Gen F'd? 9781743589045

Table of contents :
Title Page
Contents
Introduction
1. The end of good jobs
2. Shelving the Australian Dream
3. How neoliberalism consumed the future
4. The wrong tools
5. And so say all of us!
6. Making the modern Fair Go
Acknowledgements
Notes
Copyright Page

Citation preview

Advance praise for Gen F’d? ‘By the early 1990s, the future of young Australians stopped being what it used to be. Today’s young Australians must reckon with a reality the Sex Pistols sang about in 1977: “There’s no future for you!” Alison Pennington’s Gen F’d? is packed with insights on how this generation might earn a shot at a future worth living for.’ – Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, former Greek Finance Minister, DiEM25 co-founder and bestselling author.

Other titles in The Crikey Read series: Lies and Falsehoods – Bernard Keane Unvaxxed – Dyani Lewis Leaning Out – Kristine Ziwica The Teal Revolution – Margot Saville

CONTENTS

Cover Page Title Page Introduction 1. The end of good jobs 2. Shelving the Australian Dream 3. How neoliberalism consumed the future 4. The wrong tools 5. And so say all of us! 6. Making the modern Fair Go Acknowledgements Notes Copyright Page

INTRODUCTION

Young Australians have grown up with the false promise of a future defined by universal advancement. In an era of internet information overload, they have the sense that to know something is sufficient for society to act on it. For example, when scientists discovered Penicillin, the first antibiotic, it was swiftly integrated into modern medicine, saving millions of lives from infection. In the same way, when we discover that burning fossil fuels is warming the planet or why children are growing up in poverty, we expect that society will do something about it. Along with shallow indicators of wealth and success, such as on-demand deliveries, access to shiny new devices and cafe brunches, young Australians have been spoon-fed elaborate fairy tales about their place in an innovative ‘knowledge’ economy. Technological advances, scientific endeavours and increasing levels of education have created the powerful notion that universal human progress is in cruise control. Combine these narratives with the ideal that success can be achieved through individual hard work – without the support of governments, collective movements or other institutions – and you’ve laid a terribly dangerous trap for young people to fall into. Born from the 1980s onwards, young people only know a harsher, ‘each for their own’ Australia. They’re on the front lines of a vicious global political project of upward wealth distribution that has worked to ensure everyday people get less and less of the economic pie, while big corporations, and the CEOs who run them, get more. This is neoliberalism in action. Neoliberalism’s adherents claimed so-called free markets were the most efficient and moral ways to meet human need – an invisibility cloak while

the levers of public spending were hijacked under our noses. Public assets were privatised, the number of millionaires multiplied, and tax cuts and concessions were thrown at older, now-wealthier cohorts of Australia to buy them off. Meanwhile, government’s primary role to serve and invest in the future opportunities and capacities of its young people was abandoned. The neoliberal virus of short-term thinking has infected everything – politics, business, institutions and our entire social fabric – damaging the shared planning capacity we need for the future, ensnaring all of us in a machine that allocates resources unequally, and without any thought for the consequences. Young people have been prioritised in this economy only as fodder for the insecure ‘McJobs’ economy. Stretched, stressed and juggling adult lives, young Australians are denied full citizenship that should come with adulthood, told to play their part by buying green products for houses they don’t have and paying HECS debts in pursuit of career-building jobs they can’t reach. And, while they beaver away online engaging in supposedly new, non-traditional forms of democracy,1 power is being exercised without them, and not in their interests. It’s no surprise that there’s a feeling of existential doom and mass disempowerment gripping their thinking. This book explains how Australia created the F’d generation – and what we can all do to turn things around. Generational containers are trite, but since this is a story about young people, I’ll be more specific about who I define as ‘young’. Historian and media academic Associate Professor Tony Moore reminds us that ‘youth’ – the liminal life stage where people are neither children nor fully franked adults – was not natural, but carved out over decades of economic and political change.2 It first emerged during the 1950s expansion of consumer capitalism, as business marketed youth products to rebellious young adults. In this book I am broadly referring to Gen Ys, also called ‘Millennials’ – those born between 1980 and 1994 – and Gen Zs – born between 1995 and 2009. Both generations share the experience of trying to find jobs and build their lives after major crises – the global financial crisis (GFC) for Millennials and the COVID pandemic for Gen Zs (but also a double whammy for Millennials). Broadly, young people are those aged 35 and under.

‘Youth’ are anything but a homogenous cohort, with diverse experiences by income, sex, gender, ethnicity, cultural practices and more. But young Australians increasingly experience an overarching set of common, unifying conditions, such as less job and housing security; high exposure to the internet, social media and new technologies; a sense of responsibility to avoid climate catastrophe; and altruistic pandemic-era sacrifices for mainly older segments of the population. These conditions all raise the stakes for youth political action, creating a distinct bloc around which their newfound agency and civic potency could emerge. While this book is focused on young people, it’s about all of us, because the compounding economic, political and environmental crises they face are emblematic of the breakdown of an entire post-war order that was marked by equality-promoting governments and institutions. That breakdown affects us all, and future generations. I’m an economist who has researched inequality and its retrograde impacts on economic and social progress. I’m also attuned to inequality because, like millions of people from working-class backgrounds, I’ve marinated in it. I hail from Adelaide’s west, where the cosmopolitan economic growth of Sydney and Melbourne and Howard’s housing boom ‘battlerism’ never touched us. So I’ve grown without a shred of illusion about neoliberalism’s claims that enriching the richest would make families like mine better off. What did help me was the network of public services that walked alongside my parents – like Medicare, public schools, and Centrelink, and opportunities to grow and feel a sense of belonging through music education and team sports. Every one of these services was at that time public, free or heavily subsidised, and accessible within one or two kilometres of my house. Every one of these services has today been cut or access has been seriously compromised for people not born into means. I draw on economic concepts in this book because economics helped me to understand my world, and I think it can for you too. It helped me grasp why so much misfortune was systematically inflicted on people around me, in the form of unemployment, poverty, poor health and violence. For decades I saw hardworking, strong, kind-hearted people simply try to make ends meet, or attempt to build a life for themselves – and it was always like pushing shit uphill. There were just too many examples for their struggles to be individual ‘faults’.

In grappling with how to fix the fragile, precarious existence many young people face today, it’s worth acknowledging they’re not alone. Thousands of working-class, poor, First Nations and migrant Australians have been in the same position for decades in this country. This book tests the cornerstones of the Australian economy through the lens of what matters most to the millions of people who make the economy run – decent jobs and houses – to give readers a sense of how bad things really are for young people. It then pulls back the curtain to show how the neoliberal political project is at the centre of this problem, allowing a wealthy minority to hijack the economy and diminish the share of the economic pie going to everyday people, as well as achieving the mass individualisation of structural problems. We’ll look at how young people are currently working with the wrong tools to try and make change, and how the right tools – including collective and government action – can help us all to win back our share of the pie, and make it bigger. In a landscape devoid of hope, you’ll find oodles of it here, as I outline the plan to resurrect and remake a ‘Fair Go’ Australia for the modern era. Ensnared in a fast-paced, frenzied and atomised world, it’s hard to connect with others, let alone imagine taking those first, brave steps to becoming active in the political system to make change. But to achieve the 21stcentury Fair Go, we all need to build it. This book aims to put analysis to the anxious churning in young people’s stomachs, to empower them and provoke action, but I am really sounding an alarm for the future of egalitarian Australia, and calling for all hands on deck to remake it. So, whether you are young, middle-aged or old, I hope this book serves as both a fist pump and a kick up the butt to get (re)acquainted with the power every person has to make social change. Australians everywhere know that the status quo can’t remain. Emerging from two major crises in the GFC and the pandemic, and with the consequences of decades of neoliberal global wrecking banging on our door in profit-led inflation, climate change and recession, Australians sit in an uncomfortable liminal place. We can’t stay where we are, but we don’t know what’s ahead. As well as economics, this book draws on history to help us understand our present. Scattered through Australian history, like a trail of breadcrumbs, are inspiring accounts of a people and a nation overcoming the odds. I follow that trail, uncovering how the Australian people solved

some of the big problems of their day, in order to understand how we may tackle the big challenges of our time. Left battered by the Depression, Australia was at a crossroads when World War II began, in terms of its economy, polity and social fabric. Reflecting on our nation’s next steps, H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs, economist, public servant and architect of Australia’s post-war reconstruction, argued in 1943 that there were two ways to see the problem. One was to seek the resolution of system-wide instability within our existing structures, the other, ‘to see the very confusion and inflexibility of the situation’ as ‘an opportunity to move consciously and intelligently towards a new economic and social system’.3 In the aftermath of the GFC and pandemic crises, the latter our own wartime mobilisation, will Australia return to a society that dismantles economic opportunity for future generations? Will it ‘snap back’ to an economy of consciously designed unemployment, bad jobs and housing insecurity, while gold-plating the private schools, opportunities and bank accounts of the wealthiest? Or will we draw on the knowledge and experience of our own inspiring past of people-powered egalitarianism, and build the infrastructure of opportunity and hope that heralds a new era for Australia? One that lifts everyone up, and leaves no one behind? Can a lost generation find itself, and by extension, the nation’s future?

1. THE END OF GOOD JOBS

What do you want to be when you grow up? We pose this question to children as a way of asking them not what kind of people they want to become but what jobs they wish to work. Typically, though, kids don’t develop an answer to this question independent of what influential people around them say about jobs. I’ve learned that it’s common for parents to encourage their kids – You’d be a great teacher! or You could be a lawyer! or What about becoming a carpenter! – but I have no memory of my parents encouraging me to do any particular job. Their only advice to me was to get a good one. A good job meant security. It was one where you couldn’t be sacked indiscriminately, one that let you rest when you were sick, and paid enough to make ends meet, while leaving something left over for small luxuries. If you were lucky, then it was also a job that held meaning. Working-class people like my parents were shielding themselves from the conservative onslaught of John Howard in the 1990s, and were acutely aware of the inherent power asymmetry within the workforce. As unionists, they knew that job security was the steadier ground from which to unite with workmates to make bad jobs better ones. Casual work carried the ultimate risk for sticking your neck out – the sack. It was a work regime built upon fear of unemployment, and it pitted workers against one another.

But as I entered the workforce in the early 2000s, the economy of Adelaide’s western suburbs where I lived was changing. The state had haemorrhaged decent jobs with the decline of manufacturing and public sector cuts and there was a sense that life was going to become harsher for working-class families like mine. And this was despite our unrelenting bythe-bootstraps work ethic. While I knew about unions and the system of industry-specific minimum wages called ‘awards’, and while I’d grown up learning first hand how to stretch a dollar, the job market I came into was something entirely different to the one my parents had experienced. Everywhere, the only jobs on offer were either casual or ‘gig’ work dressed up as empowered selfemployment. In the two years preceding my legal entry into the workforce (2004–05), more than one-third of all jobs worked by South Australian women were casual.1 Many of these were part time, a far cry from the salaried apprenticeship structure that supported my mum through nursing school in the early 1980s. Insecure work had emerged as the dominant business model for entrylevel jobs, touting flexibility and efficiency. Cash payments were creeping in and payslips disappearing. For young workers, this environment represented a wave of economic anxiety. Full-time hours were no safe harbour either. The percentage of young people working full-time in casual jobs, without job security or normal paid leave entitlements, more than doubled in the 25 years from 1992: from around 10 per cent of workers aged 15–24 in 1992 to 21 per cent in 2017.2 From the ages of 15 to 26, I would find insecure work in every imaginable sector – across retail and hospitality, as an airport cleaner, as a freelance editor and as a music teacher. Despite this decade of committed toiling, not one of my employers across the 14 jobs I performed saw fit to invest in me long term. There were no basic entitlements, little training and not much willingness to guarantee hours and income. No matter how industriously I may have prevailed within this dodgy job market as I pursued my education, I was barely earning enough to get by, and only when supplemented with Youth Allowance or Newstart (now JobSeeker). Even then, bouts of crisis accommodation, irregular meals and the absence of health care when badly needed might be stretching the definition of ‘getting by’.

In the end, I scraped together a work history by folding disparate job experiences into one ever-evolving story about my value to the next lowwage employer. I became a walking CV, and began to prepare myself emotionally to never earn enough to start my own life. I believed that I would forever be a flexible ‘input’ to business needs. I could see the first rung on the ladder of economic opportunity disintegrating before me. Not just my economic opportunities, but an entire generation’s right to decent work. It enraged me. So where else to start this book but with a look at how the first rung on the ladder of opportunity, and a major pillar of Australian citizenship, was dissolved, and how the members of the most educated generation in history were funnelled into dead-end, insecure jobs, with cascading consequences?

Disposable jobs, disposable people Australians have long believed that tough, bottom-feeder work is the normal course for youth starting out. Casual employment with big fast-food behemoths is thought of as simply ‘doing your time’, and it’s become customary for older workers to chastise the young ‘snowflakes’ who dare to want more from their working lives. Yet young people today have been plunged into a world of work totally unrecognisable from that of previous generations. In recent decades, government economic policies have intentionally transformed jobs into something we compete against one another for. From the late 1970s, but gathering pace in the 1980s, big structural changes were made to the DNA of Australia’s economy. Businesses became increasingly determined to make quick bucks for shareholders rather than investing in people for the long term. They found friends in politicians who punctured holes in labour regulations and cut public services and welfare payments, thereby magnifying our dependence on employment incomes. With workers’ pay legally in the firing line of business competition, and the ability for business to discipline workers strengthened with expanding insecure work, the great advancements in dignified work gained by early20th-century union action, such as sick pay and predictable working hours, were reversed for millions of workers. The traditional Australian ideal of a stable, full-time job with paid holidays and sick leave crumbled. In 2017, for the first time in recorded statistics, these full-time standard jobs with

entitlements fell to less than half of all jobs,3 improving marginally under a tighter post-lockdown labour market to 52 per cent of all jobs in 2022.4 Where full-time jobs were once the norm, they were suddenly being sliced and diced into smaller ‘bits’ of jobs without enough hours or pay. The wider-reaching assault on job quality and wages made people feel insecure everywhere they worked, regardless of their status as permanent or not. The sense was that someone was always ‘out there’ ready for your job, and if you didn’t accept that extra task or work those extra unpaid hours, you could be on your arse. Instead of work expanding the possibilities of how we organise society, persistent fear has fostered staler and more transactional workplace relationships. This short-sighted, lazy route to profits and growth has fostered a Hunger Games-style fight for good jobs, shutting out youth from one of the most important life-building pillars of economic citizenship. It has undermined their financial capacity to build independent, adult lives and has resulted in the first generation in our history to become downwardly mobile. The compounding effect of these powerful economic changes has been to cultivate a new mindset in Australian businesses: a laser focus on squeezing workers on the job. Employers don’t think about what that practice means for sustaining their businesses over the long term: only half of Australian businesses surveyed in 2018 by business lobby group AiG said they intended to increase training expenditure.5 Young workers who require training and mentorship are perceived as investments with no immediate returns. So, why make them? With the drawbridge pulled up on permanent career-building jobs, young people have been forced to make ends meet elsewhere. Over the last four decades, private services industries like hospitality and retail have exploded, with 1.2 million jobs added in these two industries alone. And it’s job-hungry youth who are the cheap-labour fodder. Young workers comprise three-quarters of the hospitality workforce serving your weekend brunches today,6 but the jobs propelling these industries are marked by low hours, low pay, and a lack of basic entitlements and opportunities for training and advancement. Given their concentration in private services sectors, it’s unsurprising that over half of all young people under the age of 25 were employed in casual or ‘gig-based’ jobs in 2021. The other side of this demographic coin is that

