Thanks Loaded 
I’m all embarrassed now!
Definitely my shout. Whaddya having?
Well maybe I will drag a little bit
Duckster wrote
A bit more than you by the look of this. How old were you when you lived in Australia did you say?
No, and I am a person who is on welfare, (not a welfare that contributes food vouchers either or is limited in its time available to me). I have had ‘elective’ surgery, as recently as last December, after a 3 week wait, and emergency treatment within hours. And both for ‘free’
I have never paid school fees for my children when I haver not been able to afford them. In NSW and Queensland and as far as I know all other states in Australia, Govt school fees are voluntary, not mandatory. And even then they are minimal, usually less than $100. Where on earth did you get the information that people in Australia get taken to court over public school fees? Do you have a cite?
Given the nature of our welfare and public housing systems, Duckster, your comments do nothing more than expose your extreme ignorance of the way the Australian system works. While I admit it has more and more flaws appearing as we follow down the path of the American model, we still have a safety net system that does not encourage people to live on the streets, those that do are there for reasons besides lack of income or available housing.
Who defaults on student loans? As Primaflora pointed out, there aren’t many people around who are keen to put their hard earned degrees to work earning less than $A23,000 p.a. which is when you begin paying your HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) debt back with your taxes.
I might also enlighten you to the fact that there are no age retrictions on getting HECS or PELS (post grad loans), just as there are no time restrictions as to when you must begin to pay it back only income level. Not many people anticipate living below the poverty line to avoid doing so.
Maybe you should do a bit of unbiased research.
Sorry I can’t show you my Australian citizenship certificate or my Aussie passport.
Or, god forbid, give us some actual cites on the opinions you have posted?
What a surprise!
racinchikki, I’m certain that Canada and the USA have their distinct cultural differences. Of course NU has less in common with Mississippi than it does with a large Canadian city.
I was thinking of countries where the culture is very different. In many ways, the history of the US and Canada are similar, in most areas, the language is the same.
I don’t think someone moving from Canada to the US (Hi, Gingy!) would experience the same culture shock than a person moving from Canada to the Middle East or Canada to China.
NU=NY
Old enough to be a legal adult, and then some, for the entire time I was there.
Good for you. As for it being free, you may not have paid for it out of your own pocket, but you did pay for it.
Well, my SO at the time was a school teacher while I worked for a university. And in SA when I lived there, local school boards were taking people to court for failure to pay mandatory school fees. My SO knew of parents who did go to jail for failure to pay.
Ignorance? I seem to recall a number of serious public housing scandals where housing was tight, only to find out that many of the houses built for low income people were occupied by public housing officials earning extremely good salaries.
As for safety nets I will agree with you. Yet that doesn’t dismiss many homeless I saw daily on the streets to/from work, or the volunteer work I did with the local Red Cross chapter, and Neighbourhood Watch and the Police.
I will submit there may have been a change in the two years since I’ve been gone, but as I stated I worked for a university while I was there. As for specific details on defaults I cannot offer more. I still abide by the old confidentiality agreements I signed as part of my job
No need to enlighten. But thanks.
Perhaps you should take a more critical eye of your own surroundings.
Gee, I am so sorry that I cannot offer you cites from The Australian, the Adelaide Advertiser, National Nine News, Channel Ten or the SMH.
I guess you’ll just have to live with the opinion as it is.
Duckster
stop digging, mate. While you’re doing your imitation of someone who knows what he’s talking about, the fact is that there is no way you could know duckshit about PELS as it’s new. HECS hasn’t changed dramatically in the last two years.
Gotta looooooove the confidentiality agreement preventing you from backing up your arguments though. That’s always a good one to silence the opposition. You could however do a websearch and pull up some info on actual defaults on HECS fees as opposed to saying you cannot discuss it.
It’s fascinating too that I googled SA and mandatory school fees and waddya know! Zero, zip, nada on the epidemic of imprisoned Australian parents who cannot pay for their offspring’s public education.
The SMH is on line. So’s the Australian. And the TV channels. And the Adelaide Advertiser.
Get googling mate! Verify the existence of your alternative reality Australia! And one-off occurrences of these events do not support asserting that it is common in Australia. Every country has its situations where pensioners don’t get their entitlements or school administrators overstep the line.
