(Cartoon by Mark David | )

CORPORATE AUSTRALIA HAS DIAGNOSED the nation’s economic malaise. Unsurprisingly, it believes government is largely to blame. Business, apparently, has little to answer for.

New research by law firm Mallesons finds business leaders losing confidence that government policy is supporting productivity and competitiveness.

They present themselves as committed to growth, investment and innovation, while warning that policy failure could leave the next generation worse off than their parents.

The full report will not be released until September, but its early findings, shared with the Australian Financial Review, tell a bleak story. Business is trying to build prosperity, government is getting in the way, and ordinary Australians are paying the price.

It is a convenient and reassuring morality tale. Government is blamed, while business quietly exempts itself from scrutiny.

Corporate Australia’s warning

Mallesons’ annual Directions Survey draws on the views of directors and senior business leaders. The 2026 survey examined economic and regulatory pressures, government-business relations, and the impact of artificial intelligence on strategy and organisational design.

The results show a business community increasingly dissatisfied with government. Just 1.6 per cent of respondents believe the relationship between business and government is working “very well”, while more than 40 per cent say it is working poorly. More than half believe current policy settings will harm productivity growth.

The message is that government failure, excessive regulation and the lack of business-friendly reform threaten productivity and future living standards.

This account is only half right.

Productivity matters, and business leaders are right to worry about Australia’s weak performance.

But their view rests on an assumption that corporate Australia treats as common sense. Lift productivity and prosperity will follow. It is the old promise of trickle-down economics. What benefits business is presented as benefiting everyone.

The same old trickle-down myth

Faith in business-led prosperity is hardly new. It was a central promise of the neoliberal project that has dominated economic policy since the 1980s.

For decades, we have been told that if governments cut red tape, reduce taxes, weaken constraints on business and create favourable conditions for investment, the resulting economic growth will eventually flow through to the rest of society.

History tells a different story. Economic growth and productivity gains have largely failed to translate into broadly shared benefits to working people.

As the OECD has noted, rising productivity does not automatically lead to inclusive prosperity, with the benefits often distributed unevenly across firms, workers and households.

Australians have lived through this failure. Real disposable incomes have declined significantly and housing affordability has become increasingly strained while market concentration and profit margins have risen across much of the economy.

Who really benefits?

What the business story refuses to confront is the fact that the real problem is not simply about how much wealth an economy creates, but who has the power to claim it.

If corporate leaders are serious about the prosperity of future generations, they need to do more than cherry-pick policies that serve their own commercial interests and present them as a national economic strategy.

Productivity creates wealth. Who receives it depends on wages, bargaining power, taxation, competition, housing and the institutions that govern economic life, many of which business actively seeks to influence in its own financial objectives.

Without institutions that distribute economic gains more fairly, greater productivity can become corporate profits, rising executive remuneration, soaring asset prices and further concentration of wealth.

Productivity may be necessary for rising living standards, but it is far from sufficient.

What business leaders leave out

If business leaders’ concern for future generations is genuine, then they need to start asking different questions, rather than limiting themselves to the kinds of policies that got us into this mess.

How will productivity gains be shared with workers rather than absorbed into profits? Are corporations investing enough in skills and training? Are executive rewards rising faster than employee incomes? Are firms promoting competition, or benefiting from market concentration?

These are not peripheral questions, but they are largely absent from a business agenda focused on lower regulatory burdens, investment incentives and the conditions corporations say they need to succeed.

Blaming government is easier than confronting the possibility that today’s pressures on wages, housing and living standards stem in no small part from an economic model from which business itself has benefited.

It is true that the next generation is at risk of being worse off than the last, but higher productivity alone will not save it. Australia also needs an economic system that distributes the benefits of growth fairly.

If business wants support, it needs to explain not only how wealth will be created, but how it will be shared.

Without that, its productivity agenda is not a plan for national prosperity. It is a demand for corporate advantage dressed up as concern for the future.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 15 August 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/business-pushes-trickle-down-myth-then-blames-government-for-its-inevitable-failure,21425

Pauline Hanson considers Gina Rinehart her friend yet refers to her deferentially as “Mrs Rinehart” (Screenshot via YouTube)

LAST WEEK, Pauline Hanson’s updated parliamentary registry of interests revealed that Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, had paid for her to fly from London to Sicily to go to a Dolce & Gabbana fashion show.

It is the latest in a series of gifts and benefits provided by Rinehart to Hanson and her One Nation party, including domestic flights, hospitality and even a Cirrus G7 private jet worth $1.3 million.

When it comes to their relationship, Treasurer Jim Chalmers is on record as saying: “Pauline Hanson is a wholly owned subsidiary of Gina Rinehart”, working against the interests of “workers and battlers”.

There is a striking paradox here. One Nation’s growing support is driven in part by rising living costs, housing stress and a widespread sense that the economic system no longer works for ordinary Australians.

If that is the case, why is Australia’s richest billionaire among the party’s most enthusiastic supporters?

Turning economic pain into cultural grievance

A key to addressing this question is illustrated in the events surrounding Pauline Hanson’s recent European “fact-finding mission”.

The trip was supposedly about immigration, multiculturalism and national identity. “I don’t want Australia to become like Britain has,” Hanson explained. Mass deportations? “Oh, I love it,” she said.

The culture war campaigning continued when she got home. Having focused on immigration abroad, she soon turned her attention elsewhere. Taking domestic violence leave from work? That’s a scam for a holiday, she claimed. Single motherhood? That’s a get-rich-quick scheme.

Last month, workers were in her sights. Why are we in such economic dire straits? It’s because, to use her words, workers “actually are lazy” and businesses “can’t sack people these days”.

There are clearly no new “facts” here, only familiar themes from the Far-Right populist playbook. If Hanson has learned anything recently, it is not about immigration, multiculturalism or national identity. Rather, it is how to convert economic pain into support for the cultural grievances she has championed for decades.

The missing question of inequality

With One Nation, Australians struggling to make ends meet amid stagnant wages and rising prices are encouraged to blame immigrants, single mothers, domestic violence victims and supposedly lazy workers.

What is conspicuously absent is any serious scrutiny of concentrated wealth, corporate power or economic inequality. This is where Rinehart comes in.

When asked why One Nation is supported by Rinehart, Hanson recently said she is a:

“...very smart, clever woman. She’s a very proud, patriotic Australian, and she sees the same in me. That’s why she backs me.”

Hanson has publicly acknowledged consulting Rinehart on policy matters and has credited her with developing at least one One Nation policy proposal. While counting her as a “friend”, she also refers to her deferentially as “Mrs Rinehart”.

Appeals to friendship, patriotism and shared values tell only part of the story. The other part is One Nation’s silence on the extraordinary accumulation of assets by billionaires, the tax advantages enjoyed by the wealthy, or the widening gap between those who own assets and those who rely on wages.

Voters are encouraged to see immigration, multiculturalism, government regulation and political correctness as the source of their problems, rather than asking who benefits from the unequal distribution of wealth and power.

This is what makes the relationship between Hanson and Rinehart far less paradoxical than it first appears. One Nation gives expression to genuine economic frustration while directing political anger elsewhere.

The result is a policy platform that promises little in the way of changing the inequalities embedded in the economic status quo, or Rinehart’s position at the very apex of it.

Hope for whom?

Speaking at the Townsville Bulletin Bush Summit in June, Rinehart blamed the problems facing regional Australia on “big spending government, wasteful government”, high taxes and excessive regulation. Hanson, by contrast, was praised for giving “Aussies across our country hope”.

But hope for what?

There are many ways of addressing the growing reality that prosperity is being shared less and less fairly. Think of wealth taxes, higher taxes on billionaires, inheritance taxes, major reforms to capital gains concessions, reducing the political influence of the rich or stronger redistribution of wealth and income.

None of these is on One Nation’s policy agenda. Instead, the party offers explanations centred on immigration, cultural change, welfare dependency, government regulation and political correctness.

The discontent driving One Nation’s rise is real. But addressing it requires confronting deeper questions about who owns wealth, who exercises power and who benefits from the way the economy is organised.

Until those questions are confronted, the frustrations on which One Nation thrives will persist, and the inequalities that generate them will continue to deepen.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 1 August 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/australias-fairness-problem-is-holding-productivity-back,21317

(Cartoon by Mark David | @MDavidCartoons)

ASK AUSTRALIA’S business leaders what keeps them awake at night and the most common answer is productivity. It ranks ahead of economic uncertainty, political risk, business transformation and financial management.

According to the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the problem lies largely with government. Excessive regulation, outdated workplace laws, inefficient tax settings and barriers to investment are said to be holding productivity back.

If those matters are resolved, they argue, Australia will:

‘... create an environment where businesses can grow, workers can benefit, and Australia remains globally competitive.’

It is a well-worn story. If only government would get out of the way, business would generate stronger economic growth and everyone would share in the rewards.

But there may be another way of understanding Australia’s productivity problem. Rather than looking solely to regulation, taxation or labour market reform, it is worth asking whether prevailing business practices and organisational cultures are themselves part of the problem.

The missing link between productivity and pay

Research presented by Warwick Smith and Adelajda Soltysik from the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) at the Economic Society of Australia (ESA) annual conference earlier this month found that workers’ pay has failed to keep pace with productivity growth since the 1990s.

Rather than flowing into higher wages, a growing share of productivity gains has failed to show up in workers’ pay packets. Perhaps more strikingly, workers have fallen furthest behind in the very industries where productivity has grown most rapidly.

It is not just that productivity is outstripping pay; workers are actually going backwards. The OECD has just reported that since 2021, real wages in Australia have fallen by around 5 per cent, one of the sharpest declines among advanced economies. While living standards across OECD countries have generally improved since the pandemic, Australian workers have experienced a significant decline.

Australia’s labour market remains relatively strong, and unemployment is low by historic standards. Australians are working. The question is whether they are still receiving a fair share of the value their work generates.

For a country that prides itself on fairness, this raises a deeper question: What happens when people work harder, become more productive and help create greater prosperity, but increasingly struggle to see the benefits in their own lives?

The fraying productivity bargain

A productive economy relies on more than regulation, technology, investment and efficient markets. It also relies on people believing that their contribution will be recognised and rewarded.

Workers are asked to invest their effort, creativity and commitment in the expectation that they will share in the prosperity they help create. The gap between productivity and pay matters because it weakens that expectation.

This is not merely an abstract economic argument. It is the lived experience of Australians who find housing increasingly unaffordable, discover their pay buys less at the supermarket each year, and are repeatedly told the economy is growing while their own living standards stagnate.

Could this help explain why Australia’s productivity growth has weakened? Workers who feel valued, respected and fairly rewarded are more likely to contribute the effort, initiative and innovation needed to drive improvement.

By contrast, when the rewards of economic growth are increasingly captured by business while workers are left behind, the motivation and willingness to contribute that underpin long-term productivity can begin to erode.

