Our massive productivity gains have been eaten up by the billionaire/owner class.

i completely agree with that and it's not that we have a productivity problem, we also long ago lost interest in needs vs wants and most of what we do as a society is based around the latter letting the former fall beside the wayside.

The really really weird shit is this is all encouraged by voters, LNP, ONP and ALP.

Does no one seem to remember that you used to be able to support a family of 5 on one modest income?

while that's true, it was of a different time and has rose tinted glasses. As my mother said, the reason she became a teacher was so she didn't have to give up work when she became pregnant and the two photos my mother has of her with her family shows they (8 kids and her parents) lived in a tin shack. All my grandparents died in their late 60's or early 70s not needing endless medical care and decades of pension.

Twisting the avocado toast meme, anecdotally, my 20 something nieces have spent more time overseas travelling then I have and I'm 59. One is off to Canada again for months as we speak and the other just got back from Japan, again, for the 4th time and she's 23, and that's just one of the many countries she's been to.

There's also any number of grumpy 60+yr olds (the ones apparently employed and raising a family of 5) who say they cant afford Australia anymore, so what happened to their so called wealth? YT is full of single, aged pensioners retired to Laos, Thailand and more recently Cambodia (because they can't afford Thailand)

on YT; Fiasco Dagama, Brett Voyage and read the comments section. The comme td unironically blaming migrants while their plan is to migrate and geo arbitrage :)

I retired at 40 (am now 60) and lived off grid in a little cottage in the bush because i never fitted in anywhere in Australia anyway.

New car sales are at an all time high (what a joke that is) discretionary spending (trinkets and gee jaws) also keeps rising.

Compare that with the have massive savings in Super and we're the second richest country per person on earth after Luxembourg,

Theb we're the biggest users of diesel (and have no oil) on the planet per capita because we're too incompetent to build electrified rail, in a country that's massive... the one token build recently, Inland Rail, has been scrapped from incompetence.

I'd suggest folks re read the Lucky Country, from the 1960s, the ironically titled book that pointed out we're a bunch of fools, electing idiots. The title was about we were lucky we had access to tremendous primary capital we expended (back then more farming, now mining) and it dulled our minds so we didn't have to think too much. Not much has changed

The last sane Prime Minster we had was Gough Whitlam and it's mostly been a shit show ever since, enabled by voters.