Australia’s permanent full-time workforce is aging, while the disposable, cheap casual workforce retains its youthful appearance. But the decline of traditional full-time job pathways for young people isn’t confined to the private sector. State public health-care and education systems, already contending with budget cuts and ever-increasing demands, have come to depend on free youth labour each year, as students sub in for overworked teachers, nurses and other health-care professionals as a requirement of gaining their qualifications. Once, nurses and teachers intraining had salaried apprenticeship structures, free accommodation or bursaries, but now they’re burning out with months of unpaid placements, and mounting HECS debts.7 This dependence on free labour reached new heights during the pandemic as hospitals and schools enlisted pre-service students to the front lines. Failure to properly invest in university-to-jobs pathways means that the public health and public education systems face profound and growing workforce pressures. One study found rising psycho-social stress among nursing students over the course of their study, with one in five students completing their studies already burnt out and at risk of quitting the profession.8 This was before the pandemic. Instead of properly funding precious essential services and cultivating young people’s passion to contribute to the public good we have undermined both. The most insidious lie told to hundreds of thousands of Australia’s young casual workers who’ve flipped burgers, stacked shelves and scanned barcodes for years, is that their casual jobs were only temporary. While young workers saw these jobs as holding zones while they studied to acquire the qualifications needed to unlock their real futures – futures filled with interesting and engaging careers, like those marketed to them in university brochures – businesses have in the meantime reduced the expectations of their young workers, as well as those of wider society, that such jobs should be better paid, secure and more permanent. Acceptance of this has reinforced the social contract for Australia’s archaic junior wages system, which pays workers under 21 only a percentage of the adult minimum wage which was $21.38 per hour at the time of writing. Right now, you can finish high school at 17 and be worth only 58 per cent of an adult wage – just $12.30 per hour. For 15-year-olds it is 36.8 per cent of the minimum hourly wage, a measly $7.90 per hour.

In Australia you can legally consent to sex at 16 years of age. From 18 years of age you can vote in elections, drink publicly and die for your country. But when it comes to employment, our laws don’t consider you an adult until you’re 21. That’s six years in the workforce before we let adults be paid as such. This appalling discrepancy carries serious consequences for the financial security of young workers, who, like any other worker, can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to perform their job soon after starting that job. And this is to say nothing of their families, who may depend on this income. The most profitable companies in our corporate landscape, like Woolworths, Coles and McDonald’s, are the biggest beneficiaries of junior wages. Like vampires, they’ve fed on millions of young workers for decades to build their empires, routinely sacking older casuals, and replenishing their stocks with cheaper, fresh teens. Only they won’t say ‘sack’. You just won’t be scheduled for shifts next week. And every week here out. By allowing the practice of using young, disposable labour to become entrenched, the most egregious illegal wages and safety practices have emerged. Hundreds of millions of dollars in lawful wages have been thieved from lower-wage, mostly young workers in major supermarkets, restaurants, fast-food outlets and universities since 2013. Employers blame the so-called ‘complexity’ in our awards system for the theft, while aggressively lobbying to ‘simplify’ awards to cut workers’ pay further. ‘Look what you made me do!’ Wage theft is a business model, with 35 per cent of all employees in accommodation and food services industries reporting hourly earnings below the national minimum wage.9 Around one-quarter of all young employees aged 21 to 24 across all industries report hourly earnings below the national minimum wage. For decades these practices have undermined young workers’ jobs and incomes. But dodgy labour models have also stymied the development of a better hospitality industry in Australia. They have belittled the skill and dedication of those young workers who want meaningful careers in the industry they love.

Where did it all go wrong?

Contrary to claims that Australia emerged unscathed from the 2007–08 GFC, this is when the worst trends for youth jobs and incomes set in. In the three years before the GFC, half of all jobs market entrants under the age of 25 were employed full time.10 Then things went south. Among youth trying their luck to land work after the GFC between 2016 and 2019, full-time employment rates plunged around 10 percentage points to only 41 per cent. It was even lower for those who’d only finished high school, at just 35 per cent.11 The GFC also marked the rise of pessimism among employers, who reduced investment in future workforces. As entry-level career-building jobs started drying up, youth started pooling in low-paid, insecure services industries like hospitality and retail. Despite being sold university degrees as pathways to jobs, graduates were finding it harder to land full-time work. The Graduate Outcomes Survey, funded by the Australian Government Department of Education, shows prior to the GFC, the number of bachelor-level graduates in full-time jobs, as a percentage of those available for full-time work, was at an alltime high – 85 per cent. But post-GFC employment rates plunged to their lowest level in 17 years, at only 68 per cent in 2014.12 The penalty for living in cursed times are lower earnings, which compound over a lifetime of economic scarring. If you were trying to get work straight after the GFC, you fared the worst. Only 54 per cent of people under 25 entering the labour force between 2009 and 2012 were in full-time employment three years after entering the labour market, compared to 62 per cent of those who got in before the GFC.13 Compare the pair: if, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree, you machine-gun distributed your CV across every formal graduate program and landed an elusive graduate role, you’d be earning around $1300 per week (pre-tax).14 If you returned empty-handed to your hospitality job, you’d earn around half that amount (the median weekly earnings for degree-holders in hospitality just $700 per week15). In 2018, the Foundation for Young Australians estimated the delayed transition time to getting into full-time work after graduation was 2.6 years.16 That initial good job opportunity loss multiplied by the average transition means the university graduate still making coffees is around

$31,200 worse off than a graduate who immediately lands a full-time role in a formal graduate program – and that’s assuming the cafe job pays 52 weeks of the year, which most don’t due to their casual, intermittent nature.17 That’s just from delayed labour market entry. The earnings disadvantage accumulates over your lifetime. US data indicates that graduating during a recession results in a wage penalty that can last up to ten years.18 After years of compounding pain finding work, over-education, insecure work and wage theft, the pandemic struck. The impact of this virus-led shock on an already weakened entry-level jobs market was significant. Almost half of all young workers were concentrated in just three industries when lockdowns hit in 2020: hospitality, retail, and arts and recreation. As industries most reliant on public human contact, they were among those sectors with the highest number of staff hours slashed. Young services workers were also disproportionately in casual roles – cheap to sack and less likely to be covered by the federal government’s JobKeeper wage subsidy, which excluded casuals with less than 12 months’service. Thousands of young workers were thrown on the scrap heap. Australia Institute economists Eliza Littleton and Rod Campbell found that during the 2021 lockdowns 55 per cent of all job losses were shouldered by people under 24 years old, despite them making up only 14 per cent of the workforce. Then, when lockdowns lifted and we all opened our wallets again, the jobs young people got back were almost entirely casual or part time, with little job security.19 In the recent post-lockdowns recovery, mainstream economists celebrated the best labour market conditions in 50 years. Excuse younger Australians for not sharing the enthusiasm. Young people know better than anyone that not all jobs are created equal. High levels of employment are no victory if those jobs are low-quality, dispensable ones. Youth unemployment may be lower than in previous years, but it’s still more than double the rate for all adult workers. If you look beneath formal ABS statistics, there’s a bigger story. In order to kill good jobs and flip them into bad ones, you need lots of hungry people who’ll take anything on offer. This is why growth in insecure work is inseparable from growth in the number of people out of work or wanting more work – what economists call ‘underutilisation’.

One in five young workers aged 15–19 needs more hours.20 Dig even deeper and there’s a worrying layer of youth giving up on the world of work altogether. Data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey shows over 220,000 people aged 15–24 were not in the labour force or engaged in study or training at all in 2019.21 Three-quarters of those weren’t working or studying due to caring, disability or health barriers. The remaining young people who don’t provide these reasons for non-participation are most likely to live in poorer households, with their concentration in the bottom 20 per cent of the income distribution increasing over time. Since the GFC, around one-quarter remain unemployed one year after observation. These aren’t kids playing video games, as conservative poor-beaters often claim. This is profound disadvantage and destitution. Insecure work is inseparable from the welfare system. It works in grisly tandem with bosses exploiting precarity. This is evidenced by the fact that you can’t survive on either job income from a casual part-time job or welfare payments alone – by design. Try combining your tiny weekly pay with Youth Allowance or JobSeeker. Even though you’ll only just make ends meet, Centrelink docks the payment for every dollar earned over a below-poverty threshold. The financial punishment exists to ensure you’re always on your toes, desperate for a few more rostered hours. It’s a powerful wage suppression machine for employers, who sit back ready to funnel desperate people into their shitty jobs.

Locked out of the Australian story It is difficult to overstate what this generational jobs rupture represents for Australia’s social and economic fabric. It’s worth tracing the roots of this fabric in history, a story all too often forgotten but so important for revealing what’s at stake. World-leading movements for political and economic democracy emerged right here in Australia, both at the ballot box and on the job, where powerful bosses were expecting workers to toil on poverty wages and in undignified conditions. None of those gains were complete, of course, until the right to vote and to access quality jobs was won by groups previously shut out of big reforms, including women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Jobs are central to Australia’s concepts of citizenship and contribution. The story of migration is one that centres itself around employment. When migrants like the European labourers in the post-World War II construction industry couldn’t see their concerns reflected in a predominantly AngloCeltic worker union movement, they fought for representation and leadership, for example in the Builders Labourers Federation. From the early 1980s, Australia bolstered old-age incomes through the superannuation system and expanded universal health care through Medicare – ‘the social wage’. These advancements happened through a series of agreements between government and unions, starting with the Prices and Incomes Accord in 1983, where unions agreed to limit wage increases in exchange for other benefits. This period fortified the notion that in this country, working a job meant that you had the right to hard-fought improvements to the welfare state. But there is and has always been a dark side to what political scientist Professor Francis Castles calls Australia’s ‘wage earners’ welfare state’. And it’s this: if you can’t work, you’re a secondary citizen. It’s a powerful ideological leftover from the very specific way government action and services expanded with wage earners in mind. This dangerous, long-lasting hangover holds that the bountiful fruits of our collective toil can only be accessed if you have a job. The narrow logic follows: if I have to subject myself to this pain, then so do you! It’s why even a unionised worker might cop physical and financial harm to stand with their workmates on a picket line, but still believe that ‘dole bludgers’ should get off their arses and work like the rest of us. This resentment will keep rearing its head until we imagine a new world of work, and one of government services and social security supports. Australia’s history of progress, of overcoming the odds and advancing egalitarian reform, has centred on the fight for better jobs. And much of that experience has presupposed the existence of jobs that you could progress and build a life with. Something that many young people have never known. By losing sight of where we were going and putting narrow selfinterested crooks behind the steering wheel of Australian workplaces, we’ve generated a precarious lost generation. This situation is driving the breakdown of the social compact of the Fair Go in Australia, with rising

inequality carrying wider consequences for people’s trust in government, democratic participation and social cohesion.

Baristas with PhDs Where leaving school and going straight into a job may have once been the normal course for older generations, today young people are pursuing further education at a growing rate. In fact, the proportion of students aged 15–24 enrolled in full-time education has more than doubled since the mid1980s, reaching 53 per cent in 2022.22 This higher rate of participation has resulted in people with more qualifications: the percentage of those aged 20–34 holding a bachelor’s degree or higher almost tripled, from 13 per cent in the mid-1990s to 38 per cent in 2022.23 If this pace of growth continues, two in five young workers will have university qualifications by 2025. But while young people are doing everything they can to attain higher education and skills, their efforts aren’t translating into better work outcomes. The proportion of graduates in full-time work in 2021 declined to its second-lowest rate in 24 years, only 69 per cent. Whereas it took one year to move from education to work in the mid-1980s, it now takes almost three years. That’s a long time chasing jobs, working unsuitable ones, boxticking for income supports, and waiting for your working life to start. One consequence of there being fewer good jobs available is that graduates are becoming more entrenched in jobs that don’t require their qualifications. The percentage of over-qualified, degree-holding employees within sales, labouring, and clerical and administrative roles has nearly doubled since 2008 to one in five workers. Research on over-educated and over-skilled graduates in Australia shows they have lower earnings, lower job satisfaction and higher resignation rates compared to all graduates.24 Since Youth Allowance payment rates haven’t kept up with real living costs, many students also now can’t afford to focus on their studies, and have to work. The expansion of university education to working-class youth always came with conditions. It’s why the percentage of students with a full-time workload who are also holding down jobs has tripled since the 1980s. The pressure to earn income is partly why lecture theatres are emptying out in universities across the country.

Young people’s studies also faced significant disruption during pandemic lockdowns. The number of students dropping out of education and training increased, especially among youth from disadvantaged backgrounds.25 New graduates trying their hand at decent entry-level jobs faced, again, severely diminished prospects before even getting started. Their post-GFC graduate compatriots had clawed back some of the lost terrain over the five years leading into the pandemic, but the pandemic pushed them back to square one. The share of bachelor-level graduates in full-time work is still a whopping 16 percentage points below pre-GFC levels – at only 69 per cent. This isn’t a ‘post-COVID recovery’. Is there a more blatant demonstration that individual striving and a university education aren’t tickets to decent work than the existence of Australia’s army of young casual academics? Instead of building stable, distinguished careers in the academy, they have wound up as exploited cogs in degree factories, with their jobs pathways dismantled before they could even get off the blocks. I saw this tidal wave of precarity building when I was doing my postgraduate studies at the University of Sydney. Brilliant, passionate educators whom I admired were losing their jobs, or seeing pathways to permanency vanish before their eyes. Hell-bent on finding safe harbour after a lifetime of financial instability, I never warmed to academia as a job prospect. With public funding for universities declining and the corporatisation agenda in full swing, I knew insecure work could never be trusted, regardless of the prestige attached to it. In fact, the prestige and high intellectual demands made it riskier to exploitation. Nowadays, there’s no such thing as a permanent job in academia. Wage theft is endemic in Australian universities. More than 20 public universities were investigated by the Fair Work Ombudsman in 2021 for underpaying casual academics – most of them young workers. A survey of casual academics by the National Tertiary Education Union found 90 per cent worked in excess of their paid hours.26 The volume of unpaid additional hours meant casual academics weren’t being paid for 32 per cent of the work completed, including marking, planning and administration. The multimillion-dollar surpluses being clocked across universities in the 2021–22 financial year reveal the private beneficiaries of this illegal wage theft and cost-cutting.