Reconnecting effort and reward

Rather than looking to government alone to solve the productivity crisis, all of this suggests that business itself may hold part of the answer.

Most debates focus on how productivity growth can lift wages and living standards. Far less attention is paid to the possibility that the relationship might also run in the opposite direction.

Workers who can see a clear connection between their efforts and their rewards are more likely to embrace change, invest in new skills and contribute the discretionary effort that organisations need.

In this sense, Australia may not just have a productivity problem. It may have a fairness problem that is holding productivity back.

For years, many organisations have pursued strategies based on wage restraint, labour flexibility, outsourcing and relentless cost cutting. Such approaches may deliver short-term financial gains, but over time they can undermine the trust, loyalty and engagement that sustain long-term performance.

Perhaps Australia’s productivity crisis is not simply a problem of government policy. Perhaps it is also the consequence of a model of business that has increasingly failed to reward the people whose work underpins its success.

If workers no longer see a meaningful connection between effort and reward, business should not be surprised when productivity becomes harder to find.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 18 July 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/australias-fairness-problem-is-holding-productivity-back,21317

The Internet’s Decline, and What It Has to Do with Research

Something has gone wrong with Amazon. Search for a product and the results are flooded with near-identical items from anonymous third-party sellers. Scroll through Google and genuine results are buried beneath layers of sponsored content. Log on to social media and algorithmically promoted posts crowd out the people you follow. This creeping degradation of digital platforms is called ‘enshittification’, a term coined by writer Cory Doctorow in 2023 to describe the death spiral of online platforms that begin by serving users, then serve advertisers, and finally serve only themselves. The American Dialect Society named it word of the year.

Our own research, published this year in the journal Organization, shows that the same process is now well underway in academic publishing, with serious consequences for the meaning and value of scholarly research. The stakes are high. As this publication system degrades, the knowledge base on which management education and business schools depend is weakened, ultimately putting at risk the value and credibility of business schools themselves.

Five Stages of a Downward Spiral

We identify a five‑stage enshittification process that is operating in academic publishing, and analyse how it is driven by the convergence of commercial incentives and a deeply entrenched ‘publish or perish’ culture.

The first stage is the commodification of research. Since the 1980s, academic knowledge has been progressively stripped of its intrinsic value and recast as a tradeable commodity. Research is evaluated not for what it contributes to human understanding, but for where it is published: specifically, whether it appears in journals on approved ranking lists. The result is what Pardo-Guerra in his 2022 book has called the ‘quantified scholar’, an academic whose worth is determined by scores, metrics and rankings rather than the quality or impact of their ideas.

The second stage is the proliferation of pay-to-publish models. The open-access (OA) movement, launched in the early 2000s with genuine democratic ambitions, sought to remove paywalls and broaden access to research. But commercial publishers rapidly co-opted the model. Rather than charging readers, they began charging authors, imposing article processing charges (APCs) as high as €9,500 per paper in prestige journals. Alongside extras such as proofreading and ‘editing services’, this has created a lucrative new revenue stream that has perverted the economics of publishing. Academics now effectively pay to be published, while publishers’ profits are boosted, often from budgets directly funded from the public purse.

The third stage is a decline in quality and integrity. As publishers compete for volume, even the peer review process, long-regarded as the cornerstone of scholarly rigour, comes under pressure. In 2023, Web of Science delisted approximately 50 journals, including publications from prominent open-access publishers, after concerns that rapid ‘special issue’ growth had compromised review standards. Financial incentives to accept papers create systematic pressure to lower the quality bar.

The fourth stage is a surge in low-quality publications. The number of papers indexed in major databases grew from 1.92 million in 2016 to 2.82 million by 2022. Estimates suggest that as many as 25% of open-access journals may be predatory, existing primarily to extract fees, with over 400,000 such articles published in 2014 alone, a figure that has likely risen substantially since.

Paradoxically, this explosion of output may be suppressing genuine innovation. Research published in the journal Nature found that while the volume of scientific papers has grown exponentially in recent decades, it is significantly less likely to be disruptive of direction-setting.

The fifth and final stage is enshittification itself. This is the point when the scholarly system becomes so overwhelmed by quantity and distorted by profit motives that it becomes stripped of its core purpose of advancing knowledge.

Why Business Schools Should Take Notice

The leaders of business schools – deans, programme directors and those overseeing teaching and learning – might reasonably ask whether this is a problem for science disciplines rather than management education. The evidence suggests otherwise. Business schools sit at the epicentre of the forces driving enshittification.

Journal rankings in particular matter intensely in management education. Instruments such as Financial Times (FT) rankings, the Chartered Association of Business Schools (CABS) Journal Quality Guide or the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) Journal Quality List, which have all institutionalised a culture in which publication in ‘approved’ journals trumps the substantive contribution of research. When a paper’s acceptance into a high-ranking journal validates it as a commodity regardless of its content, the incentives for scholars do not point towards bold, risky or genuinely innovative work. The result is a homogenisation of research that serves career advancement more than it serves knowledge.

The burden falls unevenly. Scholars facing precarious employment, institutional marginalisation or language barriers are disproportionately pushed towards the pay-to-publish market. Researchers from the Global South often face a particular double bind of needing to publish in English-language journals for international recognition while contending with APCs that can amount to a year’s salary. Business schools that champion diversity and inclusion must reckon with the fact that the publishing system they valorise reproduces precisely the inequities they seek to address.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) adds a further dimension directly relevant to management education’s current concerns. The same AI tools reshaping business practice are now generating publishable-looking research at scale. While AI has many benefits, using AI tools to mass-produce papers that merely sustain the ongoing enshittification of academic publishing is not one of them. AI-driven publications pose genuine risks to the knowledge base on which educators, students but also executives and policymakers rely, and raise questions about the integrity of the research pipeline feeding into business school curricula and executive education.

What Can Be Done?

Enshittification is not inevitable. The current trajectory can be reversed, but doing so requires deliberate intervention at multiple levels. At the level of evaluation, institutions and funding bodies need to move away from journal-based metrics as a primary proxy for research quality. The Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) offers a promising framework, seeking to rebalance evaluation towards broader assessments of scholarly contribution and societal impact. Business schools that genuinely value knowledge creation over credential-accumulation have both the incentive and the influence to advocate for this shift.

At the level of publishing infrastructure, a return to not-for-profit models through academic societies, university presses and institutional repositories would prioritise dissemination over extraction. Cooperative publishing models, in which governance returns to scholarly communities, offer a structural alternative to the commercial oligopoly that currently dominates the market.

At the level of culture, the ‘publish or perish’ imperative needs to be critically examined. This includes a limit on incentives that reward volume over quality, the recognition of more diverse forms of scholarly contribution, and the desire for genuine accountability for research integrity are changes that business school leaders are well-positioned to champion.

A Leadership Challenge

It would be easy to dismiss concerns about academic publishing as the grievances of frustrated scholars. The evidence suggests something more serious. Business schools are enmeshed in the systemic erosion of the infrastructure through which knowledge is produced, evaluated and disseminated. Global academic publishing is a USD 19 billion industry, with some publishers reporting profit margins that rival those of Microsoft or Google. For publishers, the commercial logic is as coherent as it is exploitative. The question for everyone else is whether research should be treated as a public good or reduced to a commodity.

The enshittification of academic publishing sits at the intersection of AI automation, the attention economy, institutional responsibility and the obligation of management education to generate knowledge that is genuinely useful to organisations and society. Business school leaders helped create the incentive structures driving this system. They are therefore not only implicated in the problem but uniquely positioned to change it.

This article was originally published in Global Focus on 1 July 2026 and is republished with permission.

AUSTRALIA’S NEW POLITICAL PARTY, Community Strong Australia, has emerged with a distinctive political proposition. At a time when populist movements are reshaping democracies around the world, what makes the party unusual is its seemingly paradoxical attempt to combine populist appeal with political moderation.

Contemporary political debate is often framed as a contest between progressive liberalism and an increasingly assertive populist right. Community Strong Australia, however, might just succeed in carving out a different path.

What the party’s founders and MPs Zali Steggall and Allegra Spender appear to be creating is what we might call “centrist populism”. It combines a populist critique of the political establishment with a broadly moderate and pragmatic policy outlook.

Can centrist populism succeed where liberal centrism has faltered, while avoiding the anger and exclusion that have come to define populism on the right?

The right-wing populist playbook

When we think of populism, we usually imagine its right-wing variants, exemplified in Australia by Pauline Hanson and One Nation. Such movements combine hostility to political and cultural elites with attacks on immigration, multiculturalism and so-called “woke” politics.

Right-wing populism does not emerge from nowhere. It begins by identifying genuine grievances felt by many citizens, especially economic insecurity, declining living standards, distrust of political institutions and rapid social change. It then transforms those grievances into a combative political narrative that pits “ordinary people” against a self-serving elite.

In this way, legitimate concerns about economic insecurity and political disconnection are transformed into a politics of resentment and cultural conflict, often diverting attention from the underlying economic pressures driving public discontent.

What Community Strong Australia appears to be attempting is a centrist version of populist politics, but with one crucial difference. It recognises many of the same grievances that right-wing populists identify, amplify and exploit, but seeks to respond to them without the exclusionary, resentful and often racist politics that characterise much contemporary right-wing populism.

A populism of the centre?

While right-wing populists tend to redirect public frustration towards migrants, minorities and cultural elites, Community Strong Australia seems to be trying something different by channelling dissatisfaction with the political establishment into a politics of reform, participation and representation.

Zali Steggall is explicit in her populist framing.

Speaking on the day of the party’s launch on 25 June, she stated that Australians were:

“...frustrated and tired of the status quo. The major parties have contributed to the situation we are in where too many Australians feel like they are not getting ahead. The system is not listening to their concerns.”

This is unmistakably populist language, contrasting ordinary citizens with an unresponsive political establishment.

Yet Steggall also describes the party as “centrist”, emphasising:

“...sensible economic management, climate action, integrity [and] equality.”

The logic is clear: acknowledge the growing dissatisfaction bubbling up through the Australian population, identify the major parties as part of the problem, but then propose a moderate and institutional response rather than one based on extremism or exclusion.

Populism without extremism

As Allegra Spender put it this week:

“...a lot of people feel politically homeless”. Many, she argued, are “deeply cynical about the major parties” and “deeply frustrated with them”, but are also “really concerned about extremism”.

This captures the political space Community Strong Australia is seeking to occupy. What it offers is a populism without extremism or zealotry. It channels public frustration with the major parties, but without the resentment, scapegoating and culture wars that have become the hallmarks of right-wing populism both in Australia and internationally.

Community Strong Australia’s centrist populism seeks to represent citizens who feel neglected by the major parties but are reluctant to embrace political extremes. In doing so, it aims to channel dissatisfaction with conventional politics while maintaining a commitment to democratic institutions, social cohesion and economic responsibility.

