Australians are being squeezed from every side, and the pressure is only growing heavier.
Taxes take more of a worker’s pay than in decades, with bracket creep punishing families who barely keep ahead of inflation.
The harder you work, the more the government takes
The reward for diligence is not dignity but depletion.
At the same time, a record wave of migration – nearly half a million new arrivals a year on average between 2022 and 2024 – floods into the country.
That figure is unprecedented.
It sends rents and house prices to heights unseen, forcing young families to surrender hope of ever owning a home.
Services groan under the weight.
Hospitals are crowded, schools are stretched, and infrastructure buckles under strain.
When a “solution” is finally offered, it borders on parody.
Co-operative housing is paraded as the brave new idea.
Instead of being a simple renter, you pay for a share in the co-op and get a say in how the property is managed.
On paper, it sounds liberating – but in practice, it means ordinary Australians are told to accept scraps.
The message is brutal but clear: you will never own your home, but you can co-own the headaches.
This is not relief but retreat.
It is the downgrading of the Australian dream.
For generations, the promise was both simple and sacred.
Work hard, save what you can, and one day you will own a house.
That dream anchored families and stabilised communities.
Now, with prices inflated by mass migration and wages gnawed away by excessive taxation, the government’s answer is to shrink the dream.
Not ownership, not relief, just a bureaucratic experiment dressed up as empowerment.
Anthony Albanese may not have created this crisis, but under his watch the burden has only deepened.
The cost of living climbs, debt mounts, and insult is piled upon injury for the very people who built this great country.
The farmers who feed it, the builders who raise its homes, the teachers who shape its future, and the workers who keep its engines running.
They carried Australia on their backs, yet today they are asked to carry even more while owning less.
Australians are not asking for experiments but they are asking for fairness.
They want wages that mean something, taxes that do not punish effort, and a housing market that does not treat them as strangers in their own land.
Instead, they are told to make peace with permanent precarity.
Own nothing, rent endlessly, and pretend it is progress.
That is the vision of those who claim to govern in the public interest.
The migration surge mentioned earlier must be seen for what it is—not charity, not compassion, but a numbers game.
More people means more pressure on every single aspect of society.
Politicians boast of growth and multicultural vibrancy, while families see overcrowded trains, impossible house prices, and waiting lists that never end.
Australia is not China or India.
It is a nation of just 27 million, yet 500,000 newcomers are being thrown onto its shores every year.
Relative to its size, it is a tidal wave.
Mental health is in freefall, and social trust is fraying.
Without assimilation, the burden grows heavier still.
The tragedy of the commons plays out in real time: too many people competing for too little, and cohesion dissolves into conflict.
To compound matters, as wages rise with inflation, workers are pushed into higher tax brackets.
Families find themselves paying more, not because they are wealthier, but because the system punishes them for trying to stay afloat.
And while average Australians are becoming poorer—financially, spiritually, and psychologically—they are told to be grateful for the “remedies” concocted in boardrooms.
Co-op housing, carbon schemes, endless studies on affordability.
Not one of these confronts the twin truths: immigration drives demand, and taxation drives despair.
To speak these truths is not prejudice, but plain arithmetic.
A house cannot shelter two families at once.
A wage cannot stretch when every dollar is taxed twice.
A nation cannot endure when its pillars collapse.
The Australian dream was never a fantasy.
It was real, tangible and possible, shaped suburbs, raised families, and gave millions a sense of security.
But it is now being dismantled piece by piece.
Young Australians are told not to expect what their parents had.
Instead, they are told to accept “shared equity,” to welcome strangers without limit, and to smile while paying taxes that make savings impossible.
Australians deserve better.
They deserve leaders who fight for families, not for figures on a migration spreadsheet.
They deserve governments that cut waste before they cut wages and housing policies that restore ownership, not repackage renting.
The promise of this country was not meant to be conditional.
It was meant to be the reward for hard work and responsibility.
The great betrayal of our time is that this promise is being broken.
Broken not by accident but by design, by governments that chase short-term numbers while ignoring long-term consequences, by leaders who would rather tinker with schemes than face hard realities.
Australians know better.
They know the dream is not dead, only denied.
And they know it can be restored, but only if those in charge dare to face the truth.
John Mac Ghlionn is a researcher and essayist who writes on psychology and social relations. He has a keen interest in social dysfunction and media manipulation.