One of the consequences of the vanishing bottom rung of Australia’s opportunity ladder is an unravelling of the social compact for how we pay for education through the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. The whole premise of HECS is that you will only pay off debt when you’re earning good money – when the public’s investment in your education yields an individual return. But what is the value of a degree in this job market? For youth languishing in dead-end jobs where their hard-earned qualifications and skills aren’t deployed, it’s zero. It will take around two years longer to pay off a HECS debt in 2022, compared to graduates in 2005. The size of HECS debts increases as young workers start full-time work later, and many undertake additional postgraduate study to give themselves a better chance at landing work. Adding to the pain is the federal Coalition government’s 2020 Job-ready Graduates Package, which increased study fees; the cost of studying an Arts degree, for example, rose by 113 per cent. The average outstanding HECS debt in 2021 was $23,685 compared to $14,404 in 2011. The way the federal government treats and recoups these debts rubs salt in the wound. In 2019, the federal Coalition government lowered the repayment threshold to $45,881, which saw 130,000 mostly young workers lose income to HECS repayments – two-thirds of whom were in jobs that didn’t even need a degree.27 An entirely arbitrary practice of HECS debt indexation designed to protect the ‘real value’ of degrees means government slaps extra interest costs on your outstanding debt. The rate rose to 3.9 per cent in June 2022 – the highest it has been in ten years – piling more than $1.9 billion in extra debt onto students in 2022.28 So that we’re clear: amid a profit-driven inflation surge (not wages), young workers are expected to pay more for debt accumulated to obtain jobs they don’t have. But even if they did have jobs, their wages would grow below the rate of interest government is charging them. Youth are now paying more on rent and food, and have more debt. The logic is busted. Bigger debts that take longer to pay off affect the capacity of young people to start their next life stages, like buying a house and starting a family. This limits their life choices. Reigniting the government’s responsibility to generate sufficient good jobs is the only way to repair the social contract of HECS over the long term. If it can’t do this, study should be free.

Beautiful lies There’s no shortage of lies peddled to distract from a busted jobs market failing to create enough good jobs. Young people have heard them all, like hard work and individual efforts carry you far, or university degrees are gateways to stable jobs. More sophisticated distractions include assertions about what you should study (or should have studied) to be prepared for a future full of inevitable impersonal forces, like automation. You should study fields in ‘real demand’, like science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), which supposedly have the best employment outcomes because there are not enough people with the knowledge. But if that were the case, why do mathematics and sciences graduates have some of the worst full-time employment placement rates of any study field?29 This is what happens when governments gut public research funding from places like CSIRO and our universities, which would have typically employed new STEM graduates. Another big lie is the idea that digital technologies will polarise your chances at getting a job in the future. It follows that those with high-level technical skills will be bestowed the benefits of automation. Didn’t start coding when you were four years old? Too bad. ‘Low-skill’ workers will be displaced by robots, penalised with lower chances of employment and lower pay. But nothing could be further from the truth. The jobs we wrongly associate with ‘low skill’, such as those in caring services and hospitality, have boomed in recent decades. And they’ll keep doing so. According to the National Skills Commission’s most recent employment projections, the forecasting body soon to be replaced by Labor’s new Jobs and Skills Australia, 1.2 million jobs will be created in the five years from 2021 to 2026, and five labour-intensive industries will be the biggest job-creators – health care, professional services, education, hospitality, and construction – representing two-thirds of all jobs growth.30 The reality is that the discrepancy between how and what a Google app developer is paid compared to a chef or a disability care worker has little to do with technology. It comes down to how our society values those jobs. We can make different and better collective choices to value socially important work by those who care, educate and feed us by promoting institutions that support workers to demand better compensation for their work. For instance, new gender equity laws introduced by the federal

government will allow workers to bring pay-boosting claims to the Fair Work Commission to address structural pay discrimination in feminised industries. Without institutions like unions – which unite workers around common interests, improving the pay, quality and status of jobs in the wider public through campaigns and collective bargaining – the chefs and disability carers can’t get up from the wages floor. Traditional career progression has been turned on its head by insecure work. Normally, workers advance through their jobs, with new experience and skills tied to level advancement. New capabilities once gained through higher qualifications (or tickets in the case of construction) were then formalised through higher pay in collective agreements negotiated by unions. Australia’s prevailing awards system assigns legal minimum pay rates to skills progression within industries, but that’s no good for young people assembling bits and pieces of jobs, flying by the seat of their pants. They’re denied any formal attachment to or identity within an industry. Futurist tech-bros and policy-makers celebrate this breakdown as the new era of ‘microentrepreneurs’.31 You can fund your own path to success! Meanwhile, young people yearn for belonging in their work and pile up qualifications and skills completely outside all our existing institutions.

Putting good jobs back on the map After years of living in chaotic share-houses and crisis accommodation while doing my master’s in Sydney, I got a housesitting opportunity, looking after two yappy dogs for a woman while she travelled to Greece. I was sitting at her doily-covered dining table when my phone rang and my life abruptly changed. After clearing months of gruelling interviews, I had landed a permanent full-time job in the public service in Canberra. I called my family immediately, teary and ecstatic. The stability and predictability of a decent public sector job was the ceiling of my low expectations in this broken economy. I felt both guilty and privileged to be employed. Over the next five years, I would flog my guts out in the job based on that guilt, and that feeling of privilege. But … after a life of relentless, frenetic risk and price calculations everywhere I went, I noticed that I suddenly had time to think.

The thing about the human brain is it’s wired to keep you alive. It’s always engaging in risk assessments to mitigate future threats to your ability to sustain yourself. I’d been deprived of the capacity to secure life’s basics. I’d been defensive, anxious and sick for so long. That was all I knew. But with a stable income for the first time in my life, I could feel my brain being reconstituted. Things were no longer happening to me. I gained agency over my life. A stable income kicked off changes in my brain that allowed me to read, to focus, to analyse and strategise more deeply. To think beyond the next payday. To write this book. Insecure work is nothing short of systematised anxiety. It stops people satiating their most primal need to mitigate risk. It stops them planning ahead; instead, they live payday to payday, gig to gig, contract to contract. Insecure work has broken the spirits and material capacities of workers to exert bargaining power and fight back. It is a barbaric way to treat people, and an unacceptable way to organise work in an economy. It’s also a huge loss of human potential. It results in patterns of entrenched low wages, no career trajectories, higher exploitation and vulnerability to wage theft. When you fear losing income for raising problems at work with your boss, you’re less likely to ask to be paid properly, let alone ask for a pay rise. Young people have shown incredible resilience in this time. But it’s not sustainable. From decades of economic policy choices made by governments, and exploitative business practices, high HECS debts, reduced incomes and more, young people have suffered extraordinarily high levels of anxiety and other mental health conditions associated with being banished from the pride lands of permanent work. Worst of all, Australia disproportionately subjects millions of young people to this anxiety machine, exactly when they’re facing the most fragile time for adult brain development. The wider consequences for our whole economy and society are significant. We have huge workforce challenges from climate change adaptation, with the pandemic compounding the issues of an aging workforce, especially in the health-care sector, and the need to rebuild our capacity to manufacture stuff, for which our future skilled workforce desperately needs investment in now. A large layer of young people have given up on the world of work and education. It is a systemic failure, with huge costs.

Mass job losses during the pandemic have expressed the full scale of a problem that started years before with the GFC. Contrary to claims young people enjoy the ‘flexibility’ and job-hopping forced upon them, it must be said that this is not the world of work young people hoped to join. Job security consistently ranks more important to young workers than rates of pay, or even full-time hours.32 They yearn for secure employment. Australians’ ideas of work straddle the jobs market of yesteryear and the one we have today. We all have an obligation to understand both worlds, so that we may find solutions. It’s not enough to fight for entry into a bad jobs market. The types of jobs, how we do them, and under what conditions – all of these must change. This isn’t a celebration of paid work as some sort of salvation. We need to displace the tightening grip our jobs and bosses have over our lives. It is the combination of all our working efforts that determines the shape of our economy – what we produce, how much, and on what terms we achieve this. Jobs are the terrain of historic social change and progress – where we collectively advance a better world of work, including remuneration for types of work that were once denied acknowledgement, such as educating young children or caring for the elderly. The right to a good job was once at the centre of Australian egalitarian traditions, our identity and sense of self. Regenerating a hopeful future for young Australians, one they can grab with both hands, demands that we reclaim that right.

2. SHELVING THE AUSTRALIAN DREAM

As well as decent jobs, the second pillar of economic opportunity to crumble for young people is a secure place to call home – once realisable for the great majority of us, but now a pipedream for many young Australians. While investors pocket the financial gains from pushing up inner-city prices, it has become standard Australian fare to blame young people for gentrification. Since they can’t buy houses in the suburbs where they grew up, or get jobs in their home towns, many young people have moved to inner-city areas to rent for good reason. They’re closer to amenities, transport, services, jobs and places of study. Since many have given up saving for a home, they spend whatever paltry income is left after bills on coffee, beers, occasional gigs and hot outfits, only to be called ‘hipsters’, apparently responsible for mass social dislocation. In the early 1980s, before market forces were unleashed, young people were much more likely to be home owners, with over 60 per cent of people aged 25–34 owner-occupiers. Now, it’s less than 45 per cent.1 Youth in the lowest 20 per cent of incomes have suffered a disastrous collapse in homeownership rates, dropping by almost 40 percentage points, to just under 23 per cent in 2016 – among the largest falls in home-ownership rates in the

OECD.2 This colossal shafting is radically at odds with young people’s expectations: 70 per cent still see buying a house as an important goal.3 But many young people have a looming sense that that goal won’t be realised. How did it all go wrong? And how can we fix this situation?

How the foundations crumbled Working to buy your own home is a rite of passage in Australia, firmly rooted in a time when government delivered plentiful, affordable housing. Following the senseless poverty and destitution inflicted by price-gouging landlords during the Depression, we created a better, more equitable housing system after World War II. Up until the mid-1970s, government took a hands-on approach to housing, constructing homes for people to buy or rent at low cost. Investors weren’t prioritised over the rights of people who needed shelter, and government helped people buy with cheap loans. It was these settings that generalised the home-owning dream to over 70 per cent of Australian households by the late 1960s. But from the 1980s, Australia’s housing system was being transformed into a ‘closed shop’, working to expand the wealth of existing home owners and investors. If you owned a home, you had membership to Australia’s exclusive wealth-builders’ club. Generous tax concessions flowed to home owners, who were encouraged to expand their financial position, spending on their own house and maybe a rental property. The capacity to stash 50 per cent of the spoils from selling a house away from the tax man, paying capital gains tax (CGT) on only the remaining 50 per cent, combined with negative gearing, meant easy money without having to move yourself, and an annual cash-flow boost through interest deductibility at every income tax return. After pumping up the insiders’ gains, government abandoned its role in new construction, handing the reins of housing supply to private interests. The majority of public dwellings, built by state housing authorities after the war, had already been sold off, mostly to the households occupying them, such that less than 4 per cent of all homes are government-owned today.4 After cutting supply, governments increased demand for housing. Tax concessions cultivated an investor class, but so did weakened lending regulations, which saw an explosion in new lending, as investors received almost the same loan rates as owner-occupiers. House price growth was

speeding ahead of employment incomes, and political pressure to respond to intergenerational and class inequality grew. Governments responded by ploughing billions into schemes to assist first-home buyers. Twenty billion dollars was spent in helping some young and low-income people into the market throughout the 2010s,5 but by 2021 this was little more than a bandaid over a bullet wound. Australia’s gold-plated housing system manufactures false scarcity. It excludes an ever-larger group of people, for whom housing becomes a rare commodity. Contrary to rudimentary supply–demand theory, individuals holding ownership of the hottest product in human life have zero interest in expanding supply to meet demand for affordable, decent homes. They sit and wait for prices to increase, and people borrow more and more to keep up. Worse still, Australia helps older, wealthy owners of housing to keep cashing in on the lack of affordable homes and rising prices. Economists Matt Grudnoff and Eliza Littleton found that almost three-quarters of the CGT discount housing benefit goes to the top 10 per cent of households by income, and more than three-quarters to people aged 50 and over.6 People under 40 receive only 6 per cent of CGT discount benefits.7 It’s a government bankrolled gravy train, and there are no wealth or inheritance taxes in sight. Many young people are locked out of a housing system dominated by rich older people. The housing industry is at pains to hide this, selling the long-standing lie that the Australian landlords reducing their taxes are average-earning mums and dads, while in reality the beneficiaries of negative gearing are overwhelmingly wealthy. More than half of the $4.3 billion annual benefit from negative-gearing tax cuts goes to the top 20 per cent of households by income.8 Those aged between 40 and 60 capture over 60 per cent of the concessions.9 Even if lucrative tax concessions were unpicked to support a more level playing field in our housing system, young people’s pain is multiplied in the jobs market. The Productivity Commission found that real incomes for people aged 15–24 declined by an average of 1.6 per cent every year over the decade 2008–18. Incomes fell slightly less for the Millennials aged 25– 34, but still fell 0.7 per cent each year. Over the same period, real incomes for the over 65s increased by 37 per cent … more than one-third.10 The only cohort emphatically mobilising is the oldest.

Since young people lost a decade of income growth after the GFC, lower incomes mean they can’t build savings at the same rate as older generations. The 20 per cent deposit of $120,000 to buy a median capital city unit is simply impossible for many young people to reach, placing home ownership in fantasy territory. Right now, thin savings blankets already mean severe distress when shit hits the fan. Without a secure income or roof over young people’s heads, economic shocks are more severe, overall health and wellbeing diminished, and the ability to grasp opportunities for other jobs or study compromised. Widening intergenerational inequality centres around our housing system, with billions pumped into making houses more valuable. Many people who own those houses obtained them decades ago when prices were lower and you could rely on available jobs that paid enough to buy one. In the mid-1980s, the median earner forked out three times their annual income for a home, compared to the record-high 8.5 times their income in 2022. But it’s not the old widower on your street who’s to blame, the bloke who bought his inner-city house in the 1970s for $15,000 and saw it rise to $1 million by retirement. Access to the basics of life is not the problem. Follow the big investor money.

