Doing it Tough?

(Above: Housing Emergency Rally, Adelaide, March 19.     Photo: Anti-Poverty Network SA facebook page)

 Written by: John G. on 20 March 2023

 Prices are up! Groceries, power, petrol, rent and mortgages have gone through the roof. 

Home loan repayments have doubled for many. Rents are soaring.

Wages haven’t kept up with living costs. Buying-power we get to work has been going down for ages. Now it’s smacking head-on into raging inflation and pumped-up interest rates.

To feed, clothe and house ourselves, the challenge for people who work for their living’s become so much harder.

Growing hardships stalk the working classes at the same time as we make the economy work. Its time we made it work for us!

Bankers and governments have their answers to hardships people face

They rub salt into the wound. The salt of high interest rates, of rising prices, of the building industry being smashed as credit dries up, of hundreds of thousands of people thrown out of work, that salt, is being forced onto the wound of our hardships. 

Their remedy is to make things so much worse for people. 

Their story is they’re pushing the country through the bottom of the business cycle into blue skies of boom times beyond. 

The Reserve Bank has announced it sees the high interest rate regime is expected to last into and beyond the middle of next year. They say their goal is to wipe out over 400,000 jobs, keep wages way behind inflation, and exhaust household savings to reduce people’s consumption. By consumption they mean food, keeping a home, keeping clothes on our backs, educating kids, looking after people’s health, what we need to live. 

Their way is for business to scramble over the broken lives of hundreds of thousands, propped up by more hardships millions are facing, to get over the troubles their massive profiteering creates. 

In Covid they found billions to get over the crisis.

What a contrast to the response to the Covid emergency. Hundreds of billions of dollars were found and couldn’t be spent fast enough. 

Then, Australia’s central banker told a business lunch; ‘… we are seeking to play our full role in building that bridge to the time when the recovery takes place.

By doing all that we can to lower funding costs in Australia and support the supply of credit to business, we will help our economy and financial system get through this difficult period’ P. Lowe, Governor, Reserve Bank of Australia 19 March 2020 https://www.bis.org/review/r200319a.pdf 

Now they are happy to leave people’s lives in tatters. No bridge building for people working for a living. Bankers, governments and big business abandon us. 

We’ve been left to stand up for ourselves

Can we? 

You betcha! 

As one singer put it, ‘Every fire in the world starts with someone’s spark, when there’s a fire in all our hearts, we’ll be more than they can handle’.  

Where do we find that spark? How do we join the sparks into a fire raging through the country?

The hardships are grinding away at millions of us. People are hurting. People want answers for relief. 

The authorities work to make things worse for us. 

It’s the millions for ourselves, against them saving business for the next boom and bust cycle, wrecking hundreds of thousands of lives.  

Damn them and their system. 

Through Covid, it became very clear. We make it all work. 

Now’s a time to start organising to make it work for us.