My brother’s school was trying to force parents to pay the voluntary school fees, and started banning children who hadn’t paid from excursions. The parents complained, the school was reprimanded, and that was the end of it. Voluntary school fees are just that - voluntary. Some over-eager schools may try to bully parents into coughing up the $100 or whatever it is, but they’re not allowed to do it and will get in trouble when they’re found out.
Primaflora, I get the feeling that Duckster was insinuating that those aren’t great news sources.
Coldfire wrote:
"And I know plenty of people who live in China and find it brilliant: it’s quite possibly the most capitalist country in the world. Yeah, it’s rough if you’re Chinese, but you can live the life of a king there if your paycheck’s in Euros or Dollars.'
The same goes for Russia. Business opportunities as hell and You can easily have whatever You like with the money You earn.
Moscow and St Pete are expencive, but I was once living in a community of 11.000 inhabitants, in a place next to nowhere:
- The rent of my house and garden 10 USD per month
- A gardener, a chauffeur, a cook etc., each 30 USD per month. (I usually pay the double or tripple).
- a meal (a sallad, soup, orange juice, beef etc.), about 1,5 - 2 USD. “Fancy restaurangs” about 5 USD.
Now I am working in a town of 300.000 inhabitants and the rent is higher, about 100 USD per month for 3 rooms and a kitchen and the workers costs about 70 - 100 USD/month.
The montly income here in the wooden business varies between 1.500 - 2.000 USD per month, depending on the season.
(naturally You have to know what You are doing).
I am learning languages and cultures, and I am not too occupied with work for living. (English reading Your posts, Russian in the street, Norwegian language is just an odd hobby).
If I lived in US, I could hardly make more than 2.500 USD/month.
And You know the costs “over there”???
Duckster wrote:
I think you have a bit of confusion happening here Duckster. We don’t have ‘local school boards’ here in Australia, however you do in the US. Nor do we have ‘mandatory’ public school fees. as has been pointed out a number of times.
I assure you that if even one parent was imprisoned for not paying a voluntary school fee of $100 every other parent in the country would know about it!!! I can imagine the public furore. It has not happened. Your SO was obviously mistaken.
It may come as a surprise to you Duckster, but in Australia we don’t have debtors prisons, and amazingly no one goes to prison for non payment of debts. They go bankrupt and lose most of their possessions, but sorry, no gaol.
Well Duckster, I don’t know what university you worked for, but it obviously wasn’t a mainstream one! You show a total lack of knowledge as to how our tertiary education system works. The only people in Australia able to default on tertiary fees are overseas students, as all residents are eligible for deferred HECS, so if they chose to pay up front and couldn’t, they have a deferred option. (Unless of course you are talking about a non accredited ‘university’ ie a private college of some sort which is not eligible for govt funding). The university itself does not administer the student loan scheme, the government does, and you would have no access to that info as an employee of a university.
Well, I was going to defend myself against Duckster’s uninformed comments, but I see the rest of you have already done it for me!
And if you pay your HECS upfront, you get a 10% discount!
I remember a year or two ago there was a lot of anger because a handful of schools had used a sort of “public shaming” in order to get parents to pay the voluntary school fees. I can’t remember exactly, but schools would either publish the names of families who had donated, or publish the names of families who had not paid the fees. And some students were left out of school activities and excursions because their parents hadn’t paid. However, this definitely wasn’t widespread, and as I mentioned, there was a lot of public anger about it.
Much as I detest a pile-on, I’m gonna have to call for some clarification on these two in-credible assertions. I find it extremely difficult to believe that (1) parents have gone to jail for refusing to pay school fees; and (2) students have “defaulted” on HECS “loans”.
Tell us you’re not making this shit up, please.
Australia has always been at the very top of the list of places I want to visit, and I’ve always imagined that it would be a primo place to live. I still think that, but talking about the dfferences btwn the U.S and Australia, this thread has highlighted one that strikes me. Australian dopers are actually bragging about entitlements provided by the Government like they’re a good thing. By and large, you don’t find such an attitude in the U.S., and when you do it’s among people who are professional welfare addicts. We have a lot fewer Govt programs here, aparently, and I still think we have too many. Judging from this thread, that’s not the case down under.
( This post in NO WAY,SHAPE OR FORM compares Australians with welfare losers. The point is that the attitude I see from people on welfare ( which in this country is A BAD THING ) here is obviously more common amongst the professional working class in Australia ( Judging ONLY by comments posted by Australian dopers in this thread.) and thus is a difference between the two countries, which I point out as that’s what this thread is about )
I think of this often, actually. It’s mostly the same, but there are enough differences to make it uncomfortable unless you are used to it. I am having issues with racism, that’s a big one, but I try to avoid places where I’m subjected to it. The brands are different in the stores for the most part, but when I do come across a familiar brand, it’s different than in Canada.