Politically, the strategy is astute. It leans into a space largely vacant in Australian politics by appealing to voters disillusioned with the political status quo while rejecting polarisation and cultural conflict.

The economic test

The unanswered question is whether Community Strong Australia can deliver policies that address the economic conditions driving dissatisfaction with mainstream politics, especially wealth inequality, housing unaffordability, wage stagnation and the soaring cost of living. The party has already identified many of these economic pressures and its website argues that Australians are ‘working hard and not getting ahead’.

It is too early to know whether the party represents a genuinely new form of centrist populism that can drive real change felt at the supermarket cash register, or simply a rebranding of liberal centrism. As the party develops its policy positions, the crucial test will be economic.

If Community Strong Australia can pair its language of community and political renewal with credible policies on housing, taxation and living standards, it may succeed in building a broader constituency beyond the teal-aligned voters most likely to be its initial supporters.

The real test is whether centrist populism can move beyond diagnosing economic insecurity to addressing it. Otherwise, Community Strong Australia risks settling into a formula of being socially progressive and politically reformist, but economically conservative when it comes to the pressing need to challenge the vested interests that sustain the status quo.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 4 July 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/centre-v-right-populism-same-grievances-different-answers,21251

Durchs dunkelte Deutsclands. Die Doppel-Justitia. by Thomas Theodor Heine (1867–1948), licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

As the World Inequality Report 2026 warns us that we live in “a world in which a tiny minority commands unprecedented financial power, while billions remain excluded from even basic economic stability” political leaders continue to insist that meritocracy is the path to fairness. The report confirmed that wealth concentration has accelerated even in countries that claim to champion equal opportunity, yet the harsher the data becomes, the more loudly meritocracy is invoked as a moral defence of the status quo. Inequality is reframed not as a structural failure but as the natural sorting of a society where the deserving rise and the undeserving fall.

Meritocracy has become the moral alibi of the wealthy. Under its banner, the hoarding of an oversized share of the world’s riches is recast not as exploitation or structural injustice, but as the natural reward owed to the industrious and the gifted. Meritocracy presents itself as the basis of a fair society where opportunities are equal, and rewards accrue to the deserving, irrespective of creed, colour or connections. This was the political logic at play when United States President Donald Trump issued an executive order titled Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy. The order rolled back the civil‑rights‑era legal standard of ‘disparate impact,’ which underpinned federal anti‑discrimination laws designed to address both overt racism and the structural barriers that continue to produce inequality. Trump’s order stated:

A bedrock principle of the United States is that all citizens are treated equally under the law. This principle guarantees equality of opportunity, not equal outcomes […] It encourages meritocracy and a colorblind society, not race- or sex-based favoritism. Adherence to this principle is essential to creating opportunity, encouraging achievement, and sustaining the American Dream.

The executive order formed part of a broader political agenda that, under the guise of meritocracy, sought to undermine civil rights and dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across U.S. public institutions and beyond. Trump argued that such programs constituted “race‑based and sex‑based discrimination” that served to “discourage merit and leadership.”

Trump’s rhetoric drew on the image of, in his words, a “society that is colour-blind and merit-based”, where the most talented and hardworking people rightly reap a greater share of life’s material rewards. In his simple moral worldview, society is divided into winners and losers, and which side of that line a person finds themselves is entirely their own doing. Trump’s meritocracy offers a distinct moral framework in which the rich, successful and powerful are not fortunate, they are righteous, having earned their status through superior virtue and breeding. An inequality of outcomes is a sign of justice, and those who do not achieve such things are cast as authors of their own misfortune. This dichotomising logic becomes a moral defence of economic inequality, especially when that inequality is based on racial and gendered divisions.

The contemporary obsession with meritocracy did not originate with Trump, nor is it exclusively tied to the right-wing populism that he advocates. While Trump deploys the idea of meritocracy for his own political purposes, often through a harsh dichotomising rhetoric, it is part of a broader post-political neoliberal consensus cemented in the early 21^st century. A key figure in this development was British Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair. In 2001, Blair was riding high. He was coming to the end of his first term as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and commanding a significant lead in the opinion polls ahead of his re-election . The central themes that informed Blair’s election campaign were meritocracy, choice and opportunity. “New Labour’s big idea is the development of human potential”, he said, “It is based on a notion of equality that is not about outcomes or incomes; but about equal worth”.

Questioned on his political position, Blair was openly post-political, arguing that he operated outside the distinction between left and right. “We are what we believe in. We are meritocrats. We believe in empowering all our people,” he proclaimed. Like Trump after him, Blair embraced the belief that everyone could compete for their share of the bounty of global wealth, and that those who deserve it most should benefit most. Blair offered a capitalist version of meritocracy in which the just rewards for a person’s hard work would be measured by what the market deemed that labour to be worth. When he was first elected as Prime Minister, Blair even went so far as to say the old elitist system was being replaced by a “new Britain is a meritocracy where we break down the barriers of class, religion, race and culture”.

While Blair may have politicised meritocracy, enthusiasm for it had already been growing in the global business community. In 1997, Steven Hankin of the top-tier consulting firm McKinsey & Co. coined the term ‘the war for talent’, signalling the intensifying competition between major corporations. This competition was not a fight over customers or revenues but over hiring the ‘best’ people from what was portrayed as a small pool of exceptionally talented executives. Hankin and his colleagues prophesised that “companies are about to be engaged in a war for senior executive talent that will remain a defining characteristic of their competitive landscape for decades to come”.

The ‘talent mindset’ that the McKinsey consultants insisted that successful companies must adopt was symptomatic of the age of meritocracy that they were part of ushering in. This was a ‘global meritocracy’ where the barriers to success were not geographical but simply down to the position of talent and the willingness to work hard. In this new global system, competition was the central organising principle as individuals were pitted against each other in the world labour market cum corporate Colosseum that drew a dichotomous line between the talented and the rest. The winner would, and should prevail! Global meritocracy was propelled by the global war for talent, which turned skilled workers into a new commodity traded by multinational corporations. In the latter parts of the 20^th century governments of advanced economies worldwide promoted education to increase their stock of ‘human capital’. Emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil, India and Russia similarly invested in developing ‘talent’ as part of their engagement in the global economy. Countries too could compete to be winners in the global economy, a mantra echoed by Bill Clinton’s ‘New Democrats’ in the United States, Gerhard Schröder’s ‘Neue Mitte’ (New Centre) in Germany, the Ulivo (Olive Tree) Coalition in Italy and beyond.

While the popularisation of meritocracy as a political virtue came about at the turn of the 21^st century, the term’s origins tell a very different story. Historically, meritocracy is a relatively recent term, coined by British sociologist Allan Fox in the 1950s, though he did not share the political enthusiasm it has attracted in the 21st century. In an article called ‘Class and Equality’ published in the Socialist Commentary in 1956 Fox argued convincingly that although meritocracy claimed to be the high road from class oppression to equality, this was, in fact, a chimera. For Fox, meritocracy was simply a new class system that replaced birthright with talent as the basis of inequality. Meritocracy did nothing to foster equality; it merely changed who occupied the top of an unequal hierarchy. Fox was nothing if not satirical. What he found especially undesirable was that meritocracy championed:

[A] society in which the gifted, the smart, the energetic, the ambitious and the ruthless are carefully sifted out and helped towards their destined positions of dominance, where they proceed not only to enjoy the fulfillment of exercising their natural endowments but also to receive a fat bonus thrown in for good measure.

The problem is that meritocracy, even if it were entirely successful in achieving its own desired outcomes, does not remove social inequality, it just changes the basis on which people are unequal.

Fox may have coined the term meritocracy, but it became more widely known through the publication of Michael Young’s satirical book The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality in 1958. Like Fox, Young was far from a fan of meritocracy. The book, written as the report of a fictional sociologist, imagines a Britain in 2033 that had become entirely meritocratic.

Today we frankly recognize that democracy can be no more than aspiration, and have rule not so much by the people as by the cleverest people; not an aristocracy of birth, not a plutocracy of wealth, but a true meritocracy of talent.

Merit, in this new world, was defined as IQ plus effort, and those who had the most of it ruled the roost. No longer would a highly intelligent and hard working person born into a lower class family remain stuck there. They would instead be educated for greatness and responsibility, hoisted up the social ladder in accordance with their merit. This is a society where one’s place in the social hierarchy was determined by one’s place in the intellectual hierarchy. If a person is in a lower class, it is not because they were born into a particular family, it is because they are actually inferior!

In the fictional 2033, while nepotism and inheritance were eliminated as the basis of class reproduction, for Young, the meritocratic future is entirely dystopian. Sieved and sifted through the education system, the kids were streamed so that, from an early age, the brightest and the best could be cultivated into a new upper class of meritocratic rulers. Equality of opportunity thus functioned as a mechanism designed to produce inequality of outcomes. The problem is that meritocracy does not abate inequality. Quite the contrary, it provided a moral justification for a different structure of inequality. This was the dominant political philosophy in Young’s dystopian future and is also dominant for today’s advocates of meritocracy.

What can be learned from Young is that if we focus only on debating whether today’s wealthy deserve their riches based on an assessment of their merit, we are engaging with only half of the problem with the meritocratic ideal. The other, and indeed more potent half, is the question of whether meritocracy is a worthy political ideal in the first place, despite being championed by politicians as seemingly ideologically distant as Tony Blair and Donald Trump. The real issue is not simply whether we do or do not live in a meritocratic society, but whether meritocracy itself is a desirable aspiration. Young’s answer is an unequivocal no. The problem is not just that extremely wealthy people represent a failure of meritocracy, but that meritocracy is a failure of an idea.

Meritocracy is a political ideal that justifies economic inequality as fair. Democracy, by contrast, is both a political system and a way of life grounded in equality, and thus stands in direct opposition to meritocracy. The fusion of meritocratic rhetoric with democratic institutions in the early 21st century became not only a cause of rising inequality but also its principal moral alibi. Meritocracy recognises no solidarity or community as it reduces social life to individual striving and competition such that shared prosperity and care for the well-being of all citizens is an anathema to meritocracy. In place of meritocracy’s survival of the fittest ethos, democracy promises that all can survive and flourish. This is a promise worth remembering and striving to keep. Democratic politics asks what is required for all to live with dignity, security and voice. If meritocracy is a fable crafted to sanctify unequal outcomes, democracy names an alternative based on shared prosperity, mutual care, and institutions built to make human flourishing the norm rather than the privilege of a meritocratically sanctioned elite.

A version of this article was first published in Italian translation as La meritocrazia nell’era di Trump. Come la disuguaglianza ha trovato il suo alibi morale in La Fionda 1/2026. This is the original English version.

