I’ve lived here for 5 years from the uk. Whenever someone critiques the uk I find it interesting to hear their gripes and can accept there’s many things with the UK which are bad, and I reply with many UK thing i also don’t like. However, there seems to be an inability to accept criticism about Australia without saying well what about this in the UK, or what about this in the USA, at least we’re not like x or y… As long as Australia isn’t the worst at something, it’s hard to critique it.
Take the examples of previous threads, where people have mentioned about driving deaths or tall poppy syndrome, yet they seem to always be met with - “at least we don’t have the US hustle culture” or “well if it’s bad here try xyz”? Or the worst “whingeing” which seems to be coupled with that person whingeing more themselves?
I’m mainly interested if there’s a cultural stance about not being able to realise a country might not be a good as you think. While YES, being a very developed, high HDI, GDP country- we all know that.