Feudalism returns While Australia encourages the wealthiest households to build housing assets, it forces young and low-income households into an increasingly pressured private rental market. Over 60 per cent of people aged under 30 are renting, with this age group experiencing the sharpest increase in renting arrangements than any other age group since 1996.11 Low welfare payments and casual jobs are no match for rising rents. In fact, based on current rates for renting one bedroom in a two-bedroom unit, an average 18year-old working in hospitality or retail, or receiving Youth Allowance, meets the definition of housing stress in every capital city in the country.12 Australia’s private rental system was designed to be a tenancy of transition, not a permanent encounter. But renting permanently is the reality for a growing number of low-income people, including youth, older women, those with disabilities, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Governments have failed to catch up with this seismic shift in rental

dependency. Without regulation of rental conditions, human dignity and security of tenure are railroaded by landlords, who routinely price gouge, abuse tenants, and offer dilapidated, inadequate, poor-quality housing. After momentarily cooling with reduced demand in the pandemic lull, and various short-term measures introduced by state governments to relieve renters – including moratoriums on evictions and prohibitions on rent increases – rental prices have since surged. In the 12 months to September 2022, rental prices grew nationally by 15 per cent, and vacancy rates fell to their lowest level since 2006 at less than 1 per cent,13 with ongoing floods in New South Wales and Victoria placing greater strain on already-slim housing stocks in regional areas. The shortened supply of suitable rental properties in many pockets of the country facilitates invasive practices by real estate agents too, who routinely encourage rent-bidding and payment of several months’ rent in advance, and demand financial and personal records from tenants. All for the privilege of paying off someone else’s mortgage! Australian landlords demand a return on their investment as a matter of entitlement. As a class, they pocket billions in housing tax concessions, contribute to rising prices, and then demand their poorer tenants keep up with rents. Retrofitting a rental system designed to build the wealth of investors into one that meets human need costs us a pretty penny. The sneaky, indirect subsidy not often acknowledged is the almost $5 billion spent annually in Commonwealth Rent Assistance – a supplement paid by the federal government to people on meagre social security payments trying to keep a roof over their heads – which underpins the private rental system.14 Australians idolise self-employment as an escape from the horrors of bad bosses, and it’s not hard to see the appeal of owner occupation to escape landlords. People would rather scrounge and submit to a lifetime of bank debt just to escape the indignity of individuals unfairly emboldened by our policies to determine the life course of others. Why, after all, should young people be fixed in a cycle of helping secure wealth for older generations?

Broken links in the Fair Go chain In a housing system generating inequality both within and between generations, all young people face rising hurdles to home ownership

compared to earlier post-war generations, but those with the lowest incomes suffer the most. Parental lending is reported with humour in our media – the Bank of Mum and Dad is now the ninth biggest mortgage lender – but this creeping return to feudal social relations is a shocking development in a nation that defined itself against the rigid class hierarchies of Britain. Australia’s investor-dominated housing system has walked the nation to the cliff’s edge of our egalitarian history; whereas employment income was once sufficient to secure housing and a good life, working any job today is no longer enough; the wealth you’re born into increasingly determines your life chances. While young people have nothing to gain from a housing system built on ever-rising prices and inherited wealth, it doesn’t mean they’ll revolt. I’ve seen an uncomfortable trend among many middle-class young people who’ve resigned themselves to insecure, unfulfilling jobs, and a sense they won’t transcend their parents’ financial or professional success. Australia’s housing system is politically conservatising. The vast majority of wealth held by middle-class and upper-middle-class households is concentrated in land holdings, between 56 and 88 per cent of their net wealth.15 That’s a lot of eggs in the status quo basket. Disenfranchised young people see that economic opportunity may go backwards in their lifetime, but at least they’ll inherit the house when Mum and/or Dad kick the bucket. But with the average age of people inheriting wealth in the 50s, it’s an awfully long time to wait.

Mortgages are the new marriages By prioritising investor interests in rising house prices above the rights of young Australians to live in stable housing, young people’s choices about their private lives are also severely compromised. As houses have become more expensive, two incomes are now the norm for mortgage lending requirements. As people borrow more to keep pace with prices, two people must commit to paying off debt together over their entire working lives. With high lifetime financial risks attached to borrowing from big banks, young people are being forced to make multiple life choices in one fell swoop. Even if the stars align with a suitable life partner, you must scramble for two regular incomes and savings exceeding $120,000. That’s a lot of stars. Best you choose your parents well!

The rising cost of living, financial insecurity and normalisation of two incomes to buy a home has big implications for gender equality too. From the late 1960s, the women’s liberation movement advanced women’s financial independence. Better wages and jobs, and higher social security payments for single parents and victims of family violence, were about expanding women’s life choices beyond the world of domesticity and male dependency. Stronger women’s incomes undermined a key driver of violence, and rising divorce rates were celebrated as women could now build independent, freer lives on more of an equal standing with men. Young women raised in the second-wave glow have been told they can study anything, do any job, demand equal pay and express their sexuality more freely. But the reality of Australia’s two-income housing system is that it drags them backwards on the terrain that matters most to their freedom – their financial capacity to support themselves. Young women now need to partner up for their entire lives – and most likely with a man, statistically – in order to achieve home ownership. The choices are to be independent but poor, or to expose oneself to more antiquated gender relations just to obtain economic security. In many ways the mortgage contract is the new marriage contract, only mortgages bind young women to more than just partners. Women sign contractual oaths to remain faithful to bosses and banks now too. Regardless of your gender, the result is that for young people, private lives filled with family love and domestic bliss are either being delayed or have become unimaginable for many. Fruitful private lives become the domain of those with higher incomes. Meanwhile, the working class and poor find they have no time for anything but chasing money. While some people might make choices to not get married or not have children, slowing economic opportunity limits the private choices of all. The UN Declaration of Human Rights acknowledges stable housing as the bedrock of rights to a family life and to privacy. Government’s exit from delivering housing, enough good jobs and an adequate welfare safety net impacts fertility choices. Australia’s fertility rate has been steadily declining since the 1980s, with the number of couples without children expected to outnumber those with children in the next decade.16 Since fertility choices are made within increasingly hostile economic and environmental conditions, it’s no wonder one quarter of young people are pessimistic about having children. The 2021 Australian Youth Barometer

survey found that whether youth had made firm decisions to have kids or not, a stable home and financial independence were considered preconditions to having a family.17 Sixty-five per cent of young people who saw no hope of owning a home were also pessimistic about having children. No homes? No babies.

Hoping for a crash What’s the effect of all this? Australia’s jobs, housing and tax policies are writing the futures of people who have no chance of contributing to the story. It’s why 53 per cent of young Australians expect to be financially worse off than their parents.18 Deloitte’s 2022 ‘Global 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey’ shows the biggest issue plaguing Millennials and Gen Z is the rising cost of living. Almost half of young people globally live from one pay day to the next.19 On top of the sense that the rising cost of living will price them out of having a family, many fear delivering their future progeny into a climate apocalypse. Existential doom and mass disempowerment are taking a grip on young people’s thinking. They’re trying to make the right choices against a backdrop of collapsed collective movements and government inaction against an energised global fossil fuel sector. With economic exclusion carrying lifelong consequences for employment, health and welfare, it’s unsurprising that many young people have given up. One in ten people aged 15–24 is not engaged in any education, employment or training. Just under one-third (29 per cent) report having poor or very poor mental health.20 Severe psychological distress has grown since 2017, with youth from low socio-economic and regional backgrounds experiencing the highest rates of mental illness.21 Young people feel the terrible weight of a society that is failing them. Without hope of buying homes, young people engage in their favourite big crisis past-time: welcoming a market crash. With the pandemic came renewed faith in total economic carnage as the route to owner occupation – a hope that prices would crash and they’d finally be able to afford a home. These ideas are inspired by the collapse of the US financial system after the GFC, though such an event is entirely ill-fit for Australia’s housing system. One of my favourite economists, Hyman Minsky, wrote about how asset price inflation emerges in modern financial markets, and what governments

do when it goes belly up. When prices rise unsustainably, get away from their underlying value and enter free-fall, government swoops in as the lender-of-last-resort, socialising financial losses before debt deflation infects the rest of the economy. Exactly whose losses government socialises is the real question – as seen with the trillion-dollar bailout for US corporations during the GFC while thousands of working-class Americans lost their homes. Hoping highly leveraged poorer households lose their homes to bring down prices is no pathway to housing security for Australian youth. Morality aside, any generalised housing market crash in Australia is highly unlikely because astronomical levels of public money are pumped into the system already, including $14 billion every year in tax concessions and more in subsidies. But then, as Minsky reminds us, government will do everything it can to prevent a housing system crash because housing is so heavily intertwined with the stability of Australia’s banking system, which is, in turn, highly concentrated in mortgage lending. The big four banks hold $1.9 trillion in mortgage loans, which comprises 65 per cent of all their liabilities.22 Unlike the United States, Australia’s problem isn’t securitisation and unregulated ‘shadow banking’; it’s big, national banks that have monopolised credit provision and rake in easy profits by tightening the screws on workers’ mortgages and making houses more expensive. Even if government unwound unsustainable tax concessions and built more houses, house prices might decline moderately, but never bottom out. So, waiting for housing prices to enter free fall is another pipedream. But with 69 per cent of young people now believing government has a responsibility to provide access to affordable housing for everyone, the scene is set for new and creative solutions to Australia’s housing crisis – the likes and scale of which we’ve never seen – including mass urban social and public housing projects, and shared-equity and cooperative housing schemes. With the advancement of a new national affordable housing agenda, ‘generation rent’ may finally taste secure independence.

3. HOW NEOLIBERALISM CONSUMED THE FUTURE

The previous chapters went deep on the eroding foundations of the Fair Go. But to truly understand how good jobs and the dream of owning a home unwound for young Australians and other outsiders, we have to zoom out and take stock of big changes made in our economy that incrementally dismantled opportunity over a generation. By understanding the logic behind those forces, we become empowered to overcome it, and ultimately replace it. Those changes were led by the neoliberal political project, which tied our hands in a powerful whirring machine of profit-first, short-term thinking. If we can’t unpick the knots and reclaim our shared democratic economic planning, Australia risks dissolving the ladders of opportunity and mobility for good. As a United Workers Union cleaner said at a 2017 protest outside Parliament: ‘Trickle-down economics is a lie. The only thing trickling down is our sweat and our bank account balance.’

This is your brain on neoliberalism Neoliberalism is a term associated with 19th-century ideas centred around free-market capitalism. Commonly, it refers to market-oriented reform policies, like lowering trade barriers, deregulating capital markets and

eliminating price controls. Especially, though, neoliberalism refers to policies that diminish government’s role in shaping the economy and delivering services. In practice, neoliberalism has given untold powers to private enterprises, and in the process has eroded our access to good jobs, incomes, services and infrastructure. In effect, it is tanking the future for the vast majority of us. Neoliberalism has permitted companies to tear up their social contract with the Australian people, choosing quick shareholder returns over investing in the workers who deliver their profits and make the economy run. From airlines to aged care, corporate greed has debased our essential services, disposing of decent jobs in the process. In step with Australia’s supermarket duopoly, global Big Tech behemoths like Amazon and Google siphon value from every nook and cranny of our lives, competing for our diminishing incomes and attention. Meanwhile, as time-pressured, incomestrapped workers are kettled into big retail stores, small businesses are bought up, disappearing from our neighbourhoods. What neoliberalism really is, at its core, is a vicious political project of upward wealth distribution, from everyday people to big corporations and the CEOs who run them. The direct beneficiaries of this massive wealth transfer told us that the government was, in fact, ineffective, inefficient and self-interested. Our government – combining local, state and Commonwealth levels and all their departments and functions, which is the biggest and most influential actor in the economy, and one accountable to democratic power – was a mere support act. Government shouldn’t provide direct jobs, decent welfare supports, run quality services or build innovative and smart future-focused industries, they said. Justice and fairness, they said, is the terrain of free enterprising markets: those all-knowing, efficient, magical, self-correcting organisms that tend towards perfect balance. Well, surprise, surprise, with the government’s exit from upholding and progressing living standards, real wages are lower than they were ten years ago,1 workers’ share of the economic pie has shrunk to a post-war low,2 schools and hospitals are in a workforce crisis, and bulk-billing doctors are harder to see. The Productivity Commission found the rate of income poverty – defined as those earning below 50 per cent of the median income – remained at 9 per cent of all Australians over the period 1988–89 through to 2015–16, despite 27 years of uninterrupted economic growth.3 The

Australian Council of Social Services, which uses a measure of income poverty after housing costs have been deducted, found there were more people living below the poverty line in 2018–19 (13.4 per cent) than 20 years ago in 1999 (13.1 per cent).4 Census data shows homelessness rose by 30 per cent in the decade to 2016. None of this was inevitable. Neoliberalism was conceived a generation before it weaselled its way into our lives. In history there are big moments when prevailing norms about how best to organise society dissolve under the weight of reality. So-called economic ‘laws’ fail to stand up too. In 1947, against the backdrop of the Keynesian ascendancy, a bunch of economists gathered in Switzerland to plan for a new global economy. Calling themselves the Mont Pelerin Society, they designed a set of mathematical models and ideologically charged notions of individual freedom and market exchange. The combined effect of the economists’ plan would naturalise the power of owners of wealth, break the collective power of workers, and displace the role of government spending in meeting human need. They designed neoliberalism. Far from waiting for the best ideas to win, neoliberals like Milton Friedman set to work dispersing their ideas across the world through thinktanks in business, politics, government administration and universities. Almost three decades after the Mont Pelerin Society had gathered at their Swiss hotel, in the 1970s, Keynesianism’s frame for analysing the economy and how to fix it was over-extended by globalisation, high inflation and unemployment. It was go-time for the neoliberals. By the early 1980s, the global stagflation crisis had crashed on our shores. We faced negative growth, 7 per cent unemployment and high inflation. With a highly unionised workforce chasing pay rises to keep pace with rising prices, big business considered workers too uppity, and profit rates unacceptably low. Neoliberalism was there, patiently waiting to pounce, aided by Australia’s own neoliberal think-tanks like the H.R. Nicholls Society, whose members included Peter Costello, federal Treasurer from 1996 to 2007. It became the new cogent political economic frame to make sense of the crisis, resolving the business–labour stand-off in favour of business. Key to the neoliberal regime winning supremacy has been its claims to price stability. Their academic economist foot soldiers entered the room waving around credentials, promising to slay our new common enemy:

inflation. From the early 1990s, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) started using its central bank powers explicitly to control inflation, which amounted to periodically destroying the number of jobs in the economy and workers’ spending capacity – an inflation-beating medicine workers are copping again right now. For decades employment has been artificially constrained, and the unemployed cruelly blamed for not finding work. While Australia avoided the most extreme fundamentalist neoliberal ‘reforms’ unleashed in places like the United States, the United Kingdom and New Zealand, the Labor government of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating still accepted the premise that government policy should focus on pumping up business returns, and believed those returns would be productively invested to lift growth and wages – this is what people mean by ‘trickledown economics’. After being nurtured like seedlings with public money and a stable environment to grow into the post-war ‘golden age’, big corporations turned on the welfare state that created them, like knife-wielding lunatics. Finding influence with politicians at all levels of government in all major parties, they started consuming anything of value, flipping public goods into private gains, like housing, as discussed in the previous chapter. Production in capitalist market economies is always dominated by profitmaximising actors. They’re programmed to hunt down profit. But something changed in the 1980s. Profit-maximising logic entered hyperdrive. Privatisations intensified during the 1990s, stripping our assets in utilities, banks, airlines, telecommunications and more. Everything in the way of business profit became a so-called barrier to economic growth, like taxation, unions, publicly owned utilities, and regulations against dodgy, harmful environmental and financial practices. And neoliberals pursued this intensified attack under the fallacy of ‘better economics’. Alongside the erosion of public services, tools of redistribution in the tax system were blunted to increase profits. To ensure everyday people toiling on the job delivering those rising profits got sweet-FA, unions and collective wagesetting were dismantled. With workers’ share of the pie diminished on the job, other big policy changes introduced in the 1980s helped empower big business and reduce the role of government in creating economic opportunity for everyday people. In 1984, Prime Minister Bob Hawke committed to the ‘trilogy’ of not increasing tax revenue, government spending or the budget deficit as a

percentage of GDP, in what Professor Emeritus Frank Stilwell termed ‘a self-imposed fiscal straitjacket’.5 Subsequent cuts to public spending, deepened financial deregulation, and the abandonment of government’s commitment to full employment all set in motion a deterioration of economic opportunity. Far from inevitable or natural, these actions were choices. The neoliberal storm brewed across the whole economy, amping up over the Howard years, moderating under Rudd and Gillard, and then jumping on steroids under Morrison. If you want to know the true intention of the neoliberal agenda, it’s this: since 1975 the share of the economic pie going to workers has fallen from 58 per cent of GDP to only 45 per cent in 2022 – the lowest level in recorded Australian history. That represents the redirection of $26 billion in 2021 alone – and hundreds of billions since the mid-1970s. Economist David Richardson tracked the impact of neoliberal forces in Australia on rising inequality post-war. In the years between 1950–60, almost all the benefits of economic growth went to the bottom 90 per cent of income earners. Then, from 1983 to 2008, the tables turned: the top 10 per cent of income earners started increasing their share of growth to around 40 per cent. Shockingly, over the period 2010–19, the richest 10 per cent pocketed 85 per cent of the fruits of economic growth, with the bottom 90 per cent receiving only 15 per cent.6 This isn’t mere ‘change’. It’s an upheaval.

