> All the smart people have already left.
I don't believe this, but I empathise with your fury.
There has just been a small Covid outbreak in my town. The organisation of the response (all local - not federal) has been phenomenal, straight up inspiring.
But we are also the inheritors of a long legacy of stupid and brutal, and it can be hard to look around and believe that now is better than it was. How could this possibly be better? The gutting of CSIRO is a tragedy, but it's short term gain for tragedies all the way down.
I think Australia today is different better society than the country a century ago, we are iterating of a base of absolute monarchy and entrenched power, and it seems as we have got comfortable, and many of us are comfortable, many of us have stopped pushing.
There's a book on historical protest movements in Australia by Jeff Sparrow. It was an eye opener for me to see that actually things were even worse a century ago, the way fear of communist infiltration was used to control society, was even more clumsy, and more successful than the garbage we encounter today. The story of the Hilton Hotel bombing in the 70s is so clumsy it would be hilarious if lives weren't ruined. ASIO planted a fake bomb (which they intended to find and they use to justify further funding), which actually blew up, and then the Indian representative (was it the ambassador or the Prime Minister?) declared it was a terrorist attack against him, so ASIO had to find a hippy to arrest, so they did and they got away with it.