Concerns Over Public Transport in Australia

Not to make you panic, but what just happened to me on public transport... here on the train in Brisbane, scares me about Australia's future in general, because we're already— already very communist. Look.

I have my phone, you can tap to get on the train.

Sometimes my card, I mean, my—my Brama doesn't work, I mean, and I've got money and everything, but it doesn't charge me the fifty cents, and I have to buy the physical one.

When I go, the girl says to me, "Oh, no, do you have any coins?

Pay with coins at the machine." I say, "Okay," and I go with my little coins, I've got some little coins there, and I said, "Well, I'm going to spend them, right?" So I go over to the machine thing, and the machine has a picture that says it doesn't accept coins.

So I come back and say, "Well, look, what am I supposed to do?

I mean, it doesn't take coins, so I had to ask her to charge me here.

I mean, charge me, please, charge me.” And she would say to me, “No, no, I can't hold you up.

Take a photo showing you couldn't send a photo, and go on through.”

Look, this kind of deterioration, these little—these dirty spots here, it wasn't like this before.

Someone used to come and clean this with a machine.

Uh, these things start to deteriorate because there's no money to pay for these services. The transport workers are protesting.

Why? Because they're not paying them enough.

Why? Because they raised the minimum wage and obviously the middle class is the one that bears the cost of the, of the minimum wage increase, right?

Because the business owner simply, uh, adds the co— the minimum wage increase to the product, and well, and the person who consumes the product, whether they’re middle class or something else, they eat that up, and the middle class doesn’t get a raise. Obviously, the transport workers are middle class and they want a pay raise, right?

It makes sense, but there’s no money. I mean, they wouldn’t even take my coins, they wouldn’t accept my card, they wouldn’t accept anything from me.

And they told me, “No, you have to get on and use the system because we can’t stop you.” So, what am I trying to tell you with this?

It scares me a little because we’ve already seen this in Venezuela with the metro and I hope things change, because it would be very sad if this fell apart. And of course, you get scared because we’ve already lived through this, and I see the Australians as being very similar to how it was

People in fourth grade, we had an excess of abundance and a lot of innocence. We didn't know what evil looked like, because obviously, evil comes out of nowhere and—bam!—it, it hits you. And, well, you know communism is a process that happens slowly, right? It's not like you wake up one morning and

you're already living in a communist country. No. I mean, obviously, communism tests your capacity and tests how much the person who produces can withstand, and how much, how much the person who gets things for free likes it, right?

For me, this, I—everyone says, "Oh, but you got a ride to the city for free." I say, "But that's not right.

They have to charge me there, because otherwise, how does the system sustain itself? Do you understand me? They don't have the capacity to think that through. Not yet.