{"id":650664,"date":"2026-05-05T07:20:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-05T07:20:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/650664\/"},"modified":"2026-05-05T07:20:18","modified_gmt":"2026-05-05T07:20:18","slug":"the-economic-betrayal-of-working-australia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/650664\/","title":{"rendered":"The economic betrayal of working Australia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mateship is being hollowed out as decades of policy, corporate power and now AI shift wealth from Australian workers to those who own the system, writes James Stekhoven<\/a>.<\/p>\n

MATESHIP. The word Australians reach for when they want to describe something essential about who we are. The understanding that when things get brutal, you don\u2019t bail. That a fair go isn\u2019t a marketing slogan \u2014 it\u2019s a moral obligation.<\/p>\n

Hold that word in mind the next time the Reserve Bank<\/a> raises rates while supermarkets post record profits. Or when a technology company quietly replaces a hundred workers with software and books the savings as shareholder return.<\/p>\n

Because what has been done to Australian workers over the past four decades is not just bad economics; it’s a betrayal of mateship.<\/p>\n

\"Capital<\/a><\/p>\n

The men who died at Gallipoli and on the Western Front \u2013 shearers, labourers, clerks, teachers \u2013 didn\u2019t die for the landlord class. They died hoping that Australia was building something worth defending. A society where working people had dignity, security and a genuine share of the country they were asked to give their lives for.<\/p>\n

That inheritance is being liquidated. Quietly. In the language of economic necessity.<\/p>\n

The inflation con<\/p>\n

Inflation has surged since 2021; we\u2019re told the medicine is interest rate rises. Cool demand, bring prices down. Difficult but necessary.<\/p>\n

What went unexplained is that the inflation Australians experienced was not caused by excess demand. It was cost\u2011push<\/a> \u2014 energy shocks, COVID-fractured supply chains and corporations using the inflationary cover to expand profit margins. The\u00a0ACCC documented it<\/a>. Supermarkets, energy retailers and insurers \u2014 prices rose well beyond what cost increases justified.\u00a0Shareholders banked the difference<\/a>.\u00a0Interest rates fix none of this<\/a>. Higher rates do not make petrol cheaper. They do not constrain a supermarket\u2019s pricing power.<\/p>\n

What they do \u2013 with ruthless precision \u2013 is\u00a0transfer money<\/a> from debtors to creditors. From mortgage holders to banks. From working Australians to the asset\u2011owners.<\/p>\n

Then those higher rates fed back into inflation itself. Landlords passed mortgage increases to renters.\u00a0Rents have risen<\/a> far faster than wages. Businesses passed financing costs to customers. The medication worsened the illness and workers were told to be grateful.<\/p>\n

A digger from\u00a0Pozi\u00e8res<\/a>\u00a0would have had a word for that arrangement. It would not have been polite.<\/p>\n

Labor\u2019s original sin<\/p>\n

The architecture of working\u2011class disadvantage in modern Australia was not built primarily by John Howard<\/a> or Tony Abbott<\/a>. It was built by\u00a0Hawke and Keating<\/a> \u2013 Labor governments\u00a0\u2013 while the union movement rolled over.<\/p>\n

The Prices and Incomes Accord<\/a> had a genuine intent. Workers accepted real wage restraint in exchange for the social wage \u2014 Medicare, superannuation and a seat at the table. But the second half of the compact was hollowed out.<\/p>\n

\"Australia\u2019s<\/a><\/p>\n

Financial deregulation<\/a>\u00a0handed structural power to capital markets. The shift from\u00a0centralised to enterprise bargaining<\/a>\u00a0destroyed the coordination that had kept wages moving with productivity. Workers were\u00a0atomised<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 negotiating alone against employers with vastly superior resources. Pattern bargaining was dismantled.<\/p>\n

By 1996, the scaffolding for three decades of wage stagnation was firmly in place.<\/p>\n

Workers surrendered their most powerful collective weapon and received superannuation in partial exchange. The swindle would have embarrassed a Gallipoli quartermaster.<\/p>\n

