I paid $450 for my passport and I'm not just angry at the state of it... but also at how it arrived in the mail: 'Are you kidding me?'
Tilly McConnell claimed it was clear the Australian Passport Office was 'cutting costs on all corners', as she even noted the quality of the passport was questionable.
'I want to know who works at the Australian Passport Office and posts things out,' she said in a TikTok video.
'I recently got my passport and, are you kidding me. It came in this.'
Ms McConnell showed how her expensive passport arrived in a simple paper envelope with no other protection.
'Do passports not get water damage now? I don't understand. It came in a normal envelope,' she said.
'And this is the quality of it. What the f***. My old passport is in better condition than this. Are you kidding me? Nope, I am p***ed off.
'My last one came in bubble wrap and everything. They're cutting costs on all corners.'
Social media users said the lack of protection for such an important document was 'ridiculous' given it can't be used if it gets damaged.
'They left mine in my letterbox. My $450 legal identity left in my letterbox,' one said.
Another said she was not as lucky as Ms McConnell and told of her recent passport experience.
'Mine came exactly the same three weeks ago; however, mine had water damage from all the rain we had,' she said.
'I took it back to the post office and they said I had to pay and order a new one. I sent an inquiry to the Australian Passport Office last week; so far, no response.'
Many other frustrated Aussies remembered the days when a passport came in a protective plastic sleeve.
They also said the government couldn't justify cost-cutting around passport delivery when the Australian document was the most expensive in the world.
'That's how they deliver the most expensive passport in the world?' one said.
'Your passport is the most important identification you can have, and they send it like that,' another said.
Sydney woman Natalie Vellozzi, 28, posted a TikTok in December, where she compared her old and new passports and accused the government of skimping on quality of the new R series.
Since its release, questions have been raised about the expensive document's quality, and Ms Vellozzi told Daily Mail the degradation was noticeable.
'Maybe the material they're using is different,' she said.
'But I just noticed as soon as I got it, it was already curling and bending over.
'When they made it and bound it together, they're not putting enough weight on it to flatten it properly.'
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But if you're someone who can literally take a knife or a machete and go into the bush and make your own fire friction kit and make your cordage and make your traps, that's powerful. Like, that's a skill set that people really value. They're not going to try and steal from you, they want to have you in their space. So for me, leading with skill set and knowledge is far more powerful than having a stockpile of things.' Robertson stands out from many in the bush survivalist community for a few reasons: she is 25, female and has an Instagram account with nearly 55,000 followers. She became interested in this world a few years ago when she was holidaying near Byron Bay. She went to a bush survival school run by a man known as Cockatoo Paul, who would eventually become both her life and business partner. 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'They find themselves in trouble later in life because they've just spent their life savings [and] years roll on, decades … and they've amassed a huge amount of preparatory items and they've forgotten about their own health and wellbeing, and the world has not collapsed and they find themselves in a spot of bother.' Some find they have spent decades preparing for the end of the world, but not for retirement or aged care. For others, prepping comes at huge cost to relationships. 'Their partners may potentially leave them because they're so fixated with their preparations, where they're preparing for the doomsday occurrence and it just engulfs them. They're unable to work, because how are you going to fit in … a career whilst being fixated on preparing your jars of food and your freeze-dried items?' Garrett says he has also seen people who started prepping on a 'low level', dedicating more and more of their resources and mental energy to it. 'Eventually families start to get frustrated [and ask] 'What are we doing here? We're spending more time anxious about the future than we are worrying about the present, or enjoying the present.' 'It happens a lot, because prepping is a thought experiment, so once you start to think, 'How do we escape from a bushfire?' then you start thinking, well, what if there was a nuclear attack? What if all the cyber systems are down and we have to flee? What if AI turns on us? It can become a bridge to conspiracy theory and the guardrails you have to put in place are just understand that, yeah, it's fine to think about these things, but it's not fine to obsess over them.' But Garrett says becoming more prepared has made him far more peaceful, rather than anxious. He eventually moved away from his middle-class Sydney life, returning to his native US, where he lives on a five-acre property in rural California. He and his wife grow their own food, have horses and are gradually taking the property off-grid. 'Things can definitely go wrong in our lives and I'm totally capable of dealing with them … It's given me a sense of solace that not only do we have the resources we need to get through something, but I've spent years now upskilling in various things … I just learned how to lay pipes in the yard … or I learned how to put in an electrical socket or fix our breaker if it goes out. All those sort of DIY practical skills. Every time I learn something, then I think, 'Oh this is fantastic' because if something goes wrong, I don't have to call someone to deal with this – I can deal with it.'