Photo by Tracy O, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Whenever inequality comes under scrutiny, attention quickly turns to individual billionaires, and more recently even a trillionaire. Does Elon Musk deserve his wealth? What about Jeff Bezos? Is Warren Buffett one of the good ones? These questions dominate public debate. But they risk obscuring a more important truth that billionaires are not the cause of our economic problems. They are the product of them.

Blaming individual billionaires for the problem of inequality is easy and all too obvious. That gives them too much credit. Billionaires are a symptom of the problem, not the creators of it. The ability of particular individuals to accrue such obscene amounts of wealth is a result of them being able to exploit a political and economic system that has set the world up for economic injustice. Targeting individuals, no matter how arrogant, privileged or entitled they are is a distraction from the real task of changing the system that created them. Individual people come and go through the ebb and flow of life. Systems that entrench inequality and create a world where a vast minority of people hoard wealth and power are more entrenched.

The tragedy of the past 40 years of the neoliberal experiment has been the loss of faith in a collective project of progress towards shared prosperity and equality. The dominant model of globalization that emerged from the West promised shared prosperity. In practice, however, it has been accompanied by rising concentrations of wealth and power. It has created a winner-takes-all system that prizes individual achievement and makes billionaires seem like heroes. This has worked and the winners continue to take more and more of what the world’s wealth can offer, casting the promise of democracy and equality asunder along the way. The salt in the wounds is that this system that is geared for the benefit of the few rather than the many presents itself as just and righteous, as if some people deserve the lavish excess of wealth at the expense of those who do not. Such are the myths of the good billionaire.

But the demand for change is also increasingly pervasive as a new generation emerges unwilling to accept the harsh realities and injustices of economic inequality. There are many parts to the solution, ranging from market reform, taxation policy, to public education. Above all of that is the need for a resurgent hope in the democratic promises of freedom, equality and solidarity. Unlike inequality itself, hope is not an existential reality, it is a political choice to believe that the condition of the world can and should be more just. Without an idea of a future that is better than the present there can be no renewed political imagination that will take action for progress.

Political hope is not an individual matter, its force emerges from solidarity across differences as people around the world realize that economic inequality is not only undesirable but that it is also not inevitable. The growing number of voices around the world calling for a new politics of equality are testament to the possibility that those choices can be made, if only the collective political will to do so continues to develop. Collective political will—the will of the people—is the centrepiece of democracy, both as a model of government and as a political ideal.

So long as power continues to accrue to an increasingly large billionaire class, the world is on a road away from democracy, returning to the plutocracy and feudalism that deserves to be kept in the past. Political choices made decades ago set the world on its current trajectory. Political choices can change that trajectory too. The growing demands for economic justice, democratic renewal and shared prosperity suggest that a different future remains possible, if we can stop treating billionaires as heroes or villains and start confronting the system that made them possible.

Former KPMG executives Andrew Yates and Julian McPherson appear before a Joint Committee 19 June 2026 (Screenshot via YouTube)

AS AUSTRALIA SEARCHES FOR ways to grow productivity and investment, business groups insist that one of the answers is less regulation. The Business Council of Australia (BCA) has been especially vocal, earlier this year calling for a 25 per cent reduction in regulatory costs by 2030.

Responding to the Federal Budget, its chief executive, Bran Black, said that cutting regulatory costs by more than $10 billion a year was:

“...a most welcome step towards lifting Australia’s productivity and investment competitiveness.”

The message is simple. Red tape is a cost holding business back and prosperity will follow when the government gets out of the way. It is a familiar morality tale of honest, hard-working firms being thwarted by bureaucratic obstruction.

But the story is only half told. The other half lies in the incentives, norms and patterns of corporate conduct that have repeatedly undermined public trust.

The trust deficit

The business sector’s critique of regulation often treats it as little more than pointless compliance that smothers innovation and growth.

Not all regulations are well designed, and poorly constructed rules can impose real costs on firms and consumers alike. But regulation is not simply bureaucratic clutter.

When businesses cannot be relied on to act responsibly, governments regulate more heavily. Rather than reflecting hostility to either firms or markets, it reflects a loss of confidence that businesses will act responsibly without oversight.

Trust in Australian business has been under strain for years. Corporate scandals, widening inequality and perceptions that economic gains disproportionately benefit elites have weakened public confidence.

In the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, 66 per cent of Australians reported worrying that business leaders deliberately mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.

This poses a dilemma. Business wants fewer constraints in the name of growth, yet many Australians do not trust it to use that freedom in the public interest.

Trust is both a moral virtue and economic infrastructure. Markets work better when people believe institutions are competent, fair and accountable. When trust collapses, regulation expands to fill the gap.

So, the question is not just why businesses face so many rules. It is why so many Australians believe those rules are necessary.

AstraZeneca and the limits of commercial reasoning

If business wants the public to accept fewer constraints, it must first show that greater freedom will be exercised responsibly. Two recent corporate controversies help explain why many Australians remain unconvinced.

Pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca is withdrawing the breast cancer and endometriosis drug Zoladex 3.6mg from the Australian market from 1 November 2026. The only explanation it gave was that it was for “commercial reasons“.

The drug was filled 94,000 times in the previous 18 months and patient groups say the decision has left many women anxious about losing access to a treatment on which they rely.

Companies inevitably make decisions based on commercial criteria. The problem is that many patients felt commercial criteria had been given greater weight than patient care. For women dealing with serious, sometimes life-threatening conditions, the withdrawal of a vital medicine with little public explanation was bound to deepen distrust.

Decisions justified only by “commercial reasons” may satisfy a boardroom. They are far less likely to satisfy the public.

KPMG and the price of lost trust

Where AstraZeneca illustrates how commercial imperatives can conflict with social expectations, the revelations about KPMG show what happens when commercial ambition appears to corrode professional obligation.

The controversy centres on whistleblower allegations that confidential Lendlease board papers were used internally to help KPMG pursue audit work with other companies such as Westpac and Dexus.

KPMG’s internal review and a later external review by Ashurst did not substantiate the allegations.

Despite that, the fallout has been severe. In May 2026, KPMG chief executive Andrew Yates and audit leader Julian McPherson resigned over the handling of the whistleblower matter.

The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has since launched a formal investigation, and the federal Department of Finance has announced an independent review of KPMG’s governance, culture, ethics and integrity frameworks. KPMG has also agreed not to bid for new Commonwealth work until 30 September 2026.

The significance of this case goes beyond KPMG. Audit depends on trust. Firms such as KPMG sell technical services, but they also trade on claims to independence, discretion and professional integrity.

When those claims are undermined, so too is the credibility of the market institutions that depend on them.

Trust before deregulation

AstraZeneca and KPMG are very different cases, but they point to the same underlying problem. Low public confidence cannot simply be dismissed as cynicism. It reflects a growing perception that commercial imperatives too often take precedence over responsibilities to customers, workers and the wider community.

Under such conditions, it is unsurprising that trust is low. The call for deregulation assumes that businesses will act responsibly when constraints are removed. Recent experience gives the public little reason to believe that.

If corporate Australia wants fewer rules, it must first give Australians fewer reasons to demand them. The strongest case for deregulation will not be made in lobbying campaigns, but in conduct that earns public trust.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 20 June 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/corporate-australia-wants-fewer-rules-give-us-fewer-reasons-to-demand-them,21195

Whenever a billionaire appears, we are told a familiar myth of exceptional talent, extraordinary risk-taking, innovation, vision and hard work. Musk may well possess many of those qualities. But focusing on the individual misses the bigger picture.

Over the past forty years, governments around the world have deregulated markets, weakened organised labour, privileged capital gains over wages, tolerated growing corporate concentration, and increasingly treated rising asset prices as a measure of economic success.

The promise was that prosperity would trickle down. Instead, wealth has surged upwards.

These are the conditions that made Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar fortune possible.

Musk’s trillion-dollar wealth is evidence of a political and economic system geared towards generating ever greater economic inequality. And as economic inequality grows, so too does political inequality.

Extreme wealth is never just wealth. It brings influence. It buys access. It shapes public debate. It affects elections. It can even determine who gets heard and who does not.

With Musk, this relationship between wealth and power is especially clear. The world’s first trillionaire is also one of the world’s most influential political actors. He controls companies that sit at the heart of electric vehicles, satellite communications, artificial intelligence, social media and defence infrastructure.

He is not averse to direct political intervention either. Musk spent heavily supporting Donald Trump’s election campaign in the United States. He has publicly championed Tommy Robinson in the United Kingdom. He has backed Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland party. Critics have also accused him of amplifying narratives that contributed to anti-immigration unrest in places such as Belfast.

Australians should not imagine this is only an American problem.

Wealth inequality is a worsening feature of the Australian economy. While this has been the case for some time, our political debates are just starting to catch up with how life in this country is increasingly shaped by widening economic injustice in the form of housing affordability, intergenerational wealth gaps, stagnant wages, tax concessions, and the growing concentration of wealth.

As we saw in the response to recent federal budget proposals, even modest attempts to reform the taxation of accumulated wealth can provoke fierce opposition. Meanwhile, economic frustration fuels distrust in established institutions and creates fertile ground for right wing populist politics.

The irony is palpable. The same inequalities that create the grievances on which populism feeds are often reinforced by the very economic elites who benefit most from them.

In Australia, the country’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has been a vocal admirer of Donald Trump and a supporter of Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party.

This goes to show that the trillionaire milestone about much more than one man.

It is yet another loud warning about an economic system that is generating ever greater concentrations of wealth and power while leaving too many people behind.

Musk is the most spectacular symptom of that system.

All of this points to the central political question of our time:

Can democratic societies remain genuinely just and democratic when so much economic and political power is concentrated in so few hands?

We live in an age where extraordinary wealth is matched by deepening economic insecurity. Billionaires are celebrated while inequality grows. Corporations speak the language of ethics and social purpose while concentrating unprecedented economic and political power. Democracies appear increasingly fragile, public institutions are trusted less and less, and the promise that prosperity would benefit everyone has been broken.

These are moral and political conditions that shape our lives.

Rising inequality, declining trust, and the spread of populist politics are not separate trends. They are interconnected pressures reshaping the relationship between markets, business, and democracy. Understanding that shift is increasingly urgent.

The Moral Economy is a space for essays and analysis on business, politics, equality, democracy, and the moral questions of contemporary capitalism. It is not so much about how economies work, but about who they serve, what forms of life they encourage, and what kinds of societies they make possible.

I write as a Professor of Business and Society at The University of Technology Sydney, and as the author of books exploring corporate power, inequality, greed, and the changing role of business in democratic life. My writing has appeared in international outlets ranging from The Guardian, The Times and The Independent to Fast Company, Aeon and The New Humanist. In Australia my work has appeared in ABC News, The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Australian Financial Review.

The types of questions explored in The Moral Economy are

• Why has extreme wealth become so normalized?

• What happens when corporations acquire political power once reserved for governments?