I realize that it could be Iran or Thailand that I could have ended up in. I thank God that it isn’t, because if I have such trouble adjusting to something that is so close to home, what would happen to me overseas?
racinchikki mentioned earlier that regions of the US are very different, moreso than, say, upstate NY and southern Ontario. It’s the same thing when I moved from Alberta to Eastern Ontario - everything was just different enough to be uncomfortable.
Gingy, if you don’t want to ‘end up’ in Thailand, can I take your spot?
You realize I was using you as an example, right? I’m sure you’ll adjust just fine, once you realize our cops drive cars and don’t ride around on horses!
Well, since the chummy politeness of this thread has worn off a little, please allow me to explain what it was that got my goat.
I didn’t have a problem with kambuckta’s OP, although I can see why others might. I understand she may have been responding to the apparently prevalent and insulting attitude that everyone in the world would want to live in the US if they could. The thing is, we haven’t to my knowledge been expressing this attitude here, so her sudden exclamation of “Well! I wouldn’t live there!” seemed apropos of absolutely nothing and could leave many wondering, “Where did that come from?” It does strike me as vaguely impolite to start the thread with a negative sentiment, and it was exacerbated by the fact that while kambuckta was clearly quite adamant in her feeling, she gave no reason whatsoever for it. I know she didn’t mean to offend, but it could be seen as offensive just the same. So, I was rather apprehensive about the possible responses to her OP, but as it turned out the vast majority of Americans and other folk did not take offense, and responded with either polite requests for clarification or discourses on where they would or would not want to live. I don’t think rather mild comments such as, "Well, we’ll try to get along without you” were at all out of line considering the wording of the OP. The only truly off-the-wall response came from someone who is clearly a trollish asshole (and all countries have those, remember the influx of quickly-banned moronic Australian teenagers a while back?). There was also a question from one of our very new members asking if kambuckta would be considered a troll. Since this is someone who presumably hasn’t has a chance to gain complete knowledge of all board members and their contributions, I thought it was a rather innocent question. That’s all there was, really, then when kambuckta is finally able to post again, she responds with this:
At this point I was rolling my eyes at her somewhat over-the-top exaggeration. Point the first – I don’t see how anyone who worded her OP as clumsily as she did could be at all surprised at the very mild responses she got. Point the second – many Americans had posted by that time with well-mannered and thoughtful responses at it seemed disingenuous to insist that there had been some kind of mass lynching going on. Then, when the OP was inexplicably moved to the Pit, she comes in with this:
Ok. Where THE HELL did that come from? The smiley indicates that it was meant to be taken as good-natured ribbing (you Aussies are famous for that, after all). But just the same I had to think, “We didn’t jump her ass the first time, and here she is again, insinuating that we did!” It seemed unnecessarily divisive to me and it rubbed me the wrong way. Of course, we Americans have a very deserved reputation for arrogance and an over-the-top national pride, but we, your American friends here at the SDMB, had not displayed that but were getting ragged for it anyway. That doesn’t exactly foster the spirit of international brotherhood, mmm’kay?
Now that the thread has been moved to the Pit, you have received one very angry response from The Mermaid and one response from techchick basically stating that she understood where The Mermaid was coming from and suggesting that the few problems that there have been in this thread could have been avoided with a more wisely chosen thread title. I think The Mermaid should have taken a moment to understand the sprit behind the OP and temper her comments accordingly, but I too can empathize with her emotions, even if I don’t necessarily share them. The fact is, whether reasonably or not, many Americans are on edge right now and will become increasingly so for the next few days. I agree with Jodi that this is not an excuse for bad behavior, but it is a fact.
Now, then:
No group of people on this board was more sympathetic and caring during and after the attacks last year than the Australians. In fact, it is quite clear that posters like reprise, to name one example, still care and are still doing what they can to help us heal and to let us know that they care. That helps much more than you will ever know. Thank you. I think you lot are amazingly cool and intelligent and funny and I smile when I hear or see something about your country because I have seen evidenced here that the people from it are wonderful. But I am very, very disappointed that you can look at maybe three bad-tempered posts out of many, many more reasonable and humorous and polite and friendly posts and be disappointed in us.