MISERY AND SQUALOR: A GUIDED FUCKING TOUR

The official White House account, 1 day ago, all caps for emphasis because subtlety died in 2015:

America will NEVER be a communist country.

And underneath, over a photo of a man photographed at the exact angle that makes him look like a bin bag full of cold gravy in a USA cap:

The communists want to take their ruinous and deadly ideology of misery and squalor to every state in America, but we’re not going to let them.

Misery and squalor.

Alright. Let’s fucking talk about misery and squalor, you absolute walnut. Let’s get the tape measure out and do a proper inspection of the property before you go telling the neighbours their house is a shithole.

Because I’ve read the report. And mate, the stumps are gone.

THE PART WHERE PEOPLE DIE EARLIER

Start with the simplest number there is. How long do you live.

An American born today can expect 79.0 years. That is the highest it has ever been in American history, and they should be proud of it. The average across comparable wealthy countries is 82.7 years.

That is a 3.7 year gap. Nearly 4 years of grandkids, of retirement, of sitting in the sun, gone. Not because of communism. Because of the system the Tangerine Tinpot is currently defending as the envy of the fucking planet.

In the OECD rankings, the United States comes in 30th out of 38 countries for life expectancy. Thirtieth. Level pegging with Poland. Behind Slovenia, behind Portugal, behind Greece, behind every single country that Fox News has ever sneered at for having socialised medicine.

Preventable mortality: 217 deaths per 100,000 people. OECD average is 145. Treatable mortality, meaning deaths where the medicine exists and the doctor exists and the person still died: 95 per 100,000 against an OECD average of 77.

Infant mortality: 5.6 per 1,000 live births, ranked 32nd out of 38, tied with the Slovak Republic. OECD average is 4.2.

And they pay more for this than anyone on Earth. The highest total health spending of any country in the OECD. Highest spend. 30th outcome. If you ran a business like that you’d be in front of a liquidator by Tuesday.

THE PART WHERE MOTHERS DIE

The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any high income country in the world. Roughly 17.9 women dead per 100,000 live births in 2024. In 2023 the rate was 18.6, which put America statistically alongside Palestine and Chile.

Palestine.

Germany, Australia and Japan run under 5. Norway and the Netherlands sit in the low single digits.

More than 80% of those American deaths are considered preventable. Preventable. As in, a system that worked would have kept those women alive and it fucking didn’t. For Black women, the rate is nearly 3 times the national figure. Mothers in Louisiana died at 41.9 per 100,000 in 2023.

And here is the kicker, the one that should end the argument in every household in America. Out of 38 OECD countries, there is exactly 1 that does not guarantee paid maternity leave.

Guess which fucking one.

Every other rich country on Earth looked at a woman who has just pushed a human being out of her body and thought: right, she gets paid time to recover. America looked at her and thought: back on the register by Thursday, Brenda, and bring a note.

That is not misery imposed by communists. That is misery legislated by choice.

THE PART WHERE THE KIDS DON’T COME HOME

In 2025 at least 42,348 Americans died of gunshot wounds. That was the lowest number in 6 years, and it is still a number that would collapse a government anywhere else in the developed world.

Gun suicides hit the highest level ever recorded: more than 28,000 people in 2025, up from 27,600 the year before.

And firearms remained the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers for the 6th consecutive year. Not cancer. Not car crashes. Not disease. Guns. American children aged 5 to 14 are 21 times more likely to be killed with a gun than children in other high income countries. The child and teen gun death rate is 9.5 times higher than Canada’s, and Canada is the second worst.

Nine and a half times worse than the next worst. That is not a league table, that is a solo event.

Every other wealthy democracy on Earth had the same conversation America had after their own massacre. Australia had ours in 1996. Britain had theirs in 1996. New Zealand had theirs in 2019. Every one of us did the boring, unglamorous, deeply capitalist thing of passing a law, and then our kids stopped getting shot in classrooms.

America had Sandy Hook and decided 20 dead 6 year olds was an acceptable price for a legislative vibe.

THE PART WHERE 745,652 PEOPLE HAVE NOWHERE TO GO

On a single night in January 2025, 745,652 people in the United States were homeless. 266,320 of them were unsheltered, which is the polite bureaucratic term for sleeping in a car, a doorway, a tent, or a stormwater drain.