Division is distraction For decades we’ve been told that giving lots of power and money to individuals and corporations pursuing private profit-maximising interests was in our collective interest. But if you want to pursue a project that economically disadvantages the majority of people in the long run, then dividing people is paramount. To achieve this division, wealth has to be funnelled to chosen cohorts – a small group of winners – while the resources tap is turned off for the losers. In Australia, your age is one of the most powerful indicators in the winner–loser binary. It impacts everyone, and the demographic fissure is turbocharged by government policies, particularly when it comes to home ownership. But it’s not pensioners receiving meagre social security payments who are the beneficiaries of the neoliberal regime. The total bill

for pension payments is less than the cost of tax concessions on superannuation alone, nabbed mostly by the wealthiest.7 No, the real beneficiaries of intergenerational inequality, emerging from housing in particular, are the powerful network of investors, developers, banks and their lobby groups who derive mega-profits from ever-rising prices, as well as from workers’ lifetime debt bondage. Not all young people are affected the same by government reducing its role in creating economic opportunity. Wealthy youth, for example, can more easily escape the relentless cycle of juggling work, study and money that besets many working-class people by simply having been born into better financial circumstances. For this group, better access to resources and power often translates into work benefits, like being able to walk into a job in the family business or finding internship placements via family networks – internships they can work unpaid because they have financial backing. And then there’s impoverished youth, on the other hand, who of course never chose poverty, but whose economic opportunities were diminished because they were born, let’s say, in the late 1990s, when being the child of a renting single mother was a poverty sentence in itself. These youth, who are without family inheritance, housing wealth or ties to a family business that could offer employment opportunities, are most disadvantaged by the defunding of public institutions like schools, TAFE, Medicare and Centrelink. Such institutions constitute the network of Australia’s public goods and create the building blocks of economic opportunity. When large segments of economic activity are driven by profit maximisation to the benefit of a smaller number of individuals, public services become the bastions of human dignity and civility. And when the economy inflicts unemployment and poverty by design, people will come to depend on these institutions all the more. In fact, there were around 465,000 young people aged 15–24 in lowincome households in 2017–18, with an average weekly disposable income of just over $416. They and their families depended on employee incomes and government welfare payments to make ends meet. I was one of them, alongside lots of young people I grew up with. Today, young people must also confront insecure work, exploitation and wage theft without the strong union infrastructure of their parents’ day.

The Hawke–Keating government negotiated the Prices and Incomes Accord in 1983 between business and unions, cooling wage demands in exchange for price controls. Cashing in industrial power, workers were told to forgo pay increases in return for receiving improvements in their entitlements and benefits (the ‘social wage’), including universal public health care and superannuation. Combined with retention of the awards system of industry minimum wages, Australian workers fared better than workers in other anglophone countries under this unique Labor–labour–business bargain. But in the long run, unions’ strategic muscle – organising workers to demand higher wages and better conditions – was eroded. With legislation now predetermining wages, how could workers organise? And what would be the point? The result of unions being curtailed and business hijacking the levers of government – spending and regulation – has been a big shift in bargaining power to business. Whereas almost all the stock market gains (92 per cent) made in the 30 years to 1988 were derived from economic growth, the majority of gains since have come from workers’ wages.8 And to distract us further, the big winners make sure workers, government and many businesses are all staring at their feet, rather than at the horizon.

Short-term thinking, the Australian way Stopping the neoliberal machine in motion is harder than you would think, not only because it is embedded in our institutions, government and wider society, but also because neoliberalism wields a very powerful weapon: it stops us all thinking long term. Beyond the pay cycle, beyond the fouryearly budget estimates, and beyond the electoral cycle. Like a pig scoffing from the resources plate, neoliberalism consumes future economic planning, political systems and the environment we all depend upon. Despite the damage wrought by neoliberalism, government – at federal, state and local levels – is still the biggest actor in the economy. It spends a whopping $580 billion every year and employs 2.1 million people. Government once used its power to maximise human welfare, moulding private sector activity to complement its democratic vision. For instance, the post-war policy architecture up to Whitlam’s 1970s was all about ‘crowding in’, signalling what was important to the public through big

public investment and planning in many areas including education, health care, infrastructure and the arts. Then, the private sector would be invited to come along for the ride. But from the 1980s, government’s critical role in leading economic activity began narrowing. Privatisation, outsourcing and marketisation handed the reins to private interests, undermining our collective long-term vision. Business interests were parachuted into public administration, with illfitting metrics like productivity and efficiency dividends clumsily grafted onto public budgets. Armies of public servants and thousands of entities receiving government funds to do important stuff were suddenly forced to prove that receiving funds would generate immediate returns – or get no funds at all. Whole sectors of society, including mental health, the arts, and community and social services, have only known begging – locked in endless, resource-intensive, short-term grant cycles. Far from innovative, inevitable forces of nature, most markets under Australian neoliberalism have been constructed, like unemployment services (now ‘Workforce Australia’), the NDIS, aged care and private education. They’ve sprung up where government has stepped back and, without regulation, often amount to a form of manufactured misery. This state-sponsored business laziness has a strong history in Australia. When waves of squatters colonised Australia in partnership with the British administration, they got free land through systematic theft from First Nations People, and free labour through the convict transportation system. Fast forward to today, and Australian managers still think productivity means cutting wages and tying people to their workplaces, forcing them to toil longer and harder to prove their commitment and worth. They still aim to make workers poorer and more tired, indebted and docile, despite their long-term need for healthy workers to make them money. Our own publicly funded multi-millionaires in human services are proud flag-bearers for the lazy business tradition. Unable to unpick longstanding expectations of an active role for government in supporting fairness and delivering services, neoliberals have focused on getting bankrolled for the stuff they know will be popular, like care for the aged and disabled. In the process, neglected citizens become ‘customers’ and ‘clients’. Really, in so many ways, we’ve come to resemble our former colony status: an export zone shipping resources out for foreign business owners,

only now the golden fleece is coal and gas. The squattocracy of rich landowners that withheld more productive growth is now a private housing system dominated by investor behemoths, landlords and banks. The use of convict and Kanaka labour and other highly exploitative pre-union labour practices have returned through temporary migrant visa work and gig work. After we dismantled our own productive capacity in industries like manufacturing and public sector services, we then placed UK- and USdominated mining companies at the commanding heights of our economy. We let them dig, export and profit, all the while barely paying any tax. In fact, two-thirds of all mining companies pay no tax. In 2010, when attempts were made to tweak the power of our mining overlords and tax them, a coup orchestrated by the Murdoch press and the mining companies resulted in the disposing of an elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, who received strong support from young Australians. Even more embarrassingly, Harvard University recently ranked Australia 91st out of 133 countries on economic complexity.9 This is the legacy of extraction and export of unprocessed resources, of raw materials becoming the ‘backbone’ of the Australian economy. We didn’t even try to add value to those resources, effectively relegating ourselves to a primary industry colony. Hell, we even buy back our own gas at inflated prices! And with government giving up on big national infrastructure projects too, under neoliberalism Australia is still without a high-speed rail network, mass renewable energy production or a quality broadband network. There are encouraging signs that new governments are trying to reverse the direction of the Titanic, with federal Labor committing $1 billion to building advanced manufacturing, and the newly re-elected Labor government in Victoria planning to revive the State Electricity Commission to generate public renewable energy and wean the state off its dependency on offshore coal companies. In a globalising, financialised, competitive economy, immediate returns became the priority of business. Government lets business get lazier, eating up workers’ wages, converting them into profits. Business then cuts secure, well-paid jobs, offshoring operations to exploit cheaper labour sources where possible, pursuing a logic that eats the conditions of their own possibility. Sitting on vast wads of cash, business has little interest in parting with their mega profits, which reached a post-war record high of 28 per cent of GDP in 2022. Business investment in productivity boosters like

new technologies, machinery and tools has collapsed since 2012, falling to just 10.5 per cent of GDP in 2021 – the lowest rate in post-war history. This is despite billions allocated by the former Coalition government in tax breaks and other measures to stimulate a so-called ‘post-COVID businessled recovery’. Business also demanded yet more anti-union laws at home that eroded secure jobs, wages and entitlements. The loss of unions in Australia made workers cheaper and more docile, but it also dismantled an incredibly powerful organ of industry planning and coordination. Since unions work to improve job quality and stability in a sector, they’re also institutional bearers of knowledge and expertise. Increasingly stressed and insecure workers can’t apply valuable knowledge to improve their jobs because their abysmal work conditions stop them planning for their own lives. People are focused on how they’ll get through the week, not what they’ll do next year. While we run around like headless chooks, powerful corporations swoop in, buy up competitors and expand operations. They plan for a future they control and will benefit from. It’s exactly what happened when the pandemic hit. Australia’s 47 billionaires doubled their collective net worth to $255 billion in the first two years of the crisis.10 Climate change offers boundless opportunities for the wealthiest to exploit the overwhelmed, monetise misfortune and expand power. Mining companies already have dibs on the thawing Arctic, and financiers running derivatives markets will trade in the incidence, or not, of catastrophic climate events. Over time, everyday people – workers, students, carers – have been treated like cost burdens to be reduced or eliminated. Since humans are actually those running and reproducing the economy, this virus of shortterm thinking has brought major destabilising consequences for all Australians, but especially young people. Access to good jobs, housing, health care, education, income and infrastructure builds human lives. Young people starting their lives especially depend on investment in these areas. But under neoliberalism, spending on vital public goods has been consistently cut for failure to demonstrate ‘value for money’. We’ve reached an astounding dead-end for neoliberal policies. We once paid people to think, plan and produce for Australia. But the bridges out of

our policy dumpster fire were burnt by the dismantling of active government over decades of neoliberalism. The result is an economy that can’t think for itself and that follows unsustainable signals without sufficient anchors for long-term investment in our collective future. We need the next generation to send new signals that reorient resources to meet the enormous environmental, economic and political challenges that lie ahead. We need youth to reclaim long-term thinking.

False positivity Declining economic opportunity for the next generation has been masked by influential changes to our experience of work and the stuff we buy. This decline tracks back to the neoliberal campaigns to cut workers’ pay and the offshoring of Australian manufacturing. Since the 1980s, services jobs in industries like health care, education, professional and technical services, and hospitality have become dominant and now comprise around 80 per cent of all jobs. Aided by policies weakening worker rights, many of these new jobs – disproportionately worked by young people and women – emerged as lower paid, part time and casual. With a big new stock of lower-paid jobs compared to the once available blue-collar, unionised full-time jobs, wage stagnating forces set in. Wages stopped laying the groundwork for future economic security. And that was before the pandemic, when the newest inflation blowout has seen real wages go backwards at the fastest rate since records began. So, how have Australians maintained their consumption of manufactured goods? Enter China, our regional manufacturing powerhouse. China has facilitated the flow of complex and ever-cheaper technologies into Australian households, dazzling workers with TVs, smart home devices, iPhones and laptops. Yet meanwhile, privatisation has meant that the cost of essential services – you know, the substance of life itself – has risen higher and higher. You see, there are other ways that consuming cheap products has masked erosion in economic opportunity. The shift to a services economy has brought restaurants and cafes into our lives, meaning those with disposable income can put their feet up on weekends and be served a cooked breakfast.

This simple luxury of being served has made workers feel richer. Along with manufacturing workers in China, Bangladesh, India and other regional neighbours, the predominantly young and low-paid workforce staffing Australia’s private services industries like hospitality effectively subsidises this mass masking of wage stagnation. Housing is the most powerful system of manipulation, convincing people to take the neoliberal pill. Decades of house price inflation following the boom in the late 1990s made Australians feel richer than their wages suggested. With big mortgage debts, it also gave them a vested interest in the success and stability of financial markets, especially low and predictable interest rates. Workers were told by politicians and Reserve Bank governors that their mortgage payments could go up if they rocked the boat. It’s politically potent stuff, and helped the Howard government secure its reelection in 2004, campaigning on fear of interest rate hikes under a Labor government. As Labor’s bill to boost falling real wages was being considered by the Parliament in late-2022, RBA governor Philip Lowe made bigger threats, warning workers seeking to lift their wages risked triggering a ‘painful’ recession.11 Then there is the fairy tale about the constant progress of our ‘knowledge’ economy. Perhaps the worst lie of all is that universityeducated youth could navigate life without the help of power-building institutions like unions or even government. Raised with the comforts of trusted progress, the people’s capacity to defend and uphold institutions that pursue human advancement, including government policy, public education, blue-sky research, science and democratic politics, has been declining. Individual effort continues to be touted as the vehicle for expanding freedoms, for mobilisation and improving your lot.

The lucky country? So, we must now confront the reality: youth have been sacrificed to a retrograde economy that is wired for short-term thinking and consumes opportunity. We’re ensnared in a machine stuck allocating resources in the ‘now’ and on the ‘high inequality’ setting. It’s not hard to see how neoliberalism’s capacity to corrode long-term thinking fails youth, who face crippling uncertainty about their future and enough years to live with the

consequences. After all, young people exist in the future, when many of you won’t. Accompanying growing economic hardship is a buffet of wider crises – pandemic, bushfires and floods. Youth have been burdened with a fight for a safe planet at the same time as the basics of life, which have been artificially withheld by private interests and governments asleep at the wheel. But let’s be thankful for the fact that we can at least see exactly why the cards are stacked against many of us. Now, with this knowledge, we can make new cards, and an entirely new game. Like discovering new planets and putting them on the map, can we act on new information and create a new and better economy? Starting anew means a complete break from the neoliberal rubble and pursuing a better, more positive path for Australia’s economy that runs exclusion, extraction and dispossession out of town. With an interest in ending the powers of rentier enterprise, fossil-fuel giants, and landlordism and demolishing insecure work, young Australians can lead a movement that transcends the neoliberal fossil-fuel-based ruins. And it can even do much more: by curtailing the power of sectional private interests baked into the fabric of the country since colonisation, youth can help drive change that makes amends for historic wrongs to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people too, including expanding political rights, and resourcing sovereignty through Treaty, reparations and other public programs. Don’t forget that when Donald Horne coined the term the ‘lucky country’ in his 1964 book it was not in celebration of the nation’s ingenuity, but was instead a clear-sighted stab at Australia’s history of squandering advantages and putting dull-witted people in power. Our neoliberal run has provided ample opportunity to continue this unfortunate tradition. Without a broad people-powered movement committed to a new and hopeful vision for young Australians and future generations, the tentacles of neoliberalism will continue doing their dirty work, strangling the future.