• Can democracy survive widening inequality?

• What does it means when business elites continue to present themselves as forces for social good?

• What would a more just and democratic economy look like?

New articles and notes will be added regularly, and an archive of my writing over the past few years is currently available.

Some articles respond to current events, often with a focus on Australian business and politics. Others develop larger arguments about capitalism, democracy, work, corporate ideology, and public life. All are grounded in the conviction that economic transformations are also struggles over power, legitimacy, and democracy.

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THE YEAR GLOBAL neoliberal economic reforms hit full swing? 1984. In the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher confronted the miners to break the union’s power. In the United States, Ronald Reagan entrenched tax cuts and deregulation.

Across the developing world, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank rolled out structural adjustment programs that forced governments to privatise, liberalise, open markets and cut public spending.

The direction of global economic policy was clear. Markets were prioritised over states, and capital over labour. But neoliberalism was never just an economic project; it was a cultural one. It reshaped how we think about success, fairness and who deserves to get ahead.

In Australia, one of neoliberalism’s most enduring cultural artefacts emerged at precisely this moment. In 1984, Business Review Weekly published the first BRW Rich List, a ranking of the nation’s 200 wealthiest individuals and families. Rebranded as the Financial Review Rich List in 2017, it remains a fixture of national life, setting the terms on which wealth is publicly understood and admired.

The deserving rich?

More than 40 years on, the formula has not changed, but the stakes have. The recently released 2026 edition reported that the richest 200 had a combined wealth of $707 billion.

The growth in the fortunes at the top is astounding. Adjusted for inflation, the total wealth of those on the 1984 list was just under $25 billion. The personal wealth of Australia’s richest person, mining magnate Gina Rinehart, is now more than one and a half times that much.

But “The Rich List” does more than catalogue riches and chronicle the fates of those who benefit from gross inequality. It serves to justify extreme wealth as both deserved and desirable.

The story peddled by the AFR is one of meritocracy. Wealth appears as the reward for aspiration, hard work, talent and risk-taking. The moral of this story is that those at the top have earned their place and those below them have not.

This ethos was summed up by business journalists James Thomson and Anthony Macdonald on the Australian Financial Review’s Chanticleer podcast, referring to the list as the “greatest single project in Australian journalism”.

Anthony said:

“These are people that are out there doing stuff, and for me, that’s what The Rich List is about”

James, former editor of The Rich List, responded:

“Yeah, great call... We’ve got a 17-year-old son at home and he’s wondering what he should do with his life. In a way, the rich list says just go and have a crack at something”.

This is the story contemporary Australia tells itself. Everyone can “have a crack” and anyone can make it if they try hard enough.

The closing of opportunity

The reality is that more and more people are being left behind.

Over the decades since The Rich List began, Australia has undergone a profound transformation. It has shifted from a wage-based, relatively egalitarian economy to one in which wealth is both unevenly distributed and increasingly determined by asset ownership.

The result is stark. The top 10% of people ranked by wealth now own around 57% of all wealth, while the bottom 40% hold just over 5%.

For most working Australians, the pathways to economic security have narrowed. Wage growth has stagnated. Secure employment has become less certain. And home ownership, once the cornerstone of middle-class life, is slipping out of reach.

For younger Australians in particular, the idea of building wealth through property is increasingly a privilege reserved for those who already own assets or inherit them.

A scoreboard for a broken system

What The Rich List presents as a celebration of individual success is, in reality, the outcome of structural changes that have been entrenched through decades of neoliberal policy reform. These same policy settings have made it harder for others to get ahead.

The Rich List both obscures widening economic inequality while providing it with a moral justification. By heralding individual fortunes, it invites admiration for extreme wealth while diverting attention from the unfair economic system that produces it.

In doing so, it performs an important ideological function. It sustains the belief that Australia remains a meritocracy where success is open to all, and that inequality simply reflects differences in effort and ability.

The evidence points in the opposite direction. Opportunity is becoming more unequal, not less. Access to wealth is increasingly determined by what you own, not what you do.

The Rich List does not reveal a nation of boundless opportunity for anyone who wants to “have a crack”. It tells a different story of a system that concentrates wealth and narrows the pathways to economic security.

It is a scoreboard for a system that has steadily closed off the very opportunities it claims to celebrate.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 6 June 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/afr-rich-list-offers-a-scorecard-of-australian-inequality,21138

SINCE TREASURER Jim Chalmers released his Federal Budget on 12 May, critics on the political right have attacked it relentlessly.

Some of this is downright comical, from The Daily Telegraph calling the budget a “big taxing communist manifesto“ to The Australian accusing Chalmers of waging ‘class warfare‘.

One of the more serious accusations is that, by removing tax breaks for investors, Chalmers is undermining the very individual aspiration that fuels economic growth and prosperity.

The idea that tax policy can be used to encourage entrepreneurship and aspiration is a well-worn part of conservative politics. The question is whether it still fits Australia’s current economic reality.

The politics of aspiration

Central to the debate are the reforms to negative gearing and capital gains tax aimed at addressing spiralling housing prices that are locking working people out of the market.

Supporters argue that taxing wages more heavily than income from asset ownership has distorted incentives and made the system less fair, particularly for younger Australians.

The counterargument is that preferential tax arrangements encourage investment and job creation.

Among the most vocal critics has been Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who complained:

“I think they’re destroying the inspiration of people who are entrepreneurial.”

Opposition leader Angus Taylor has taken a similar line, condemning the budget as an:

“... assault on aspiration” and warning that Labor’s “toxic taxes” will “crush the reward-for-hard-work spirit that underpins our nation’s success.”

Business leaders have joined the chorus, with one group of young entrepreneurs labelling the budget an ‘aspiration ambush‘.

It is tempting to see this as a simple ideological divide with fairness on the Left and aspiration on the Right. The reality is more complicated.

KPMG’s “shrinking middle”

A relatively unheralded piece of research released by accounting firm KPMG the day before the Budget sheds light on what is really happening to aspiration in Australia. Notably, this is not coming from a trade union or a Left-leaning think tank, but from the heart of corporate Australia.

KPMG finds that Australia’s wealth gap has widened significantly over the past five years, driven primarily by rising asset prices, especially housing. While average household wealth increased from $1.26 million to $1.56 million, median wealth was steady at $700,000.

This means that while overall wealth has grown, the gains have been captured disproportionately by those who already own assets.

The consequence is what KPMG describes as a “shrinking middle”. Households that once represented the economic mainstream are being squeezed out, as asset owners move further ahead while others fall behind.

This raises the prospect that inequality is becoming more entrenched and increasingly shaped by inherited advantage.

Making aspiration credible again

It is this “shrinking middle” that represents the real threat to aspiration, not the removal of tax breaks.

Contrary to Joyce and Taylor’s claims, aspiration is not threatened by attempts to rebalance the tax system. It is threatened by an economy in which access to wealth increasingly depends on what you already own or inherit, rather than on what you do.

Aspiration requires credible pathways from effort to reward. When those pathways are blocked, the rhetoric of aspiration becomes detached from economic reality, as conservative politicians cling to a tired economic argument about incentives that is past its use-by date.

Tax concessions for asset owners are defended in the name of opportunity, yet the unequal system they have fuelled is steadily closing off opportunity for working people who do not already own property, particularly younger Australians.

This is where fairness and aspiration meet, not as ideology, but as lived reality.

When educated Australians with good jobs cannot afford to buy a home, or delay starting a family because of cost, aspiration is not under attack by tax reform; it is being undermined by an economy that no longer rewards effort.

When that happens, aspiration ceases to be a promise and becomes an illusion, and the legitimacy of the economic system itself begins to wear away.

Just the beginning

Joyce and Taylor are right that Australia needs aspiration to grow and prosper, but that aspiration needs to be available to everyone, especially those who do not start out in life with family wealth and privilege.

The tax changes introduced in this Budget signal a willingness to take that challenge on. But reversing the erosion of aspiration will require more than targeted adjustments to tax policy. It demands a broader program of structural reform that addresses housing affordability, wage growth, access to secure work, and the distribution of income and wealth across the economy.

Without such reforms, inequality will continue to harden into a system in which opportunity is inherited rather than earned and aspiration becomes the preserve of those who already have a stake.

The real question is not whether Australia values aspiration, but whether it is willing to rebuild the economic conditions that make aspiration credible for everyone.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 23 May 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-real-assault-on-aspiration-isnt-tax-reform-its-inequality,21080

Australia’s economy has long been sustained by a promise. Work hard, play by the rules, and you will have a fair chance to get ahead.

That promise did more than support economic growth. It gave the system its moral legitimacy, reassuring people that outcomes, while unequal, should be broadly deserved and that institutions worked in the interests of the many.

Today, that promise is unravelling.

Australia remains a wealthy country, but that wealth is increasingly concentrated. The top 20 per cent of Australians now hold around 64 per cent of national wealth. Inequality is at its highest level in two decades, and the share of income going to workers has been declining for generations.

These are lived realities for many Australians, especially younger people without access to family wealth, who face rising living costs, stagnant wages, and increasingly unattainable housing.

What was once widely understood as a ‘fair go’ society now feels, for many, like a system that rewards those who already have the most.

This is not just an economic issue. It is an ethical one, and increasingly, a democratic one. It is also a problem for business, whether business and its leaders are prepared to recognise it or not.

The trust problem

Inequality does more than divide incomes and assets. It refocusses how people judge whether the system is fair. When outcomes appear rigged and opportunity no longer seems genuine, trust begins to break down.

That breakdown is now visible in Australia, with public confidence in the corporate economy at an all-time low. Many Australians believe the economy is structured to benefit elites, and that decision makers are increasingly distant from everyday realities.

Political stability and economic fairness are often treated as matters for government alone, but they present a profound challenge for business. The social licence to operate rests on public confidence that is now under strain. The consequences are systemic as well as reputational. Businesses face reduced cooperation, weaker loyalty, political volatility, and growing regulatory pressure.

Globally, widening inequality and declining trust have created fertile ground for authoritarian populism. Economic disaffection is readily channelled into resentment, division, and hostility towards institutions.

Business cannot assume immunity.

The limits of the ‘growing the pie’ argument

A familiar response is that business’s role is economic growth, not redistribution. If firms invest, innovate, and create value, prosperity will eventually be shared.

There is truth in this. Economic growth is necessary, but it is not sufficient. Growth that is unevenly distributed undermines its own foundations. Inequality dampens demand, reduces mobility, weakens human capital, and narrows the future talent base needed for innovation. It can also generate political instability that disrupts investment.

More fundamentally, the idea that growth alone will resolve inequality rests on the belief that benefits will trickle down over time. That promise has proven unreliable.

The result is growing doubt about whether the system itself should be trusted.

Why this is a business issue

It is tempting to see inequality as a problem for government to worry about. Public policy is crucial, but this view underestimates how normal business decisions directly influence economic outcomes.

