Public transport from my place to the surf/town? Excuse me whilst I roll around on the ground laughing.
I'm not sure public transport will ever be able to be improved more in rural areas. Perhaps some train routes direct to the city, but I doubt anything going off to the coast would be considered. I live in the northern suburbs and currently they are electrifying the trains up this way, so transport to the city is actually worse than ever, catching multiple buses and hoping for no missed connections. In theory it should be improved once the work is all done and they may even extend the lines further north again. They are trying, though, which is something.
I don't think people are buying second hand clothes, just cheap as shit clothes that we still take to the op shop or whatever and that ends up over there.
True. When the cheapest clothes in the shops are cheaper than the op shops, there is something wrong. We've been here 13 years now and are only just throwing out some clothes from the UK, but we go through the clothes we've bought here within a couple of years, if we're lucky. The cheapest clothes here are admittedly cheaper than the cheapest in the UK, but even when you pay more they don't seem to be any better quality unless you're paying eye watering prices. Maybe that's why the shipments they got from the UK were better quality than those from Australia. 🤔
Anyway, I suspect there's a multitude of reasons why the quality of what this country is sending there has been dropping recently. Was the quality of cheaper clothes here ever any good?