4. THE WRONG TOOLS

This book promised a way forward, and I hope my straight-talking about what’s wrong hasn’t lost you so far. The tools for making change are coming, but to make the pathway to those people-powered solutions easier to see, I need to clear the weeds first. In a world steeped in individualism, bold collective action that transforms our lives is far from intuitive. In this chapter, I uncover the social realities of young people, which increasingly apply to all of us as we grapple with the rise of the internet as the dominant organ of modern life, the associated loss of human connection, and all the ways our capacity to control our time, thoughts and actions are being compromised. I ask the question: why aren’t young people rising up? By acknowledging how hard it is to buck the powerful trends that are isolating and confusing us, I hope this chapter empowers you to clear the weeds for yourself, and start building bridges to effective action. With fault lines in Australia’s neoliberal order widening to anxietyinducing widths, it’s easy for anyone to become overwhelmed. Still, young people aren’t sitting on their hands. For one, they care deeply about politics. According to Triple J’s What’s Up in Your World survey, almost four in five people aged 18–29 were moderately to very interested in federal politics in 2022 – an increase on 2020.1 That piqued engagement contributed to the election of a new federal

Labor government in 2022, and a Parliament comprised of representatives more genuinely reflective of a population in which more people were born overseas or their parents were born overseas than were born in Australia. Parallel to their participation in electoral politics, young people have a growing sense of betrayal by democratic institutions. Only 2 per cent of those aged 18–29 believe politicians work in their interests.2 Declining trust in mainstream politics isn’t specific to young Australians, with belief in the power of government to improve our lives worryingly eroding for all age groups, but their declining trust coincides with decades of disruptive economic and social change for youth. So, if young people are duly positioned to shake Australia’s foundations, how would such a shake up emerge? Searching for answers to my own big systems questions, I spent a lot of time in my late teens and early 20s involved in grassroots political activism of all stripes in Adelaide, western Sydney and Christchurch, Aotearoa New Zealand. I supported organisations to fight poverty, protect worker rights, increase education funding, expand Indigenous self-determination and promote women’s reproductive rights. I also spent time immersed in the lives of young people as a singing and choral teacher in public primary and secondary schools for almost ten years. Many of my students were from families without means and were navigating problems beyond their years. Their capacity to bravely grasp onto music to change their pain, solve challenges and find joy along the way forever changed me, proving the enormous potential of young people when positioned in an environment that cares enough to listen, cultivate and extend their voices. Searching for past examples of youth-led change, at university I studied the political upheaval that swept through Europe, the United States and other anglophone countries, including Australia, in the late 1960s. Waves of newly educated young people questioned the direction of post-war global consumer capitalism. Sceptical of towering bureaucratic and corporate structures, they were disillusioned and hungry for more fulfilling lives beyond the nine-to-five grind, and consumer ‘democracy’ at the cash register. From studying this period of youth rebellion, complemented by wider reading, I’ve embraced two key lessons. First, when widely held expectations of better lives are unmet, people organise powerful movements

to realise them. Second, people don’t accept regressing living standards without a fight. This long-term view of history has imbued a soothing inevitability of my own generation’s political agency, but I’ve been uneasy about this disposition lately. Australia’s youth, educated in the promise of universal human progress, sense deep unmet expectations. But instead of its historic display in rebellion, youth anger has been dispersed and atomised. With neoliberal economic ruin and climate change raising the stakes even higher for young people today than for those late-1960s youth, why isn’t the chasm between their expectations and reality sparking big political change?

Mass disempowerment One big reason young Australians aren’t rising up is that they face a unique confluence of socially atomising conditions – harsher than anything faced by other generations in history – and this situation is intensifying their sense of disempowerment. The more evenly distributed public funding that once held up the network of community organisations across Australia’s cities and regions has dried up. Meanwhile, the rising domination of jobs in our lives has increased stress levels, reduced time for family and friends, and severed us from leisure and community. The result has been a decline in participation in Australia’s social fabric. Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows the proportion of Australians involved in social groups in the 12 months prior to survey, including in sport and recreation, religious, and arts groups, declined from almost 63 per cent in 2010 to only 50 per cent in 2019.3 Most worryingly, participation in civic and political groups halved between 2010 and 2019, with less than one in ten Australians reporting being active in a union, political party, environmental cause or other civic and consumer rights group. Many older Australians benefited from this network of social glue, which offered forums for people to share their lives with others, and find themselves in relation to wider communities. Valiant efforts have been made to fill the vacuum left behind, but that sense of place-based belonging is still foreign to many young people. Young people are living in a society that often performs democracy without their voice. Young people trying to kick-start their lives are

generally denied access to bridges to political participation like stable jobs, housing, and political representatives that previous generations enjoyed. The historic breakdown of once-flourishing modern democratic institutions like trade unions and political parties is keenly felt by youth. Around one young worker in ten aged 15–24 was a union member in 2020, a figure largely unchanged since 2010, but the percentage of workers aged 25–34 with union membership dipped significantly from 19 per cent to only 11 per cent in the decade to 2020.4 With no experience of, or access to, the collective institutions that built egalitarianism in Australia, they can’t help upgrade it to a better model. Disempowerment is magnified by the failure of youth politics to make real change on the national stage. In Australia, from the 1960s bureaucracies and major parties embraced youth politics, including creating youth wings – often with the best liberal, even counter-cultural, intentions. But over time, youth spaces have failed to halt the siphoning off of young people from real power, more often warehousing them in education, training and other institutions where their voices can be corralled and conditioned. One consequence of this control has been the selection and promotion of very narrow, unrepresentative ‘chosen’ youth voices. The articulate, confident, more-often-than-not middle-class university student from a professional family is routinely elevated as the voice of all young people, promoting a brand of faux universalism and youth naivety that has sanitised the political environment. There has been no room for the very messy realities of the lives of many young people, who juggle jobs, training, and caring roles – and often unemployment and poverty. Instead, young people are barraged by new greenwashing campaigns. Told to ‘do their part’ through benign individual acts – as though recycling and hemp clothing influence BHP’s decision to open another mine, while 350 climate scientists were made redundant from the CSIRO over two years from 2016 during the Turnbull Coalition government.5 The fact is, buying an EV or installing solar panels are simply irrelevant courses of action to millions of people who don’t own homes or cars, or even have jobs with disposable income. These disempowering consumer-based actions to tackle climate change assume a future any young person can financially plan for. It’s both irrelevant and uninspiring for a generation surviving in an economy that can’t plan to save itself.

Young people are coming to grips with a tumultuous, era-defining time. They’ve been called to action, but the tools of collective change have been eroded or hidden. Pummelled with ever-increasing volumes of information, they’re without the tools to make sense of it all. Simultaneously filling and exacerbating the cognitive vacuum are powerful corporate-owned technologies that are sending young people into battle armed with spoons.

The internet as ‘el cortito’ In the early 20th century, the short-handled hoe – el cortito in Spanish – was the agricultural tool used by the mostly Mexican farmworkers harvesting sugar beet and lettuce across California. Big agriculturalists had safer options at their disposal, including hoes with longer handles, which were as good at the job as el cortito, and saved workers from horrendous back injuries imposed by shorter handles. But the businesses wanted to capture the maximum benefit from their investments, and realising that benefit provoked a truly ugly calculation. Big farm owners liked the short-handled hoe because it delivered reliable output, but most importantly, it forced their workers to stoop while labouring over 12–15-hour shifts. With their spines curved and heads down, conversation between workers about their poor conditions was stifled and sideways glances discouraged. El cortito kept the migrant workers disciplined, and a fearful, isolated workforce that pumps out lettuces at a consistent rate is an important investment if it’s regular profits you want. The internet is the universal hoe for global commerce. It rapidly connects producers, supply chains, trade, financiers, workers and consumers. No business can operate without using it in some form. But it’s not just a supportive technology helping coordinate and facilitate economic actors. Like Uber’s claim that it’s just a nice guy matching consumers with driver ‘entrepreneurs’, the owners of new technologies want returns for their investment too. And there’s a dark side to that pursuit. The internet and digital technologies help businesses to more easily control people everywhere. Surveillance technologies are ubiquitous, like Amazon’s GPS wristband tracking devices that record workers’ item retrieval rate across vast warehouses, and punish them with loss of shifts if their pick rate is too low. Or widespread screenshot monitoring, which takes random internal photos of what office employees have been looking at and

sends them to managers. It’s far from just a US phenomenon too. In 2018, 70 per cent of Australian workers said their employers used electronic or digital surveillance, the most common technologies being web-browser monitoring and reviewing email content.6 Another consumer-based trick harassing young people is the invitation to play master and servant in the on-demand economy. Global platform companies like Uber and Amazon can now get just about everything – cooked meals, groceries, clothes and electronics – delivered to us at the click of a button. Transactional interactions devoid of humanity proliferate, while poor migrant workers desperate for income deliver food by bike for less than the minimum wage. It’s been called the ‘great Millennial lifestyle subsidy’, where venturecapitalised Silicon Valley start-ups become good friends of young urbanites.7 (On top of gentrification, young workers can apparently also be blamed for the rise of exploitative rentier platform companies.) Big platforms want disempowered youth to embrace this dangerous idea: that commanding the lives of others is a substitute for agency over your own. Creating social norms like gender stereotypes was a standard tool deployed by business to shape our consumption habits, like the 1950s family with its full-time male breadwinner and stay-at-home wife primed with modern home appliances. But internet-connected smartphones have now mainlined corporate habit-shaping power straight into our veins. Big Tech companies like Google and Apple employ some of the smartest people in the world, from psychologists to software engineers, and they’re continuously innovating ways to hold our attention spans for the longest possible time to maximise opportunities to extract data about our lives, tastes and preferences.8 With every hour lost to doom-scrolling, ‘liking’ and status-sharing, we tell them more about ourselves. You can’t blame yourself for participating in the data-mining heist. Platforms like social media sites are designed to reduce us to problem gamblers, stuck in the poker machine delivering the right balance of dopamine, stimulation and relaxation. Subservient to the pleasure principle, we seek happiness while avoiding reality. In her 2019 book Future Histories, lawyer and writer Lizzie O’Shea talks about how being lulled into this reality-warping time suck means our sense of self becomes highly porous. In turn, we become disoriented and fragile, open to manipulation and reconstitution.9

Far from any realm of democracy and inclusion, elites transformed the early internet commons into a private sphere of closed and monopolistic markets. This occurred through the information flow framework referred to as Web 2.0, which, despite its claims to creating a more user-generated platform, killed the internet’s promises of more democratic, open-source information sharing. We became internet ‘users’ in one-way information flows, and single options were presented to us as ‘choice’. Social media platforms aren’t benevolent gifts from Silicon Valley companies, handed out freely while they build a social licence for other business activities. We are the business. Passive and pacified, we stand by as our private lives are increasingly turned into commodities. We translate our joy, humiliation, anxiety, anger and dreams into valuable data points to turn big profits. With an unlimited stream of horrible information, we are being plunged into a state of hysterics and ‘punishing oversaturation’.10 Having grown up in the internet age, young people are more prone to this information overload. The Australian Communications and Media Authority finds young people aged 18 to 35 use more internet-connected devices, and use the internet for a wider range of everyday activities, including getting the news, shopping and banking, compared with those aged over 35.11 Culture succumbs to this totalising corporate control too. Two teenagers are playing together after school, laughing at each other’s silly jokes and dances. But it’s a friendship-building moment shared not just between the two of them, because now it’s also ‘good content’. When the teens pull out a smartphone to film and upload the video to TikTok, they’re packaging themselves for an external gaze. Social media platforms encourage highly mediated, curated performances of life that can now stand in for life itself. From the late 1960s, young people led insurgent cultures that defined an era, cultures that continue to influence politics, music and social norms today. In the 1990s, the era of globalisation, culture began splintering as art production became more commercially centralised by big producers, while at the same time the internet supported decentralised cultural production and new subcultures. But making era-defining music, art and dance is limited in a time where passively reproduced TikTok micro-cultures perform better than cultural products that require the active participation of

young people to generate ideas and culture that is critically informed by their reality. People coming together to co-create cultural stories of the world around them is a phenomenon as old as humanity – from dancing and music to ceremony and visual art. It creates a sense of solidarity and belonging, and has formed the soundtrack to social change. But the new, more isolated and platform-controlled modes of cultural production today present a radical change. Today’s young people experience culture increasingly as a consumption relation: reels of tailored content delivered via individualised algorithms that record their history of clicks and views. Uploading your own dance, song or speech happens within defined parameters set by the platforms, while the attention economy, ‘binge’ culture, and the ‘bitsification’ of art and knowledge are dismantling the importance of narratives. The personalised nature of smartphone use means people record and usually consume cultural content alone, or in small groups. The attack on narratives has left many young people lacking history, stories or frameworks for connecting large volumes of disjointed information. It’s worth pointing out that First Nations People have placed story-telling at the centre of their political movement, and that we have experts on hand to restore narratives in our shared political and social life. Millions of algorithmically tailored sales pitches entrench human differences. This is because Big Tech’s marketing strategy focuses on creating silos, where people receive specific marketing based on their allocated filter bubbles. Despite experiencing similar conditions, time spent online can make people feel worlds apart from others. For young people forging their sense of self, the effect is to degrade feelings of belonging, to emphasise differences in their identities rather than base-level commonalities, like, for example, being on the arse-end of an economy denying them basic economic opportunity. Young people know that heavy social media use isn’t working. Avoiding pain and seeking distraction reinforces the youth mental health crisis. The 2021 Australian Youth Barometer found more than half (52 per cent) of young people believed social media had a negative impact on their mental health.12 Imagine if the farmworkers in California using el cortito lived under an equivalent internet-age regime. After 12 hours of back-breaking labour,

they’d return to their sleeping quarters only to have scores of businessmen knocking on the door selling to them, simultaneously performing dazzling magic tricks. Momentarily distracted from their pain, the farmworkers are peeled off one-by-one by groups of aggressive hawkers, each receiving their own bespoke magic trick sales pitches in different corners of the home. They fall asleep, alone, bewildered, still exhausted, returning to work at sunrise to do it all again. Decades of protest and union action by workers eventually ended the use of short-handled hoes in the 1970s. Would the practice have ended if they’d spent their evenings glued to screens, rather than recuperating and strategising with neighbouring workers? Big Tech companies riding the internet horse lead the spectacular expansion in big capital’s weaponry of control. We transform from humans into zombie inputs in the business cycle: value creators, and consumers. Our masters say, ‘Work the job on offer, take the pay I offer, buy the shit I tell you to.’ All the while we’re glued to our devices helping them do it. It’s genius. But none of this is inevitable or permanent. By creating a more robust collective social fabric together in the ‘real’ world, we can counter the atomising effects of the internet and reclaim agency across the entire span of our lives. But to take effective collective action, we need to re-engage with a powerful concept that has shaped modern Australia, but is presently concealed in public life – class.