Businesses are central to determining wages, employment conditions, executive pay, supply chains, and pricing. They also influence who benefits from productivity gains, including those linked to technological change.

More broadly, business helps define the norms of economic life, including what is seen as fair, what is rewarded, and what is ignored.

In this sense, inequality is not external to business. It is produced within it and often justified by it. It is also reshaping how younger generations understand the system. For many, inequality is becoming a test of whether economic life is fair, and whether it is worth believing in at all.

As inequality rises, risks to business increase. Declining trust, regulatory backlash, workforce disengagement, and political instability all intensify. As a result, business’s ability to influence policy and manage economic outcomes weakens.

Addressing inequality is therefore not only an ethical imperative. It is central to the long term viability of both individual firms and the economic system as a whole.

What responsibility looks like

If inequality is both an ethical problem and a systemic risk, the question becomes what business, and its leaders, should do.

This is not a call for corporations to replace government or to solve inequality alone. Neutrality now functions as consent.

Responsibility begins with recognising that how value is created and distributed matters. It requires asking harder questions about wages, job security, and the balance between shareholder returns and broader social and political outcomes. It also means business leaders engaging constructively with policy debates around matters such as housing, taxation, and economic reform, and doing so for the benefit of the nation, not just their bottom line.

Finally, it demands a rethinking of what success looks like. A highly profitable business operating in a deeply unequal society cannot assume that its success will be seen as legitimate, or that its social licence will remain secure.

Proposing that business takes inequality seriously is not an argument against competitiveness or profit, nor against fiduciary duty. It is an argument against pursuing them in isolation from the political conditions that make them possible.

Do that, and exploitative profiteering is recast as good business. In such a world, business ethics is reduced to a culture where selfishness is treated as a virtue.

A moment of choice

Australia is at a turning point. The relationship between business, the economy, and democracy that has long supported prosperity is under pressure. Inequality is not the only factor, but it is a central one.

For business leaders, the question is no longer whether inequality matters. It is what role they are prepared to play in addressing it.

This is a moment for leadership, not compliance. It demands recognising that economic success, shared prosperity, and social legitimacy are deeply intertwined.

A fairer and more secure economy will not emerge by accident. It will be guided by policy, by institutions, and by the choices of those with the power to influence them.

Business leaders have that power.

The question is whether they are willing to use it responsibly.

This article was originally published by The Ethics Centre under a Creative Commons license on 18 May 2026, available at https://ethics.org.au/can-australian-business-afford-to-ignore-inequality/

(Images via iStock)

WITH JUST DAYS until the release of the Labor Government’s May Budget, it has now been confirmed that property tax is finally going to be reformed. While details are yet to emerge, capital gains tax and negative gearing will be overhauled in a move to rein in investor-driven inflation in the housing sector.

How quickly politics can change. Going into the Federal Election this time last year, Labor had categorically ruled out any such reforms. Touching the property tax status quo was framed as electoral suicide.

Today, the same ideas have been recast as political common sense. What has changed is that intergenerational economic inequality has finally become a mainstream political concern, with housing affordability at its core.

But this is where the current debate starts to mislead. The housing crisis is not simply a generational story. It is a class story, too.

A “fair crack”, but for whom?

The appetite to change property tax settings is, in part, a political response to a demographically shifting voting population. Australians aged 18 to 35 now make up around a quarter of the population – roughly 6.2 million people – and outnumber the once dominant Baby Boomer generation.

This growing cohort of voters is increasingly presented as the primary group affected, with housing affordability identified as a key driver of intergenerational inequality.

As reported by the Actuaries Institute, among millennials, the ratio of house prices to income is now double what it was in the 1980s, with rising rental costs preventing them from saving for a home loan deposit. It is hardly surprising that since 2000, home ownership rates for those aged 25 to 34 have fallen from just over 50% to around 39%.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appears alert to this shift, remarking last weekend:

“I want Australia to be a land of opportunity for the future and the truth is, young people feel like they’re not getting a fair crack at the moment.”

What this fails to acknowledge, however, is that some young people are getting far less of a “fair crack” than others.

No class

Treating “young Australians” as a single, homogenous group conceals more than it reveals.

Some young people enter adulthood backed by inherited wealth, family property portfolios, or the “Bank of Mum and Dad”, allowing them to step onto the housing ladder early and to benefit directly from the tax concessions now under scrutiny.

Others, lacking family assets or financial support, are locked into permanent renting, absorbing rising costs with a vastly lower prospect of capital gains, tax advantages, or long‑term security.

This divide is already stark. Grattan Institute data shows that among households aged 25 to 40, the poorest quarter holds less than $78,000 in net wealth, none of which is in home equity. The richest quarter holds more than $554,000 and the top 5% exceed $1,500,000. Wealth inequality, in other words, is already deeply entrenched within younger generations themselves.

Framed purely as an intergenerational conflict, property tax reform risks becoming a symbolic gesture rather than one focused on creating a fair economy in which everyone has the opportunity for a secure life.

Without a class lens, it is entirely possible to claim to help “young Australians” while leaving large numbers of them little better off and the most privileged more protected than they were before.

Property reform is not enough

The upshot is that while meaningful reform to capital gains tax and negative gearing is important, if economic equality is the goal, it should be understood as only a beginning.

Property tax reform can reduce speculative pressure and soften the worst excesses of investor‑driven inflation, but it leaves untouched the deeper dynamics that sort winners from losers long before housing enters the equation.

The scale of intergenerational inequality demands far more fundamental reform. It means resetting the policies that determine how income and wealth are accumulated, protected and transferred over time.

If the Government is serious about restoring a “fair crack” for everyone, the focus cannot stop at property. It must extend to the broader structure of income and wealth taxation

What needs to be on the tax policy agenda going forward is wealth taxation, and the concessional treatment of capital relative to labour, the light taxation of large inheritances and a tax system that routinely favours existing wealth over earned income.

Without developing and implementing a policy that changes these structural settings, reforms to CGT and negative gearing risk operating as targeted corrections within a much larger system that continues to reward ownership over work and inheritance over effort.

It’s time to confront class

The changes expected in the May Budget would be welcome. Reforming capital gains tax and negative gearing would mark a clear departure from a model that has treated housing primarily as a tax‑advantaged investment. But unless these reforms are understood as only a first step, progress will be limited.

The real test of seriousness in tax reform lies beyond property. If inequality is being reproduced through unequal access to stable housing, inherited wealth and lightly taxed capital, then economic fairness will not follow property tax reform alone.

A broader reckoning with how Australia taxes wealth, rewards capital over labour and normalises inheritance as a substitute for opportunity and effort is needed. Generational inequality is part of that agenda, but not all of it.

Real changes will depend on whether policymakers are willing to name and confront class.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 9 May 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/class-is-the-missing-link-in-australias-generational-inequality-crisis,21019

When Angus Taylor announced his new immigration plan on 14 April, he received a torrent of backlash from across the political spectrum. The response was unsurprising given that, in the name of “Australian values”, he directly attacked migrants, prompting accusations ranging from un-Australian to racist.

We have thrown open our borders to “people who… have wanted to take from Australia and even change Australia to suit them,” he declared in his address to the Menzies Research Centre before reverting to the familiar refrain of blaming Labor for having “opened the migration floodgates”.

It was a ham-fisted attempt at rabble-rousing populism, although the only person who appeared genuinely roused was One Nation’s Pauline Hanson, who promptly claimed credit for the policy. Unperturbed, Taylor doubled down in an op-ed in the Australian Financial Review and on radio 2GB.

Taylor’s immigration policy was rightly condemned as ‘Trumpian‘, marked not only by the stigmatisation of minorities and heavy‑handed deportation plans, but by its reliance on moral panic, simplistic blame, and performative toughness over workable policy. Even Liberal Party MPs were dismayed, with one calling it “rank populism” and “copying Trump”.

But what made the speech truly Trump‑like was not immigration alone. It was the way border control was paired with an economic agenda that invokes “freedom” while shielding concentrated corporate power, with predictable consequences for inequality. It is this vision of business and markets that deserves closer scrutiny.

A free market fantasy

Taylor was explicit that reducing immigration was only part of the solution. To “restore Australians’ standard of living” and “protect our way of life”, he argued, Australia must shift “away from Labor’s government‑directed economy back to a free‑enterprise economy”.

In Taylor’s telling, the villains are as familiar as his performative toughness, he asserted, lest Australians be robbed of the “freedom” he claimed as being at the core of his political agenda:

“It’s time to take back control from the technocrats, the bureaucrats and the activists.”

This language is part of a well‑worn populist script that frames economic problems as the product of elite interference rather than structural market failure and entrenched concentrations of economic power.

Taylor proposed three simple strategies to place Australians on the path to restored economic greatness, each expressed in a three-word slogan. They are “removing crippling taxes”, “reducing choking regulation”, and “restoring cheaper power”.

When it comes to business, his thinking is as doctrinaire and ill‑conceived as his immigration policy. The problem is not that these measures would fail to help business; it is that they would do nothing to revitalise a genuinely free market economy.

What they would do is reduce business costs and increase profitability, especially at the big end of town. What they would not do is increase competition in an economy already dominated by highly concentrated industries.

This is where Taylor’s free market rhetoric becomes most unmistakably Trumpian. Like Trump, he equates “freedom” with the removal of constraints on capital, while remaining conspicuously silent on the question of market power. Competition, the very thing that makes markets work, drops out of the story while the structural conditions that entrench inequality are left untouched.

Markets rule where they should serve

Virtually all major industry sectors in Australia are oligopolistic. There are four major banks, three dominant telecommunications firms, two supermarket chains controlling most grocery sales, just two major domestic airlines and mining is dominated by a handful of giants. Taylor’s plan would do nothing to alter this structural reality.

If Taylor were to implement his proposed economic agenda, the result would most likely be windfall corporate gains, rather than any meaningful renewal of market competition.

Lower taxes, weaker regulation, and cheaper energy may lift profits at the top end of town, but they do little to challenge entrenched market power or to improve outcomes for consumers and workers already struggling under an inflation‑driven cost‑of‑living crisis.

Freeing up competition is a laudable goal. But it would require a far more ambitious agenda than Taylor is offering. Serious competition reform would mean robustly enforced competition law, the breakup of oligopolies, and the lowering of barriers to entry in concentrated industries. It would also mean confronting those who benefit most from the current market structure, rather than shielding them.

Encouraging real investment, intensifying competitive pressure, and supporting productivity growth would do far more to revitalise the economy and distribute its gains more broadly. What Taylor proposes instead is a program that stabilises and extends the power of the status quo, allowing markets to rule where they should serve.

Protecting the powerful

If free-market competition is truly the objective, then the power of dominant firms must be constrained, not bolstered. That would mean serious competition policy, effective antitrust enforcement, and a willingness to challenge incumbents. These requirements appear well beyond what Taylor and his policy advisers are prepared to contemplate, or even acknowledge.

