The economic betrayal of working Australia

Friendship is being hollowed out as decades of politics, corporate power and now artificial intelligence shift wealth from Australian workers to those who own the system, writes James Stekhoven.

FRIENDSHIP. It’s the word Australians use when they want to describe something important about who we are. Realizing that you can’t bail when things get brutal. Fair action is not a marketing slogan, it is a moral obligation.

Keep this word in mind next time Reserve Bank Supermarkets are increasing rates as they post record profits. Or when a tech company quietly replaces a hundred workers with software and parlays the savings into shareholder returns.

Because what has been done to Australian workers over the last four decades is not just a bad economy; This is a betrayal of friendship.

The men who died at Gallipoli and on the Western Front (shearers, laborers, clerks, teachers) did not die for the landlord class. They died hoping Australia had built something worth defending. A society in which working people have dignity, security and a real stake in the country for which they are asked to give their lives.

This legacy is being liquidated. Quietly. In the language of economic necessity.

inflation fraud

Inflation has increased since 2021; It was said that the drug was an interest increase. Demand is cool, lower prices. It is difficult but necessary.

What was not explained was that the inflation Australians were experiencing was not due to excess demand. happened cost pressure — Energy shocks, supply chains torn apart by COVID, and companies using inflation protection to expand profit margins. ACCC documented this. Supermarkets, energy retailers and insurers; prices have increased far beyond what is justified by cost increases. shareholders put the difference in the bank. interest rates don’t fix any of this. High interest rates do not make gasoline cheaper. They do not restrict a supermarket’s pricing power.

What they do with brutal precision money transfer From debtors to creditors. From mortgage holders to banks. From working Australians to asset owners.

These high rates were then reflected back in inflation itself. Landlords passed on mortgage increases to tenants. There are rents rose It is much faster than fees. Businesses passed on financing costs to customers. The drug made the disease worse, and the workers were told to be grateful.

a digger Pozières That would be a word for editing. It wouldn’t be polite.

The original sin of labor

The architecture of the disadvantaged structure of the working class in modern Australia is primarily John Howard or Tony Abbott. Built by Hawke and Keating – Labor governments – as the union movement collapses.

Prices and Incomes Reconciliation He had real intention. Workers accepted real wage restraint in exchange for social wages (Health insurance, retirement, and a seat at the table). However, the second half of the compact was empty.

Financial deregulation It transferred structural power to capital markets. Transition centralized corporate bargaining It destroyed the coordination that kept wages moving with productivity. Workers atomized – negotiating alone against employers with vastly superior resources. Patterned bargaining has been removed.

By 1996, the scaffolding of three decades of wage stagnation was firmly in place.

The workers surrendered their most powerful collective weapon and received pensions in partial return. Fraud would have embarrassed a quartermaster at Gallipoli.

The tools that target cost inflation (coordinated wage policy, unexpected taxes, price surveillance, strategic industrial policy) are precisely the tools that the post-Keating agreement made politically illegitimate. After dismantling the institutions, the only remaining leverage is in the hands of unelected central bankers whose entire professional formation is in finance.

It is clear that friendship as an economic policy is counterproductive.

AI capture

If the deal is the first major structural transfer from labor to capital in modern Australia, AI is the second. And this time the Government doesn’t even bother to negotiate.

AI is not a future disruption. It came. Legal assistants, journalists, accountants, managers, radiographers; Across the income spectrum, cognitive tasks are being automated at a pace that dwarfs previous technological waves.

One in three Australian workers is at risk job loss From artificial intelligence by 2030. About 28 percent of Australian workers exposed to productive artificial intelligence is involved in a significant part of their duties. Previous automation targeted the factory. This wave is coming to the desks, the clinic, the newsroom and the courtroom.

Economics is simple and brutal. When AI does work previously done by humans, the productivity gains are passed back to shareholders. The worker gains uncertainty. There is no automatic redistribution. No sharing mechanism exists unless the government creates it. And the Albanian Government, like all other Anglosphere governments faced with this problem, has chosen comfortable inaction.

What we have instead is language. Voluntary ethics frameworks. Responsible AI principles. Ministry working groups. Meanwhile, American tech companies, most of which pay negligible Australian taxes, are extracting productivity gains on a spectacular scale from the Australian economy, repatriating profits and being warmly applauded for their innovations.

A returning soldier who fought for full employment and the post-war welfare state, who believed that the sacrifices of war purchased something truly shared, would find this agreement incomprehensible. did not survive Tobruk So a San Francisco company could automate its grandchildren’s jobs, pay no meaningful taxes on profits, and face zero liability to the community whose labor and infrastructure made those gains possible.

EU introduced binding AI regulation. Serious economists argue AI productivity taxes funding retraining and expanded safety nets. There are media unions called for an artificial intelligence tax on businesses replacing workers. In Australia, this idea is barely emerging. The technology lobby and 40 years of political culture that sees market intervention as a sin have created a vacuum where policy should be.

This is not impartiality. It is a choice. Shareholders over workers. Silicon Valley above Shepparton.

What does friendship actually entail?

Societies that manage disruptions best build coordination institutions, truly unions. industry level poweremployers must bargain in good faith, governments are willing to use fiscal tools so that no one person can bear all the pain while someone else captures all the gain.

This is not radical. This is what societies that take friendship seriously really look like; Not a sentiment in the Anzac Day programme, but a set of institutions with teeth.

A. unexpected tax About inflation profiteers recycled into struggling households. One AI productivity tax It’s about companies automating jobs. Mandatory labor consultation before AI deployment. restored industry bargaining. Taxation of capital at rates that reflect its actual social contribution.

Important memories are summoned every April to tell us a story about who we are. But these diggers did not fight for a society in which unforeseen technological advances were pouring into the city’s high end, where workers were told to reskill at their own expense.

They fought for something more generous than that.

We need to start acting like it. Let’s not forget.