The loss of class As an economist, I work in one of the few disciplines where big collective categories still exist in our increasingly fractured world. Labour, capital, workers, businesses – they’re all empirically observable categories. But they’re not static. The relationships between these groups shape how the economy functions – who does what, and who gets what. Scholars and public policy thinkers used to enquire into the key economic relationships between profit, work and power, in all their morbid manifestations. To do so, they used the concept of ‘class’. But this approach perished from the 1980s, as academia, the Australian Labor Party and wellintentioned NGOs embraced more static, abstract notions of ‘disadvantage’. ‘Low socio-economic status individuals’ were transformed from once

historically potent political actors with agency, to policy problems requiring management or compensation.13 Differences between low-income communities and the wider society have been presented, indirectly, as failures to reach middle-class norms. The other consequence of paternalistic views about the lowly ‘disadvantaged’ class is that workers in the burgeoning professional industries don’t even identify as workers – and thus in need of collective representation in unions – but as a privileged stratum in relation to the poor. From the 1990s, class as a critical analytical concept was increasingly dismissed in social sciences scholarship, in favour of studies of identity formation and social differences, ‘places’, ‘spaces’ and ‘subject positions’. Far from some benign development in academia, the proliferation of the identity agenda was promoted globally. The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was one of its most ardent supporters when it sought creative strategies to dismantle ‘old’ notions of class in the post-war period. Seeking to shift the critical public gaze from anti-Americanism, mass political parties and communism after World War II, the CIA pursued the Cultural Cold War by cultivating a new, more conservative intelligentsia through numerous academic and cultural programs.14 So, while the right-wing commentariat of Sky News, Fox News and The Australian chastise academics as ‘lefty elitists’ today, the fact is that playing down social class and promoting ivory tower obscurity in academia was a conservative strategy for eroding working people’s belief and participation in political life. The rise of internet technologies was key to the success of this ideological agenda to kill class identity. As a collective category explaining inequality, class was labelled irrelevant to the emancipation of individuals. Defining one’s self through social media platforms and internet technologies was the new terrain for human freedom. Class was also labelled male and white, despite rich empirical, theoretical and artistic work examining class among women, migrants and Indigenous peoples, and what they shared with other workers, for instance. The result of these powerful trends de-classing Australia is that critical analysis of economic exploitation limiting millions of people’s life chances has been deprioritised in favour of the study of human differences like gender, race, sexuality or other identities linked to systems of oppression.

Class has been positioned parallel to those categories as just another form of identity – ‘low socio-economic status’ – rather than the material basis underpinning those oppressions. After all, it is your position in the economic pecking order that determines whether any of your sex, race, gender or other differences are exploited. Just ask Gina Rinehart, or Macquarie Group’s Shemara Wikramanayake, one of the highest paid CEOs in Australia, who pocketed over $23.7 million in 2021.15 Young people have been more exposed to this more individualist regime of identity construction than any other generation. Of course, much has been gained through this period of granular focus on our myriad differences. Young people in particular have an acute awareness of and empathy for the variety of human experiences and how power intersects with those identities. However, the intensity of this inquiry has meant we’ve taken our eye off the big picture. Using neoliberal ideas, big business has achieved the mass individualisation of structural problems, and they’re making bank from it. Espousing a politics of difference without this key structural frame means people with largely common interests – workers, men, women, white, black, whoever – have been positioned as opposing groups vying for the same resources. That is, they are positioned as people fighting for the same pool of diminishing wages, secure jobs and representation in politics, rather than as a social class trying to expand the number of good jobs and everyday people’s leadership across all levels of politics and society. While big business expands its power and wealth, we’re arguing over who gets the crumbs.

Solidarity as identity hurts Everyone’s ideas about political participation, but especially young people’s, are shaped by this confluence of powerful trends – the loss of class identity and collective institutions to join, and high exposure to internet and digital technologies. It’s a concoction that has confused and warped our sense of self and others. What has emerged is a social infrastructure that recasts people’s view of the world through a narrow, individualistic lens. Personal identities are the whole organising principle of the internet. As more information about a globalising, unequal world reached us through

our devices, interpretation and action have been encouraged to pass through the tiny pinhole of individual opinions and feelings. In her prescient essay on internet culture, journalist Jia Tolentino says of the distorting effects of the internet-age phenomenon, ‘It’s as if we’ve been placed on a lookout that oversees the entire world and given a pair of binoculars that makes everything look like our own reflection.’16 Even the self is centred in the expression of support for others, where solidarity has become an identity rather than an act. Helping people facing injustice should be a straightforward question of ‘How can I practically help?’, but instead ‘helping’ has become an exercise in framing other people’s lives through the lens of one’s own. This means displaying that you’re also now incensed, angry for their pain, and perhaps even guilty by birth association. Meanwhile, this frenzied world of social identity calculations orbits outside the very real lived experiences of economic and political deprivation. Millions of Australians trapped in exploitation, poverty, discrimination, addiction and violence aren’t naive about the hurdles they’re up against. They’re fighting to survive every day, and seek avenues to get the resources and power needed to make their lives better. Identity-based solidarity only diverts attention away from their material needs and towards an identity proclamation. It turns everyone away from a more valuable problem-solving mindset. Since membership with specific identity groups like gender, race, sexuality and ability have become the basis for legitimating one’s political voice, young people mobilise when issues are viewed as personally relevant to their own lives, or of those around them. This automatically restricts the number of people participating. Action is also made less effective because it becomes clouded in moral outrage that obscures any outward-looking, strategic focus on building alternative economic and political institutions that could fix the problem. Now and then I tell men about the sorts of rough experiences I’ve had as a woman. I don’t share because I seek shock or pity. Nor do I need to hear men say, ‘I’m sorry for my gender.’ I share to foster understanding and trust across a divide. I share because I know my experiences fit into a wider structural phenomenon, faced by many more people, many far worse off than me, and men included. I share because I want them to commit to tangible solidarity to address those problems – like campaigning for better

public services for women, higher income support payments, and stronger unions. I share to help weed out division among us. Trust and respect matter a great deal. They form the bedrock of democratic engagement, of progress and change. Some days, life’s punches shorten your fuse, but it is every person’s duty to listen to others and try to understand how life led them to their perspectives. Forming and expressing an opinion is, of course, also important. When we’re toddlers we learn we’re separate beings from our mothers, and embark on a turbulent journey of finding independence to reach adulthood. The journey continues over our life course, with asserting opinions core to our self-actualisation. Without other avenues for action, sharing your opinion or expressing your solidarity of pain can feel temporarily empowering. But for animals who evolved through cooperation and collectivisation, the relentless public performance of the self in pain takes its toll. Sustaining the practice psychologically has the effect of reducing people to a raw, exposed bundle of nerves. Worryingly, a huge 75 per cent of young people aged 16–24 now report symptoms of anxiety.17 When young people’s own lives scream for bold mass movements, their hyper-exposure to individualised, limited forms of action hurts. What is clear is that the power of kings, feudal lords, slave-driving colonialists or industrial capitalists was never threatened by subjugated peoples turning inward, policing each other’s language and ideas. Focusing large volumes of attention on using the right words has never precipitated an expansion or redistribution of economic or political resources in our favour. Solidarity-as-identity represents the destructive dispersal of collective problem-solving, like a comet blowing up into billions of little fragments. It is not sustainable, fair or an effective pathway to making real change. The fact is, the world is full of untold suffering, far more than you can individually comprehend, and to address it we need nerves of steel, and an emphatic embrace of expanding human economic and social freedoms. We need to move beyond politics on the terrain of the self. Historians will tell you that the world is made by big blocs of different people with differing interests finding commonality and moving together as one.

Opinions aren’t enough

The latest reported atrocities weigh heavy on young people in the absence of sustained social movements to join or observe. A profound hopelessness has set in, with a sense there’s nothing one can do. But of course, Big Tech companies are waiting in the wings, and have an outlet for your desire to react. Their self-interested solution? Plug your opinion or your expression of solidarity into social media platforms and tell others about it. While there was initially some optimism about the power of sharing opinions online, in time it has morphed into a desperate act of finding agency. To be seen to do something about a problem. Platform companies want you self-actualising with them, rather than with your peers or the wider community. Come and share your opinion, stay to feed the extractivist Google beast. This represents the continued evolution of the dynamic capacity of capitalism to absorb resistance and turn it into markets. Similarly, business wants you to think that buying the right light bulbs will save the environment, and buying into expensive unattainable beauty standards represents empowerment. Now, consider the sum total of the trillions of opinions expressed on social media over decades. All that rumination, analysis, anger and emotion plugged into a corporate-owned medium designed to achieve very different ends to the society-wide transformation we want. All that finger tapping producing free fodder for data brokers to convert into profit by selling it off to advertisers, or for reactionary politicians seeking electoral advantage, as seen in the Trump–Cambridge Analytica scandal. Opinions are only one step on the road to action. What do you do with your opinion? You must test it with others, weave it into others’ perspectives. This isn’t a one-way information flow of ‘liking’ or ‘cancelling’. It requires listening, reflection and being willing to change your own view. At the end of this process, hopefully you’re on the same page about a collective course of action. It can be uncomfortable hearing differing views, but neither uncritical cheerleaders nor demon-hunters does a healthy democracy make. The world is plunging deeper into massive era-defining change, and we need fortified democratic infrastructure to create collective people-powered solutions. A stumbling US-led global order threatening war, surging profitled inflation, and millions dying needlessly from disease, poverty and global warming. This is big shit. Untrammelled corporate power is behind the wheel of a death-machine, and we need to stop it. We must be staunch

defenders of human life, and seek opportunities to find commonality and work together. Unfortunately, defending expectations of mutual engagement in public space can set you well apart today. Sparking up a conversation on the train is more likely to terrify your fellow commuter (eyes glued to their smartphone) than uplift them. There is a dooming sense is that our shared civic reality is dying out. But difference, debate, compromise and collective action are messy, and can only be properly executed in real life. The internet may be able to pool people with similar opinions, but translating those ideas into people acting together depends on strong ties between those people. Especially people you don’t know. Base-level trust that people are inherently good is integral to forging those strong ties. It’s worth remembering that most people care about their families, friends and the wider community, just like you, and don’t generally harbour malicious intent to actively hurt others. Then you have to broaden and strengthen those ties with more people through real forums that can steer people through the mess of different experiences and, sometimes, different interests to yours. The hard truth is that corporate-owned digital technologies and social media platforms might enhance visibility of this world, but they cannot host genuine reciprocal participation. Effective action requires trust and the ability to overcome a worldview that continually references yourself. If it’s alliances and collective positions you want, having an opinion is not enough. Nor is bullying or ganging up on people you disagree with. As well as encouraging self-focus and moral outrage, internet-dependent political action often confines movements to single issues. The internet is good for getting traffic around an issue, and hype around an action like a petition or protest. But young people return home buzzing and hopeful, only for that feeling to be replaced with frustration and disillusionment when the power structures they seek to influence don’t change. The cycle will only repeat, bringing more fatigue and disillusionment, because the change young people really need touches every policy cog shaping their lives. The internet dramatically expands the reach of a message – for example, the need to transition away from fossil fuel–based energy production and invest in publicly funded renewables. But it cannot support that message to be tweaked, reshaped, interpreted and owned by wider groups in society

like unions, environmental NGOs and political parties. While the rulers meet in person – in Parliament and corporate board rooms – behind the mirror, watching us, we’re sitting in front of the mirror yelling at our own reflections, like budgies in a cage. By guzzling up time and willpower to make change, and promoting an inadequate type of action centring on individual identity, online activism restricts the formation of collective identities and sustained movements, and diverts energy away from action. Social media benefits from holding us in a state of anger, and there’s no connection between anger and rational, strategic problem-solving. Without any coordinated and harnessed outlets, it just becomes despair. Of enduring political importance are the places where you work and live, which the internet ignores. And more often than not, it sends our online efforts offshore, into the bank accounts of multinational corporations. Rather than chastising people tethered to screens, we should be harnessing our collective power to diminish the profound isolation and atomisation created by platform technologies. Regulating the wicked impacts of parasitic Big Data companies on our psychology and the wider economy is the ultimate goal. But freeing ourselves first means rebuilding vibrant spaces of profound humanness – with all the difference, connection, love and awkwardness it brings. We diminish the centrality of Big Data and social media in our lives by building better lives without any space for them. By being woven into relationships of accountability to each other, we can become more lucid, purposeful and in control.

Harnessing empathy for change Young people’s lives run on vertigo-inducing contradictory timelines. The slowing cogs of economic opportunity delay or postpone key life stages, but at the same time young people are tethered to an increasingly fast-paced digital world, consuming high volumes of news, information and social connections. They bury their heads in the dopamine hits, and worry if they’ll emerge in their thirties, still unsatisfied, anxious and hungover. Real life mimics the doom-scroll. Identifying every conceivable permutation of disadvantage and discrimination, and one’s valid position in relation to it, has exhausted young people. The practice has paralysed action, as people defer to

privilege such that they become tiny and no longer agents. But there’s also so much to harness here. A generation of emotionally intelligent and reflective people has emerged, and they have the building blocks to turn that awareness into action. In many ways, the pandemic brought young people’s online woes to a head. They were disproportionately impacted by lockdowns, job losses and the inability to socialise their pain with others. COVID-19 stole spaces for real-life bonds, those day-to-day connections that legitimised all the time spent online. But after living for so long online, young Australians are coming up for air. From pop-up vaccination clinics to the doubling of the JobSeeker payment, the power of government to rapidly mobilise people and resources was on full display during lockdowns, albeit in very top-down ways. With real power visible, the bankruptcy of limited forms of identity and online action becomes clearer. Young people increasingly understand they won’t win or fight effectively online, and that they need a collective politics that strikes at the heart of our economic and social ills. Without real-life exposure to the tactics of collective action and change, young people aren’t likely to take that first step in action for themselves, nor in defence of people they’ve never met. But that’s exactly what we need. Everywhere in our schools, tens of thousands of teachers engage in a potent social craft. After identifying differences between kids in the classroom, a teacher uses their skills to fold the students into one whole, capable of analysing and solving problems together. Far from cultivating a homogenous identity, teachers show kids that everyone, in all their diversity, belongs in the classroom, and each person plays a role in the learning process. Now, imagine that classroom represents all of society. Who is weaving all of our differences into an effective, problem-solving whole? Young people need more powerful tools to take back their stolen futures. That means new, vibrant, genuinely democratic institutions in which they can deliberate, strategise, lick their wounds, collaborate with wider society and learn from mistakes together. Neoliberalism’s campaign of division is best countered by a universal solidarity that understands our commonality – that hurt experienced by one

section of society is hurt experienced by us all. Renewing an Australia that rebuilds youth economic opportunity, and advances all human need, depends on us seeing solidarity as our biggest strength – our capacity to work together and act as one. Deploying our most powerful collective muscle will take hard work, trial and error, learning how to work together. But by shaking the screen and getting hands-on with democracy, young people can lead a regeneration in Australia’s social movements, unions, workplaces and communities.