The Trump‑like trick is to sell this agenda as “freedom” while it protects the economically powerful. Free markets do not emerge by dismantling the state and stepping aside. They depend on rules that curb dominance, enable entry, and ensure that competitiveness determines success.

By cutting constraints while protecting incumbents, Taylor’s agenda does not revive market freedom. It narrows it. What is sold as economic freedom is, in reality, the quiet entrenchment of corporate power dressed up as reform.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 25 April 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/behind-angus-taylors-immigration-plan-is-a-trumplike-economic-agenda,20964

OPPOSITION LEADER Angus Taylor seemed guarded. Appearing on Sky News last week, he was repeatedly pressed by host Andrew Clennell about his relationship with Liberal colleague and possible leadership rival, Opposition industry spokesperson Andrew Hastie.

“Is he [Hastie] after your job?” Clennell asked. Taylor laughed, then pivoted to tax, housing, and oil and gas.

Clennell did not let go. “But is he after your job?” he repeated. Taylor laughed again. Eventually, he responded without really answering. “Andrew and I are good friends and have been for a long while.”

The question lingered because, only weeks earlier, Hastie had openly challenged “neoliberalism”, the worldview that has anchored Coalition politics and its relationship with business for decades.

The consequences of that challenge remain unclear, but the business sector is on notice that the political protection it once enjoyed can no longer be taken for granted.

Hastie breaks rank

Things had been brewing since Andrew Hastie spoke on ABC Insiders on Sunday 29 March.

Asked about his support for windfall taxes on gas exports, Hastie said:

“The Liberal Party is not the first line of defence for corporate Australia. Multinationals and big business in this country have lost their social licence.”

He went further, adding:

“No one’s going to reward us for a final last stand for neo-Liberal politics. There’s no medal for that.”

The next day, Taylor shut him down stating unequivocally that increasing taxes was opposed to the “long-standing understanding of the economics profession in the Liberal Party”.

Neoliberalism is rarely named by conservative politicians, let alone something they bicker about in public. It is, however, the doctrine the Coalition – and the Liberal Party in particular – has long championed.

It was embraced enthusiastically under John Howard’s government from the late 1990s, through market liberalisation, industrial relations reform, privatisation of state enterprises, financial deregulation and significant reductions in corporate taxation.

Neoliberalism is also the word traditionally used by the Left to criticise this policy agenda, particularly the inequality it fuelled by shifting power, income, and security away from labour and towards capital.

On the face of it, Hastie’s language overlaps with elements of that critique, for example when he says that “a lot of Australians feel like the system is rigged against them” and that “we’re experiencing a lot of economic pain” as the global order fractures.

The Liberals’ old deal is cracking

Hastie’s point is not a progressive one. It is a pragmatic acknowledgement that the Right will be punished if it is seen as defending a system more and more people experience as unfair.

His clash with party orthodoxy is not a left turn. It does, however, signal a shift in the issues now cutting across the political spectrum. Economic malaise is spreading as housing is unaffordable for many, cost‑of‑living pressures are intensifying and younger Australians increasingly believe they will be worse off than their parents.

The neoliberal order has lost credibility, even among those who once backed it without reservation. It may previously have seemed self‑evident that investment, growth and shareholder value would flow through to all Australians. That faith has been eroded by inequality, wage stagnation and repeated episodes of corporate misconduct.

That the Liberal Party is now debating neoliberalism, however clumsily, is a sign that something fundamental has shifted. The economic settlement that once aligned markets, business, and political legitimacy no longer commands automatic consent.

If that settlement changes, it will shape not only the party’s future but the conditions under which business is judged to serve the public good. That assessment is unfolding in real time.

Business is on notice

Behind this moment in the news cycle lies a deeper shift in public expectations of business itself. Corporations are no longer assessed solely on their ability to generate growth, investment, or shareholder returns.

When inequality is at levels not seen for decades and when conservative politicians begin withdrawing automatic support for business, it is a sign of just how far the system has frayed. Business is increasingly judged by whether it contributes to economic fairness, through responsible practices, paying tax and providing secure well‑paid work.

Scrutiny can be expected on everything from super‑profits and resource rent to wage theft, insecure work, market power and price‑setting and the political influence that comes with concentrated wealth.

That figures on the conservative side of politics are now framing issues in these terms highlights the depth of the problem.

For business leaders, the implications are stark. They must reckon with the political and social consequences of an economic model that has delivered prosperity for some while leaving many others excluded, insecure, and unheard. Failure to adapt risks leaving corporate leaders politically isolated, defended by a shrinking circle of allies, but stripped of broader legitimacy.

The challenge for corporate Australia is no longer how to protect markets from politics, but how to act credibly in the national interest, recognising that economic power carries civic responsibility and that long‑term legitimacy depends on more than growth alone.

If business cannot be credibly seen to be contributing to the public good, it will not just face pressure from the Left. It will face it from everywhere.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 11 April 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/hasties-break-with-neoliberalism-puts-business-on-notice,20914

AS RECENTLY AS as six months ago, reform of Australia’s capital gains tax discount seemed politically unthinkable. As the May budget approaches, it has become not only plausible but increasingly likely.

This may prove to be a pivotal moment in Australian politics, not simply because of the tax change itself, but because it could signal a decisive fracturing of the long‑entrenched neoliberal policy framework that has fuelled and justified widening economic inequality.

Since Labor’s election victory in May 2025, concerns about intergenerational inequality have steadily gained momentum, crystallising at Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ Economic Reform Roundtable in October.

That shift was reinforced this month when a Senate inquiry concluded:

The concessions provided by the capital gains tax discount, in combination with negative gearing, have skewed the ownership of housing away from owner-occupiers and towards investors.

The benefits of the capital gains tax discount are also unequally distributed, with implications for income and wealth inequality and intergenerational inequality.

While the government remains cautious, all indicators now point towards change. The day after the report was released, Chalmers said the government had “an open mind to tax reform” and was “working up some options”.

More than just a tax change

While tax reform is a crucial step in addressing worsening economic inequality in Australia, what is at stake here is much larger than the fiscal setting. If the Government does act in May, it will signal the unravelling of the neoliberal economic model that treated inequality as a market outcome rather than a matter of democratic choice.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the response from those resisting change. As they struggle with declining relevance and electoral appeal, the Coalition are clinging ever more tightly to an outdated ideological framework that increasing numbers of Australians are leaving behind.

Their statement, issued on the day the Senate report was released, tellingly titled ‘Coalition stands firm against CGT changes’, reads like a textbook expression of unquestioned neoliberal common sense. It abstractly defends the sanctity of markets while systematically evacuating inequality from political consideration, relying on the familiar trickle‑down assumption that protecting incentives at the top will eventually benefit everyone below.

The Coalition insists:

‘If Labor pursues changes to the CGT discount, it will be another simplistic and one-dimensional response that sidesteps the central problem in housing, that not enough homes are being built. You cannot tax your way out of a supply shortage.’

This reflects the familiar neoliberal dogma that optimising investment conditions will deliver growth that eventually benefits everyone, despite long‑standing evidence that such benefits overwhelmingly accumulate at the top.

Rather than treating tax reform as a democratic tool for shaping fairer outcomes, it is cast as a market distortion that would “punish mum and dad investors” while threatening rents and investment.

An ideology past its use-by date

Opposition Leader Angus Taylor has dismissed any potential tax reform, saying:

“They had told us that taxes were going to come down, but we know with raging inflation taxes will keep going up, and we hear, even in recent weeks, that there are going to be more taxes on aspirational Australians. Another assault on aspiration from this Labor Government.”

It is difficult to read this as anything other than a refusal to confront the hardship created by levels of inequality that have placed home ownership beyond the reach of an increasing number of Australians.

If aspiration is being crushed, it is because Australia has an economic system built around rising asset values rather than broad‑based opportunity. That is precisely why reform is needed.

We have arrived at the point where ideological gestures towards a better future cannot hold up against the lived experience of persistent and worsening housing unaffordability and cost-of-living pressures. The deregulated and financialised economic system that has dominated Australia increasingly feels stacked against working Australians.

Meanwhile, the Coalition is stubbornly holding on to ideas that have long passed their use-by date. At this point, refusing reform is no longer a defence of aspiration, but a defence of a system that systematically undermines it.

The beginning of the end

It may have once been convincing that faith in markets, hostility to redistribution, and generous tax concessions for capital would lead Australia to greatness, but the realities of everyday life are eroding that conviction. What once passed for economic realism now looks like ideological inertia.

This is precisely why capital gains tax reform is now more likely to come from Labor. Unlike the Coalition, Labor has begun, cautiously but clearly, to treat inequality as a legitimate object of economic policy rather than a market outcome to be endured.

The CGT debate, therefore, matters far beyond tax design. It marks a moment in which long‑standing assumptions about Australian economic policy are being openly questioned, and where the choice between democratic fairness and asset‑based privilege is once again visible.

If Labor proceeds with reform, it will not simply be adjusting a tax setting but signalling clearly that economic fairness still matters in Australia. Much work remains to be done, but this could well be the beginning of the end for Australian neoliberalism.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 28 March 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/capital-gains-tax-reform-could-spell-the-end-of-neoliberal-australia,20860

THE MAY BUDGET will reveal whether the Albanese Government intends to confront the conditions driving populism or continue governing in ways that allow it to grow. Debate has focused on tax reform, cost‑of‑living pressures, and housing affordability. These matter, but this budget is about more than economics.

It is about the future of Australian democracy.

The Prime Minister has long been explicit in his ambition for Labor to become the “natural party of government“. But the centrism, moderation and conflict avoidance used to advance that ambition are ill-suited to today’s volatile economic and political conditions. This is not a time to focus on holding power. It is a time to exercise it.

With the budget approaching Albanese faces a defining choice. One path is to continue governing cautiously, allowing widening economic inequality to deepen disenfranchisement and giving One Nation the conditions it needs to build a mainstream populist movement.

The other is to act decisively and begin reshaping an increasingly unequal Australia by implementing policies capable of sustaining democracy and shared prosperity.

Populism fills the vacuum

Since last year’s Economic Reform Roundtable, the brutal reality of housing‑driven wealth inequality has forced its way back onto the national political agenda. Still, mainstream parties have been slow to respond.

One Nation has moved quickly to fill that gap, speaking directly to the economic struggles of everyday Australians and, predictably, offering an easy scapegoat. It understands the emotional reality, naming frustrations, identifying culprits and promising simplicity in a world that feels rigged and complex.

Labor has responded with caution rather than clarity. It has clung to an increasingly anachronistic centrism, preferring incrementalism that avoids risk over confronting structural problems head‑on.

