 billion. Queensland has a growing housing crisis and homelessness crisis, rampant inflation, hospital bed shortages, aged care bed shortages, other hospital system bottlenecks and breakdowns, uncontrolled ambulance ramping, plus a continuing crime and incarceration crisis to name just some of the main issues.
In addition, we have a construction industry and infrastructure crisis at both the levels of uncontrollable materials and inputs inflation and trades inflation coupled with a shortage of all the trades. All these crises will be compounded by attempting to build the Olympics infrastructure at the same time as undertaking all the other work we cannot even do properly now.
The trades workers being imported by immigration are claimed to be “skilled”. The air quotes are essential. Many of them, I would confidently say the great majority of them, are nowhere near properly skilled (and neither are many new home-grown Australian trades-persons). The level of dishonesty, sub-skilled work and sub-standard construction and maintenance being charged at eye-watering price-gouging levels, is very clearly out of control, if you can even get a tradesperson at all.
Queensland and Australia will be driven broke with decaying infrastructure, decaying social cohesion and massive social and economic problems. We are not far behind the tragic trajectories of the collapsing EU and the even more imminently collapsing kleptocratic and kakistocratic USA. None of this doomed trajectory can be changed unless neoliberal capitalism is entirely dismantled and we reclaim the power of the democratic and social state from corporate and billionaire capitalist interests. Of course, the chances of that happening successfully at this late stage are vanishingly small.