The tools that actually address cost\u2011push inflation \u2013 coordinated wages policy, windfall taxes, price oversight, strategic industrial policy \u2013 are precisely the tools the post\u2011Keating settlement rendered politically illegitimate. Having dismantled the institutions, the only lever left is held by unelected central bankers whose entire professional formation was within finance.<\/p>\n

Mateship, as economic policy, is apparently inefficient.<\/p>\n

The AI grab<\/p>\n

If the Accord was the first great structural transfer from labour to capital in modern Australia, artificial intelligence is the second. And this time, the Government isn\u2019t even bothering to negotiate.<\/p>\n

AI is not a future disruption. It\u2019s arrived. Legal assistants, journalists, accountants, administrators, radiographers \u2014 cognitive work across the entire income spectrum is being automated at a pace that dwarfs previous technological waves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One in three Australian workers is at risk of job loss<\/a> by 2030 from AI.\u00a0Around 28 per cent of Australian workers are exposed to generative AI<\/a>\u00a0in significant parts of their tasks. Earlier automation targeted the factory floor. This wave is coming for the desk, the clinic, the newsroom and the courtroom.<\/p>\n

The economics are simple and brutal. When AI does the work previously done by people, the productivity gain again flows to shareholders. The worker gains uncertainty. There is no automatic redistribution. No sharing mechanism exists unless the Government creates one. And the Albanese Government,\u00a0like every Anglosphere government facing this question,\u00a0has chosen comfortable inaction.<\/p>\n

\"Profits<\/a><\/p>\n

What we have instead is language. Voluntary ethics frameworks. Responsible AI principles. Ministerial working groups. Meanwhile, American technology companies, most paying negligible Australian tax, extract productivity gains from the Australian economy on an extraordinary scale, repatriate the profits and are warmly applauded for their innovation.<\/p>\n

A returned serviceman who fought for full employment and the post\u2011war welfare state, who believed the sacrifices of war had purchased something genuinely shared, would find this settlement incomprehensible. He did not survive\u00a0Tobruk<\/a>\u00a0so that a San Francisco corporation could automate his grandchildren\u2019s jobs, pay no meaningful tax on the gains and face zero obligation to the community whose labour and infrastructure made those gains possible.<\/p>\n

The EU has introduced\u00a0binding AI regulation<\/a>. Serious economists are debating\u00a0AI productivity levies<\/a>\u00a0to fund retraining and expanded safety nets.\u00a0Media unions have urged an AI tax on businesses<\/a> that replace workers. In Australia, the idea barely surfaces. The technology lobby and a political culture that has spent 40 years treating market intervention as sin have produced a void where policy should be.<\/p>\n

This is not neutrality. It is a choice. Shareholders over workers. Silicon Valley over Shepparton.<\/p>\n

What mateship would actually require<\/p>\n

Societies that manage disruption best build institutions of coordination \u2014 unions with genuine\u00a0industry\u2011level power<\/a>, employers obligated to bargain in good faith, governments willing to use fiscal tools so no one absorbs the full pain while someone else captures all the gain.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not radical. It\u2019s what societies that take mateship seriously actually look like \u2014 not a sentiment on an Anzac Day program, but a set of institutions with teeth.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0windfall tax<\/a> on inflation profiteers, recycled to struggling households. An\u00a0AI productivity levy<\/a>\u00a0on companies automating away jobs. Mandatory worker consultation before AI deployment. Restored\u00a0industry bargaining<\/a>. Capital taxed at rates reflecting its actual social contribution.<\/p>\n

Important memories are invoked every April to sell us a story about who we are. But those diggers didn\u2019t fight for a society where every technological windfall flows to the top end of town while workers are told to reskill at their own expense.<\/p>\n

They fought for something more generous than that.<\/p>\n

We should start acting like it. Lest we forget.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tSupport independent journalism Subscribe<\/a>\u00a0to IA.\n\t\t<\/p>\n

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\t\t\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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