Australian
living standards are dropping, as the Australian Financial Review notes,
“Australians
have experienced one of the sharpest declines in living standards in the
developed world since the pandemic, according to a new report from the OECD
that warns real wages are set to fall even further this year as high inflation
erodes workers’ incomes.
The
release of the report came as Deloitte Access Economics warned Australia was
facing its longest stretch of weak economic growth since the early 1990s
recession, complicating the Albanese government’s efforts to argue it has made
substantial progress in bringing inflation under control and easing
cost-of-living pressures.”[1]
The Daily
Mail likewise notes,
“Real
wage growth hasn't kept up with rising inflation, resulting in Australia having
one of the sharpest declines in living standards in the world over the five
years since the Covid pandemic, a new report claims.
The
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) released its
Employment Outlook for Australia on Tuesday.
The
report warned wages are expected to fall further in actual value this year,
worsening the cost-of-living crisis.
Inflation
has seen the value of Australian wages fall by 5.1 per cent since March 2021,
compared to the average developed nation, which has seen a 5 per cent increase
in wage value over the same time.
It
was one of the steepest wage declines among all OECD countries and follows
another OECD report that showed Australia's high inflation was second only to
Iceland among developed countries.
'This
sustained erosion of purchasing power points to persistent pressures on
household incomes, even as the labour market has remained broadly solid,' the
OECD said on Tuesday.”[2]
And it is not
because Aussies are not working. Workplace participation is up,
“In
a win for the Australian market, the OECD noted that Australia's labour market
was relatively strong in comparison to other OECD members.
Australia's
unemployment rate sat below the OECD average of 4.9 per cent at 4.4 per cent.
The
country's 81 per cent labour force participation rate also made it one of the
strongest in the OECD.”[3]
Australians
are working more than the average of similar countries, and yet they are getting
poorer. Why? Because of deliberate policy decisions which have hollowed out our
manufacturing, driven up the costs of housing, rents and utilities, and all
round made the money people are earning less valuable.
And we can feel
the drop in living standards.
If you read
the founding documents of the environmentalist movements, and even many of the
socialist movements, you will see that they believe that too many westerners have
too high a standard of living. They see this as a problem to be solved.
This kind of
teaching even seeped into Bible colleges. At what was supposed to be an
evangelical Bible college, when I was studying, I had to sit through lectures in
one course where a lecturer taught that families living in standalone homes,
with a backyard, a front yard, and two cars is evil, because it will kill the
planet, so we have a moral responsibility to move people into condensed living
in mega structures, otherwise we are not stewarding the planet well. I kid you
not, this was actually taught at a Bible College I went to. What is worse is
many of the students lapped it up. The lecturer even had the gall to try and
argue that Isaiah taught this!
He argued
that condensed housing, and mega structures were what should be pushed. People
should be made to live in megacities and not have their own backyards. Anything
else was irresponsible, in his view.
What I did
not realize at the time is that he was just seeking to fit in UN globalist
goals with loosely based biblical language. He even mentioned he had done some
UN work, but I did not understand what that meant straight away. After this, I
began to pay more attention to what a lot of environmentalists and socialists
actually believed, and I found his teachings were all through their ideologies.
Environmentalists
used stewardship of the planet to justify their anti-humanism. Socialists used
the politics of envy and covetousness to motivate people to take from those who
have more and give it away to anyone else, even to be squandered. This is why
they give so much overseas, by the way, they believe our level of prosperity is
immoral and gained through theft anyway. That is the actual motivation behind
telling us this is not our land, they are seeking to drum this into our kids,
and every other part of society they can, so they can move further in that direction.
And our
country has been successfully taken over at the policy level by people who have
this sort of ideology. And the fruit of that? Well, they are achieving their
goals, we are getting measurably poorer.
How many
families do not have a backyard anymore? How many people can afford to have
their wife stay at home? Less and less. Both parents have to work in most households
just to pay for a lower standard of living. How many people feel like they are
better off? How many older Australians are having to go back to work, because
retiring well is out of their reach? Australia is being driven into the ground
by people who actually believe it is moral to do that...well, to everyone
except them and their state official friends.
Why do you
think they are ok with digging up coal and selling it to China, India and other
places? They are ok with those countries using it to lift up their standard of
living, as long as our country is suppressed for ideological reasons. This is a
feature, to them, not a bug.
Other
countries seem to have broken out of this spell and have begun to turn their
sinking ships around. But ours is still deeply steeped in this anti-humanism.
And it is costing us, literally.
Someone will
read this and say, "But Matt, we still have it so good." But it is
not as good for families, and there is not as many opportunities for our
children as we had, or as the older Australians had. The trajectory is heading
downwards. It is evil to be ok with that.
That was
Hezekiah's attitude.
“16
Then Isaiah said to Hezekiah, “Hear the word of the Lord: 17 ‘Behold, the days
are coming when all that is in your house, and what your fathers have
accumulated until this day, shall be carried to Babylon; nothing shall be
left,’ says the Lord. 18 ‘And they shall take away some of your sons who will
descend from you, whom you will beget; and they shall be eunuchs in the palace
of the king of Babylon.’ ”
19
So Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “The word of the Lord which you have spoken is
good!” For he said, “Will there not be peace and truth at least in my days?” (2
Kings 20:16-19).
When Hezekiah
said this he was disregarding his responsibility to pass to his children’s
children an inheritance. Therefore, his attitude here was wrong. Deeply wrong.
List of
References
[3] Ibid.
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