That figure is up 28% since January 2020.

And chronic homelessness, the long term, no way out, this is my life now category, hit 155,750 people. An all time record. Roughly double the 77,486 counted in 2016.

Squalor. Actual, literal, definitionally correct squalor, in the wealthiest country in human history, photographed daily on the pavements of Los Angeles and San Francisco and Phoenix and Houston and posted to the internet by the very people who then turn around and tell you Denmark is a dystopia.

745,652 people had nowhere to sleep. In the richest country that has ever existed.

THE PART WHERE BEING SICK BANKRUPTS YOU

41% of American adults, more than 100 million people, carry debt from medical or dental bills.

The formal estimate of household medical debt is around 220 billion dollars. When researchers include the medical bills people shove onto credit cards, personal loans and borrowing from family, the real figure climbs toward 500 billion.

43% of American adults have not taken their medication as prescribed because of the cost. They’ve cut pills in half. They’ve skipped doses. They’ve swapped a prescription for something off the supermarket shelf and hoped.

About half of American adults say they could not pay an unexpected 500 dollar medical bill out of pocket. 19% of them say they could not pay it at all. Not borrow it, not credit card it. Just could not.

85% of uninsured adults under 65 are worried about affording healthcare. Which is not a worry, that’s just a correct assessment of their situation.

In Australia, Captain Combover, my wife had a medical episode and the total cost to us was the parking. In your country, that same episode comes with a debt collector and a garnished paycheck.

THE PART WHERE THE IRONY BECOMES PHYSICALLY PAINFUL

Now. You want to talk about communism? Let’s talk about communism.

The United States currently has 1,973,000 people locked in cages. That’s 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,277 juvenile facilities, 220 immigration detention centres and 77 tribal jails. The bill comes to at least 445 billion dollars a year, more than 5 times the 87 billion spent in 2015.

The incarceration rate is 580 per 100,000 residents. The highest of any independent democracy on Earth.

There are exactly 3 countries on the planet that lock up more of their own people per capita than the United States of America.

El Salvador. Cuba. Turkmenistan.

The only countries out-jailing America are a police state, a one party dictatorship, and a communist island 145 kilometres off the Florida coast.

That’s the company. That’s the podium. The man standing there screaming about the ruinous ideology of misery is currently running the free world’s most enthusiastic imprisonment operation, and 70% of the people sitting in those local jails, roughly 466,100 human beings, have not been convicted of anything at all. They’re in there because they couldn’t make bail.

Innocent until proven broke.

THE PART WHERE THEY DIE OF DESPAIR

69,973 drug overdose deaths in 2025. That is genuinely, meaningfully better: down almost 14% from 81,313 in 2024, and a long way down from the peak of about 110,900 in 2022. Credit where it’s due, that is thousands of families who still have someone at the dinner table.

But between 1999 and 2020 alone, around 932,400 Americans died of overdose. Nearly a million people.

Suicide rate: 15 per 100,000 against an OECD average of 11.

Economists have a name for this cluster. Deaths of despair. Not deaths of communism. Deaths of despair, in a country where the safety net was sold for parts and the sales pitch was freedom.

THE ACTUAL FUCKING POINT

Here is what the man in the USA cap is doing, and it is not subtle.

Zohran Mamdani won New York. Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan. A wave of democratic socialists is winning primaries across the country by running on rent, childcare, buses, groceries and doctors. Boring stuff. Kitchen table stuff. The stuff every other rich democracy sorted out 60 years ago while America was busy being scared of Cuba and playing with its bald eagle dick.

And because the Golden Escalator Messiah cannot argue against free buses on the merits, he has to reach for the only word his base has been trained to convulse at. Communist. Stalin. Gulag. Bread queue.

So let’s be extremely clear about what those “communists” are actually asking for.

Universal healthcare. Australia has it. Canada has it. Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan all have it.

Paid parental leave. Every single OECD country except one.

Gun laws that stop children being shot. Every comparable democracy on Earth.

Every single one of those countries is capitalist. Every single one has a stock exchange, billionaires, private property, private companies and elections. Not one of them is communist. Not fucking one.

