Everyday, I see an army of minimum wage flunkies servicing the interests of property magnates. They are the cleaners, shop assistants and waiters etc, for the tourists industry that is the Gold Coast, Queensland.
Up untill now you could have done OK here in Paradise as a underpaid slave for the negatively geared investors club, by rolling over your home loan till the debt level reached $300,000.oo but now you are up the creek without a paddle. How do you service a community when, as school leavers are now realizing, you have to pay $300.oo per week rent or take out a home loan that your meager $17.50c hourly rate is never going to pay for?
Even if you bite the bullet, roll up your sleeves and get the home loan from hell, you still have to factor in your out of control transport costs, dental plans, rapidly rising power costs, food and rates that would make a blind man blink. When ever I have pointed out this abysmal state of affairs to the one's that created it by voting for John Howard, they allude to the misconception that education can fix the problem and if the ones who are doing it the toughest, would only work harder at getting themselves into a big HEX debt, then they too could join the ranks of the privileged. This unfortunately does not fix the problem, it just passes it of to another sucker because the units still have to be cleaned, the shops manned, the beer poured and it doesn't matter if you are a qualified rocket scientist, you are still a only going to get less than $20.oo an hour to do it.
This problem is REAL, this dilemma is NOW and I would not consider voting for anybody/party that doesn't have a plan for addressing the inequality between the classes because what is going to happen when hard working, young family starters are being jailed for not being able to meet their debts.It is in every bodies best interests that the working poor be given a bigger bite of the hamburger and that the over fed stop being so dam greedy.
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I used to work with troubled teens who were most disgruntled when we charged them $100 a week for their fully furnished bedroom (with towels, bed linens, shampoo, toothbrush and paste, and ensuite bathroom), use of the laundry facilities - all products provided, food for three meals a day (including snacks and treats), transport, telephone, electricity and $20 of entertainment that they got to choose how it was spent. They were indignant that we would charge so much - I mean how the hell were they going to afford smokes if they had to pay that?
I sat them down one day to do a budget reflecting the real world and the didn't believe me. They all "knew" that they were going to live in the two storey waterfront apartments they drooled over each time we went past with new furniture and a big screen tv.
They ignored the stories of myself or other staff members about shared accommodation, or living in flats the size of a large shoebox or using milk-crates for random pieces of furniture. I don't think they even believed us.
Despite being in a situation that meant they were spending time with our organisation instead of being with family and friends they were so unprepared for the big world that as waiting for them.
And then that big world was being so unrealistic in its own way just makes the situation worse.
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