So, we’re in our third calendar year of a global pandemic. We’ve had more than two years to adjust our society and method of functioning to cater to and account for COVID, and the various ways it’ll affect our lives going forth. And yet, we don’t have free RATs.
You’d think one of the more obvious ways our governments could have prepared us to “live with COVID” (or whatever you want to call it) would be to order us a fuck-tonne of RATs, have an infrastructure in place to support healthcare workers as demands for care and vaccine administration grow, and you know, just generally invest in public health since that’s actually one of the reasons we pay taxes.
But nope. Our Prime Minister, who initially fucked up the vaccine rollout so bad that we were all forced back into lockdown when the rest of the world was just opening up again, also refused to provide every person free rapid tests. Which you’d think would be an essential part of trying to function as a society that has been severely crippled by the Omicron variant.
In fact, here’s what he had to say regarding free rapid tests:
“We’ve invested hundreds of billions of dollars getting Australia through this crisis. We’re now at a stage of the pandemic where you can’t just make everything free, because when someone tells you they want to make something free, someone’s always going to pay for it and it will be you.”
Scott Morrison has now (kinda) given in to public pressure and is making RATs free for concession holders only, but since he reckons investing money into public health is ~too much~ let’s look at all the things he has deemed worthy of our funds.
$3.5 billion worth of tanks
Yes, within the same week that Morrison told people that wanting free rapid tests was unrealistic, our government committed to buying $3.5 billion worth of tanks from imperial merchants of death in the US.
The commitment includes 29 assault breacher vehicles, 17 joint assault bridge vehicles and six armoured recovery vehicles.
The tanks will replace the army’s older ones, which our government bought in 2007 but have never actually used in combat, according to SMH. In fact, we haven’t used tanks in combat since the Vietnam war. Don’t you just love using tax payer money on imaginary warfare instead of a very real attack on the health of the public?
Oh, and FYI, this is all part of a massive $270 billion defence spending commitment Scott Morrison made in early 2020.
As of 16 December 2021, Health Minister Greg Hunt‘s office said that our government spent $34 billion on health since the pandemic began. Doesn’t feel like it’s as big of a number next to $270b, does it?
https://twitter.com/DZ_AU/status/1477967566614122500?s=20
$1.2 billion on detaining asylum seekers
In the 2021 federal budget, offshore processing cost $1.2 billion for just 300 people — that’s roughly $4 million per person, according to The Guardian.
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre reported that in 2020-2021 the government blew out $200 million more (a total of $1.3 billion) on onshore detention centres than they originally planned.
So not only do they spend a fuck-tonne of money abusing the people seeking to exercise their international human right of asylum, but our government also doesn’t even know how to budget its evil-doing money. Or maybe they do, and they’re just allocating it to their corporate mates. See below.
$10.3 billion to fossil fuel companies
We are really in cartoon villain areas right now, let me tell you.
In the 2020-2021 financial year alone, our government gave fossil fuel companies $10.3 billion in taxpayer money.
If you’re a maths-illiterate person like me who struggles with big numbers, The Australian Institute put it like this: “In fact, $10.3 billion in Government subsidies means that in 2020, every minute of every day $19,686 was effectively given to coal, oil and gas companies and major users of fossil fuels.”
So $19,686 a minute for fossil fuels, but no free RATs for me. Cool, cool cool cool cool.
$12.5 billion to profitable corporations
Corporate handouts, how on brand.
Back in 2020, Scott Morrison’s government wrongly awarded $12.5 billion in JobKeeper to businesses that didn’t lose any profits, and then allowed them to keep that money because how could we punish them for a mistake that wasn’t theirs???? How could we ask poor bwaby business to give up millions of dollars aimed to keep working class people in their jobs???
Harvey Norman was awarded $22 million of that JobKeeper money despite it’s massive profits, and only returned $6 million of it.
Meanwhile, if you’re on Centrelink and are accidentally given enough money to claw your way out of poverty, then you’re a nasty little thief and it’s robodebt for you, sir.
There’s also heaps of other examples of blood-boiling spending I could list that are in the millions rather than billions. Take these three, for example:
- NSW Police spent more than $100 million of taxpayer money in the last four years as ‘hush money’ to effectively silence legal complaints against misconduct and other shit behaviour.
- Morrison spent $128 million on one year alone in advertising, and yet we still got this shit show of a COVID ad last year.
- And of course, there’s the rorts — just read this Sydney Morning Herald break-down of which seats get funding and how much the amounts vary. Spoiler alerts: its the governments own seats getting all the dosh.
All this to say; don’t ever feel like you aren’t entitled to free universal healthcare. Don’t let our government gaslight you into thinking it’s bratty or entitled to want to protect and preserve your health, whatever the monetary cost.
There’s definitely no shortage of taxpayer money to spend on bettering our society via free RATs — our government just has very different priorities to us. And those priorities will always chase corporate profits over human life. Unless we change that.