But the political centre Labor seeks to defend is no longer solid ground. The collapse of the Liberal Party’s coherence and the rising popularity of One Nation both signal that the centre is shifting, and it is a shift driven less by ideology than by economic stress.

The May budget cannot be a single fix, but it is a chance to change course, countering right‑wing populism with reforms that are economically productive rather than socially divisive.

Only a year ago, reform of capital gains tax and negative gearing would have seemed politically impossible. Now the government has signalled that such measures are no longer off limits. These settings have long driven structural inequality, and they sit at the heart of whether Australia continues down a path of entrenched division or begins to claw its way toward fairness.

When inequality goes mainstream

There was a time when inequality conjured only images of poverty and destitution. Poverty is worsening, but inequality has gone mainstream. One Nation’s growth is coming largely from economically insecure voters, especially former Coalition supporters and lower‑ and middle‑income Australians.

These are the people who quite rightly feel cheated by being locked out of housing, squeezed by rising costs, and ignored by cautious major parties. For these voters, One Nation doesn’t offer coherent solutions, instead turning material insecurity and frustration into reactionary political protest that is socially and racially divisive but emotionally resonant.

The question is no longer whether inequality matters. It is whether Australia has the ambition to build a fairer nation before right-wing populism hardens into something more durable.

Labor’s caution, shaped by memories of past elections lost on tax policy, is understandable but misplaced. A fair Australia demands ambition for major change, and Labor’s parliamentary majority gives it the opportunity to realise that ambition.

The tools to make change are there, and as Independent MP Allegra Spender outlined this week, Australia could cut income taxes by about $29 billion while still being budget neutral. It would mean rebalancing the system away from taxing work and toward taxing assets, including capital gains and trusts.

This is not about punishing wealth. It is about modernising a system that no longer reflects the interests of ordinary Australians. Ignoring inequality by clinging to a centrist past will not protect Labor. It will accelerate voter realignment toward parties that promise disruption, however reckless.

A time to act

The Prime Minister still has time to lead decisively. A May budget built around economic fairness would reset the government’s purpose, restore faith that politics can deliver for the many, and blunt the pull of right-wing populism.

Power that is not exercised is meaningless. Australia needs an ambition for fairness, and Labor has a rare opportunity to make that real. Albanese can choose to lead that future, or he can leave the field open to those who will reshape it far more divisively.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 14 March 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/labors-budget-test-will-be-to-confront-inequality-or-let-populism-grow,20804

FEBRUARY HAS BEEN a month of high‑profile corporate court cases in Australia, both shining a spotlight an economy where customer welfare is incidental to the pursuit of profit.

In what has been called the “case of the century”, Coles is defending a major ACCC action alleging a planned campaign to mislead customer about discounts on more than 200 everyday products.

Meanwhile, Westpac was in the NSW Supreme Court accused of acting without basic morality after using its corporate might against a customer over a trivial shortfall not of her making.

In both cases, the same pattern emerges of powerful institutions wielding legal teams, algorithms and market dominance in ways ordinary people cannot match.

These are modern David‑and‑Goliath battles, with David simply trying to buy groceries or secure a mortgage. The good news, at least this month, is that David is fighting back, and winning.

Defending the indefensible

What is particularly remarkable in both cases is the lengths to which the corporations will go to argue for moral justifications for behaviour that reeks of greed and wanton self-interest.

In Westpac’s case, Justice David Hammerschlag castigated the bank’s stance as “unconscionable”, and said it was attempting to “defend the indefensible”.

It all started when plaintiff Fiona Vinall inadvertently underpaid her mortgage after an ambiguous rate change communication from the bank led her think a reduction had taken effect earlier than it actually did.

The $44.11 shortfall was then reported to credit agencies as “adverse repayment history information”, leading to a sharp drop in her credit rating and refused loan for a new home.

Vinall repeatedly asked the bank to fix the error so she could move on with her life. The bank obdurately refused.

Even when Westpac’s lawyers appeared in court, they argued that the bank was “powerless” to fix the problem. They suddenly found the power when the Court directed Westpac’s CEO to attend. Only then did they finally reverse course and removed the black mark from her file.

As Justice Hammerschlag put it, the refusal to fix the issue was “legally unjustifiable and short on commercial morality.”

Down, down for Coles

The case against Coles is ongoing, but the evidence outlined so far is serious. Take the example of Strepsils, a lozenge people across the country rely on the ease an unwanted sore throat.

For at least 649 days Coles sold 16-pack Strepsils honey and lemon throat lozenges for $5.50. The court was told by the ACCC that the price was increased to $7 for just 28 days before being reduced to $6.

That “reduced” price was promoted as part of the supermarket’s “down, down” campaign that has been running since 2010.

Coles defended itself claiming there was no deception, that the $7 “was a genuine, undiscounted shelf price”, and that “the subsequent down down program price was […] a genuine discount”. The retailer’s position was that claimed discount was in no way misleading and represented good value.

As with Westpac, it is a ‘nothing-to-see-here’ defence.

Coles’ lawyer told the court dismissively:

“All prices are temporary. Nothing lasts forever.”

Cash strapped customer fighting the cost of living crisis have a different view.

One shopper said:

“It’s one of the biggest scams that ever hit the markets.”

Strepsils may be striking, but it is far from the only example. The court is examining pricing behaviour of 245 household items. Arnott’s Shapes, dog food, baby formula, yoghurt and deodorant all show the same pattern of a brief price spike followed by a so‑called discount that leaves customers paying more than before.

Goliath in the system

The problem is not simply whether Coles or Westpac behaved badly. It is that the economic system we have built rewards them for doing so. When commercial gain outranks fairness, when profiteering is treated as professionalism, and when customers become data points rather than people, greed and neglect stop being aberrations, they are a business model.

But these cases show that corporate Goliaths are not untouchable. Regulators, courts and ordinary people are pushing back. Each ruling, each challenge, each customer who refuses to be steamrolled chips away at the idea that power is beyond accountability.

If we want a fairer economy, we need to confront the structures that enable and reward exploitation and disregard. That means stronger oversight, greater transparency, and a cultural shift that recognises that markets serve society, not the other way around.

David may be winning this month, but lasting change will require more than a slingshot. It will require rewriting the rules so that fairness and decency are not exceptions, they are the standard.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 28 February 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/coles-and-westpac-in-a-battle-against-corporate-greed,20742

IT HAS BEEN more than a quarter of a century since then-treasurer Peter Costello introduced the 50% capital gains tax (CGT) discount on investment properties. In all that time, serious talk of reform has been conspicuously absent. Until now.

By 2025, economic injustice had moved to the centre of Australia’s political agenda. The cost‑of‑living crisis, housing unaffordability, and widening intergenerational inequality dominated public debate and shaped the Labor Government’s Economic Reform Roundtable last August. While concrete policy changes are yet to emerge from that process, it offered an important mandate to talk about tax reform.

The Australian Greens moved swiftly. Their Senate motion established the Select Committee on the Operation of the Capital Gains Tax Discount on 4 November 2025. The committee’s number one priority is to investigate how the CGT discount has fuelled inequality and to assess whether it deserves a future at all.

The Overton window is shifting. The question is whether it will shift far enough to allow real change.

A $247 billion engine of inequality

Parliamentary Budget Office analysis commissioned by the Senate committee has already shown that the CGT discount will drain $247 billion from the budget over the next decade.

Even more staggering, from next year, almost 60% of the benefit will flow to the richest 1% of income earners. These are the people least in need of tax concessions.

The unfairness is amplified by the fact that, as the Australian Council of Social Service reports, Australia spends more on tax breaks for property investors than it does on social housing, homelessness services and rent assistance combined.

Greens Senator Nick McKim has called the CGT discount ‘the most unfair tax rort in the country’.

ACTU President, Michele O’Neil, describes it as:

‘... a tax avoidance scheme with most of the benefit going to the richest 1% of Australians.’

This reckoning is long overdue. Poverty is rising, the concentration of wealth is accelerating, and every year Australia produces more billionaires. Without structural tax reform, economic inequality will continue to get worse.

The current CGT debate has become a tipping point for the Labor Government, which has historically treated this terrain as a political no-go zone. In the lead‑up to May’s budget, however, CGT reform is no longer being dismissed outright.

Prime Minister Albanese has declined to rule it out and Treasurer Jim Chalmers has said:

‘...we’ll consider whether more steps can be taken on tax reform.’

The inequality crisis runs deeper than CGT

If we are serious about tackling inequality, Australia must confront the basic fact that we tax income heavily and wealth lightly. The result is a system that continues to deepen economic inequality by rewarding those who already own assets and penalising those trying to acquire them.

The CGT discount is a visible expression of that imbalance, but it is only one element of a tax architecture designed to privilege unearned gains over earned income.

Real reform would go beyond scaling back the CGT discount and at least include closing off the loopholes that allow high‑income earners to reclassify income as capital gains, and confronting the distortionary role of negative gearing, which continues to inflate asset prices and widen the wealth gap. Anything less leaves the structural drivers of inequality firmly in place.

Despite this, Labor remains uncommitted to bold reform. Both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have ruled out touching negative gearing.

Last year, Albanese reportedly insisted:

‘... the only tax policy that we’re ­implementing is the one that we took to the election.’

Broader fiscal measures needed to address inequality, including inheritance and estate taxes, have been dismissed outright.

Momentum is building, inside and outside of parliament

Despite the timidity of Albanese’s centrist politics, change is still possible if the public and political pressure are there. Chalmers had previously ruled out changes to the CGT discount and look where we are now as the budget approaches.

The push for CGT reform did not originate inside government. It came from the broader political landscape.

The Australian Greens, long-time advocates of tax reform, instigated the Senate Inquiry into the CGT discount. The union movement has played a crucial role as well, supporting reform and engaging in public campaigns that have helped shift the national conversation.

Think tanks such as the Grattan Institute, the Australia Institute and Per Capita have also played important roles in shifting the policy debate through sustained analysis.

It’s time to reward work, not wealth

This is the moment for the Government to decide whether it wants to tinker at the edges of inequality or meaningfully reduce it. CGT reform is necessary, but it is only one piece of a much larger puzzle.

Australia’s inequality crisis is, in large part, driven by a tax system that privileges wealth over work. Negative gearing, superannuation concessions, trust structures and the complete absence of inheritance taxes all entrench advantage and accelerate the concentration of wealth.https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/capital-gains-tax-reform-is-necessary,20679

Without confronting these deeper structural settings, CGT reform alone will barely scratch the surface. The decisions made now will shape Australia’s economic justice for a generation.

With a parliamentary majority, the Government has the power to make decisive changes. The Senate Inquiry has opened the door. Public sentiment has shifted. The evidence is overwhelming. What remains is the courage to act.

This article was originally published in Independent Australia under a Creative Commons license on 14 February 2026, available at https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/capital-gains-tax-reform-is-necessary,20679