Australia has Woolworths and Coles doing a duopoly stitch up that would make a Gilded Age robber baron blush. We have mining billionaires with private jets and political opinions. We are about as communist as a Bunnings sausage sizzle. And we still manage to run a country where getting cancer doesn’t cost you your house and sending your kid to school doesn’t involve an active shooter drill.

That’s not communism, you clown. That’s just a fucking government that does its job. A democratically elected fucking government implementing socialist policies you Mango-Mussolini-Oompa-Loompa-Bong-Banger.

THE CLOSE

Misery and squalor.

79 years of life instead of 83. 42,348 dead by gunshot. 745,652 people with nowhere to sleep. 155,750 of them permanently. 100 million people in medical debt. 1,973,000 people in cages. Mothers dying at Palestinian rates. Children dying at 21 times the rate of their peers overseas. Nearly 70,000 overdoses in a single year and that counts as the good news.

You don’t need to import misery and squalor into America, mate.

You’ve been manufacturing it domestically for 40 years, and now you’re standing on the loading dock in a novelty hat, pointing at the ship in the harbour, screaming about foreign contamination while the factory burns behind you.

America will never be a communist country.

Correct. It’s not on track to be a functional one anytime fucking soon either.

THE IFLA AUSSIE-TO-YANK GLOSSARY WORD FIXER

A standing feature for our American readers, who keep flooding the inbox asking what the bloody hell we just said. Australian and American English are the same language the way a thong and a flip-flop are the same footwear: identical in purpose, and one of those words is going to land someone in serious strife. Below are today’s terms, decoded for Washington. Use them wisely, or at least loudly.

Bulk-billed: When the doctor sends the bill straight to the government and you walk out having paid nothing at all. No copay, no deductible, no receptionist asking for a card before she asks what’s wrong with you. Americans, when told about this, tend to go quiet for a bit and then ask a follow-up question in a smaller voice.

Medicare card: A flimsy green rectangle that fits in your wallet and means the worst day of your life will not also be the day you lose your house. Costs about 2% of your income, which works out cheaper than one American ambulance ride. Not communism. Just a card. Bit of a boring hero, honestly.

Chuck a sickie: To take a paid sick day when you are, at best, generously described as unwell. Requires 2 things: sick leave that exists, and sick leave that is paid. Both are guaranteed by federal law here, which is why the phrase exists here and does not exist there. You cannot chuck a sickie in a country where sick means unemployed.

Long service leave: After roughly 10 years with the same employer, an Australian gets paid to piss off for 2 or 3 months. Not a perk. Not a negotiation. The law. Try explaining this to an American who has been at the same company since 2011 and gets 10 days a year, and watch a grown adult reassess their entire life in real time.

Fair go: The load-bearing wall of the entire Australian national character. The belief that everyone deserves a reasonable shot regardless of who their dad was. It is not equality of outcome, it is not a handout, and it is emphatically not Marx. It is just the radical idea that the bloke who cleans the office should be able to afford the dentist. In America they call this Venezuela.

Battler: Someone working flat out and still barely getting there. Honoured here, celebrated in song, invoked shamelessly by every politician who has never met one. The key difference: an Australian battler is skint. An American battler is skint, uninsured, 1 diagnosis from bankruptcy, and being told on the telly that wanting a doctor makes him Stalin.

Doing it tough: Financial hardship, rendered politely, because we would rather chew glass than say “I am struggling.” Covers everything from a tight fortnight to genuinely not eating. When 745,652 Americans have nowhere to sleep, “doing it tough” is what an Australian would call it right before doing something about it.

Walnut: A person of extremely limited internal capacity. Hard on the outside, mostly empty in the middle, and produces the same sound whether you tap it or reason with it. Deployed affectionately for a mate, and completely unaffectionately for a head of state in a novelty cap.

Sausage sizzle: A charity barbecue outside a hardware shop where a snag on white bread with onions costs 3 dollars and the proceeds go to the local cricket club. The single most capitalist event in Australian life, and also the single most communal. Proof, if any were needed, that a country can do both at once without a gulag showing up.

The stumps are gone: Cricket. The 3 wooden posts behind the batter. When the bowler knocks them over, there is no appeal, no debate, no replay committee. You are out, and you walk. Used here to mean a defence that has not just failed but has been physically removed from the ground while you were still explaining it.

NOT LONG NOW