5. AND SO SAY ALL OF US!

What does it mean to be ‘involved’? To take those first steps towards establishing the foundations for a better, more inclusive and sustainable Australia? It looks like lots of people working together to change how their workplaces operate, how governments deliver their services, and how people care for each other in their communities. Put simply, we must transform how we live and work. It’s about us. Electing the most progressive government cannot alone bring transformational change, nor can the most forward-thinking CEOs in renewables. Nothing moves unless we all do. Riddled with uncertainty and without a tangible frame for collective action, Australians have become more prone to complaining about politicians who don’t do or say what we want, rather than seeking to meaningfully influence them, beyond the electoral cycle. By deferring to cynicism, we avoid getting our hands dirty. One day we’ll get active, we tell ourselves. It’s a form of mass procrastination, and every day we defer that first step to action, it hurts us all. Emancipatory growth emerges when we commit to collective activity, with history full of inspiring examples of action, including Australia’s own movements for the right to vote, to join unions, and to protect heritage and green spaces from corporate greed. People are active right now, you just

can’t see them. Young Australians have made energetic, inspiring and valiant efforts to inject themselves into a public debate so often dominated by older voices silent on their growing concerns. But while such efforts are encouraging, as sporadic spot-fire reactions without broadened coalitions with other active organisations it’s unclear how these movements will be sustained and effect change. This chapter isn’t a ‘how to’ on organising basics. Many authors dedicate themselves to these matters, like Jane McAlevey and Jane Holgate, who are well worth reading.1 Instead, this is a roadmap to real-life political participation – a wider transformation that starts in our social relationships and the wider community. Whether you’re just building the confidence to take initial steps, or you’re already active in a campaign or union and interested in strategic matters, this is an urgent invitation for us all to experiment, to be brave and to take risks. It’s all hands on deck to change the future for young people in this country, and the generations to come.

From human bonds to effective collective action The road to collective action starts with reconnecting with yourself and your community, forging human bonds of trust and respect. But with our work and social lives increasingly frayed, our world becomes more hostile to us gathering on our own terms. That is, it stops us gathering for each other. Gross corporate ideology has everywhere infected the social fabric, reducing humans to products for exploiting, consumers for marketing, or ‘networkers’ accumulating contacts to leverage individual success. Everywhere people go, they are treated like means to some other ends. This ideology is fostering growing scepticism and distrust in the motivations behind our fellow humans, and its socially corrosive effects block the creation of shared realities, experiences and solutions. Human relationships should be embraced as validating, powerful and joyful ends in themselves. Research in human psychology shows the positive benefits of social connectedness to our physical health and mental wellbeing, including lower levels of anxiety and depression, higher selfesteem, greater empathy, and more trusting and cooperative relationships.2 The positive and mutually reinforcing spillover effects of more self-aware, trusting, empathetic people for wider society are clear.

The people we meet, work alongside and ‘do’ life with are our mark on the world, after all. And that extends far beyond our immediate friendship group and family. Enquiring how the cashier’s shift is going, having a cuppa with your elderly neighbour, asking your co-worker how they’re going since Dad died, helping the young mother loading her pram onto the bus, thanking your bus driver – it all adds up, and creates a big feedback loop of social connection. But most important is listening and letting people know you hear them. Fostering social bonds helps us protect human dignity. If we become guardians of human dignity, we can demand the resources needed to protect it. By throwing a few earnest shovels of dirt into the chasm between us, we can start constructing the social bonds needed to make effective political change. Some dedicate themselves to fostering human connection, being the social glue in their families, clubs, institutions, and in their paid work, like teachers and artists. With so many struggling against the tide of isolation, insecurity and uncertainty, these angels among us keep heads above water, and propagate hope. But how to upgrade these social bonds into something broader? Transforming our renewed collective visibility into political action involves working out how we orient ourselves to democratic institutions, like political parties, government departments and trade unions. These are the institutions that are influenced by the political participation of everyday people in a democracy. For many, we avoid clear-eyed assessments of these institutions – their history, logic, present capacities – because the implications of profound disempowerment and barriers to action are overwhelming. By allowing cynicism and despair to overwhelm us, we lose our shared memory of overcoming the odds together. By talking, sharing and taking action together, what feel like individual problems that are impossible to fix become shared problems we have the power to fix. By connecting hardship experienced in our singular lives to that experienced by many others, we can become stronger, more confident and more proactive in our lives. Cynicism isn’t the only problem, though. Many people are politically hopeful but naive, mistakenly believing that elected politicians or public institutions will lead the systemic change they need. But with decades of

neoliberal policies leaving our democratic institutions shells of their former selves, we are left with a liberalism unfit for our reality. Neither demons nor gods, politicians are simply manifestations of the most powerful and loudest sections of society at any point in time. We must see their decisions – good or bad – as reflections of our own willingness to sit on our hands, or be active in building solutions to our problems. If organising and cohering masses of people into a powerful project that transforms Australia is our aim, we can’t expect current institutions to do it until we can effectively demand it ourselves. After decades of bipartisan policies gutting public service capacity, there are also genuine barriers to simply implementing better policies – at least immediately. Alienated from the levers of public policy by privatisation, the Commonwealth public service has been turned into a contracts management machine, over-subscribed with private-educated lawyers, conservative economists and self-described ‘leaders’, and with not enough public servants with expertise and the diverse skills to listen, reflect and collaborate. The craft of national public policy-making must be re-learned, which takes time, and again, effective independent forces capable of informing it. But even if there was a magic wand, would we really want government to wave it, and lead the redesign of our whole society, from the grassroots up? I don’t think so. We need an independent pulse generated outside government in order to effectively inform and influence it. People need to speak for themselves.

An Australian tradition Australia has world-leading traditions of people power. When Britain colonised Australia, the Empire’s rigid class hierarchies were embraced by the settler elite. Establishing themselves in positions of power in administration, business, politics and elite boys’ colleges, the new British– Australian hybrid elite sought to recreate a society that both naturalised and expanded their wealth and their own children’s opportunities – this lineage is still visible today in Australia’s top private schools. But their agenda didn’t fully succeed. Convicts and workers rejected a society built to serve the wealthiest and formed their own ideals about equality and justice. Hungry colonies also created labour shortages that

newly emerging trade unions used to win the eight-hour work day in 1856, and the first labour party in the English-speaking world was formed. There was a level of equality here that became the envy of the world. By the late 19th century, there existed a rich egalitarian culture through unions, social groups, magazines and churches. We take for granted that our taxes go towards public services today. It wasn’t always the case. Just two years before the big eight-hour day win, gold miners in Ballarat fought the colonial administration in an armed rebellion. The Eureka Stockade was a watershed moment in the international movement for workers’ right to vote. Despite the miners’ lowly earnings, they were subjected to an exorbitant tax intended to force them back to Melbourne to work in the new factories. The miners led a movement for ‘no taxation without representation’. By the early 1900s, the fight for universal male and female suffrage had been won. Now that the people could vote, they demanded a Fair Go. However, suffrage was still denied to Indigenous people, who were excluded for another 60 years. Strongly unionised workers kept marching forward, while insisting their hard toil and taxes meant government had obligations to them. We became the first country in the world to win the living wage, with the Harvester Judgement in 1907 legislating a minimum wage sufficient to secure the basics of life for a worker and his family, including housing and time for leisure. Expanding this worker-led compact to excluded groups took a fight, which is ongoing. These inspirational efforts expanded who our systems considered paid workers. This meant expanding who could be a unionist, worthy of dignified pay and conditions, and access to government services. In the late 1960s, the Wave Hill walk-off, led by Vincent Lingiari, fought for an end to discrimination against Aboriginal stock workers and for land rights, pioneering social movement unionism. In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement tore down women’s barriers to work, demanding equal pay. The fight to expand fairness at work continues in Australia. Temporary migrant workers are routinely denied rights to minimum pay and safety, women’s skills are undervalued, and new forms of insecure work disproportionately impact young Australians.

Taking it to the streets Protests or public demonstrations are widely viewed as key bridges to effective mass political participation. Joining a large number of people expressing a shared anger in real life can certainly be empowering, especially for youth locked out from traditional democracy, including hundreds of thousands of young adults aged 15–17 without a formal right to vote. Protests can demand greater visibility of issues, and be powerful litmus tests for public sentiment that can influence wider society and political decision-makers. But they alone can’t generate and sustain that wide-reaching pulse of political participation. Since the big youth-led civil rights win for marriage equality in 2017, Australians have put huge efforts into building large protest demonstrations, especially young people, with campaign organisations like GetUp! playing key roles. Climate action protests have dovetailed with big global initiatives, like Extinction Rebellion and the School Strike 4 Climate mass protests – the largest climate action rallies in history. Invasion Day mobilisations have been sizeable and consistently attended in recent years, having received renewed energy since the emergence of Black Lives Matter in the United States. Invasion Day protests have been a strong barometer of public sentiment about questions of colonisation, Treaty and Aboriginal rights. The March4Justice protests in 2021 represented another single large protest wave, which saw women mobilise nationally for economic and physical security, after former Coalition staffer Brittany Higgins alleged she had been sexually assaulted in Parliament House. So, building on our roadmap of political participation, how can we translate sporadic rallies into tangible organisations that work towards real change? How can we sustain collective efforts in order to realise concrete demands? Against a small, wealthy elite wielding outsized power, our sheer numbers are our biggest weapon – ‘power in numbers’, as the saying goes. But how we deploy and apply ourselves in pursuing those demands is what matters most. One core reason that movements reliant on protests lose steam is they aren’t emerging from, or translating into, ongoing associations between people – organisation. Organisations are structures that people affiliate to, or become members of, which coordinate and cohere their combined campaign efforts over time. The most impactful organisations throughout history have involved large numbers of people not just participating in

political activities, but also practising democratic decision-making – whether they be movements, political parties or unions. Big protests are powerful when they represent organisation. For instance, the Vietnam Moratorium protests involved hundreds of different campaign groups who debated the merits of the nation going to war, developed a stance together, and mobilised at massive central rallies. Today’s infrequent protests are more likely to involve thousands of separate individuals or friendship groups congregating in one place. Rally organisers circulate placards among the crowd to create the illusion of an organised voice. This isn’t real power. Big rallies that are unsupported by real organisation can also cause lasting damage to the people’s belief in their democratic power when their demands are not immediately realised. For instance, without stronger antiwar organisations across society, Prime Minister John Howard’s decision to march the country to war in Iraq in 2003, despite national protests, permanently altered Australians’ belief in their capacity to influence the political decision-making process. Post-rally demoralisation is already setting in for young people. After diligently researching, deeply feeling, and seeking a common community, many turn out for rallies only to return home and ask, ‘What next?’ When they pull blanks, social media platforms are all they have. People need somewhere to brush the gravel from the graze and plough on together, stronger. When they push for political change and don’t achieve their aims, organisations and institutions should catch their fall, and help them return, with more effective tactics in the future. Everywhere our lives are becoming more disconnected, with an ongoing erosion in our shared sense of reality. Young people building their sense of self and identity have nowhere to forge shared experiences, and for them, collectivism is a matter of urgency. They desperately want to reconstitute their porous, anxious selves on stronger collectivist grounds. Don’t we all?

We all need unions The good news is that organisations exist to support this political forward motion and connection right now – unions. Unions forge human bonds of solidarity within the places we live and work, normalising the regular

gathering of workers and facilitating collective action in pursuit of shared economic and social interests. Unionism is arguably the most effective mass apparatus for crafting a better, more pro-social, equal society. While much smaller than in their 1970s heyday, when over half of all workers were union members, unions remain the largest volunteer-based organisations in Australia, with over 1.5 million members. Australian unions have inspiring world-leading traditions in fighting for workers’ right to vote, to collectively bargain with powerful bosses, and to earn wages sufficient to raise a family and enjoy the good life. But as the wider custodians of workers’ economic and social interests, fortified through institutions promoting equality, opportunity and mobility through the Fair Go, unions regularly transcend the workplace, mounting strong campaigns for social justice and higher government spending to reduce inequality, and against war, discrimination, and rampant overdevelopment of our communities by big developers. With resources, physical offices and older, experienced members on hand to share history of battles won, our unions have a pivotal role to play in changing Australia. Their expansive, proud traditions can be resurrected and redefined by a new generation of unionists, right now. Unions are the most strategic vehicle for young workers keen to have a say over how their economy works, and who it serves. Unionised workers can elect to withdraw their labour, inflicting real costs on employers for not meeting their demands. No other action registers as powerfully in a capitalist economic system geared towards maximising profits and imposing worker discipline. Unions help workers speak the language of economic power. Once unionised workers speak the same language, they can create a whole new world of work that inspires hope, instead of the dread that fills workers today. Unions can help us create more meaningful jobs that address wicked economic, environmental and social problems, jobs that pay well and support time for leisure, and jobs with stronger career pathways, including ongoing training that lifts our knowledge, stimulates and inspires us. For instance in Britain, where employer investment in workforce training has halved since the mid-1990s,3 the union-led Union Learning Fund has improved workers’ access to training, with significant benefits to workers and the wider economy. Research by the University of Exeter found for

every £1 invested in union training, a total economic return of £9.15 was generated, of which £5.75 flowed to workers in higher wages and employment, and £3.40 to employers.4 Being in unions means workers are more likely to engage in regular learning, which is leading to higher acquisition of qualifications, greater likelihood of employment, and higher wages.5 Bigger unions with flourishing active memberships can also transform their industries. When unions work together, they can help reshape the entire economy to better meet our collective needs, like decarbonisation, ending poverty, attaining full employment and expanding public services. The powerful structural economic function of unionism is far from an abstract, future goal. It’s visible all around us today. For instance, Australia’s public health-care and education systems exist today only because unionised nurses, teachers and public servants are consistently organising to protect their working conditions and the quality and accessibility of public services we all need against conservative defunding. Creating collective power in workplaces today is the democratic infrastructure of the economy tomorrow. After the Hunter Valley region became a flashpoint in the 2019 election, with both major parties claiming that climate action in its coal-mining communities would mean job losses and lower living standards, the Hunter Jobs Alliance (HJA) was launched to tackle fossil-fuel transition by putting affected workers, the Hunter community and the environment first. A coalition of 13 unions, along with community and environment groups, the HJA is now campaigning for local sustainable jobs in new industries like green manufacturing and renewable energy, backed by public investment,6 and is an inspiring example of how unions can lead community-backed solutions to Australia’s decarbonisation and energy transition challenges. With job quality eroding and real wages declining, all Australian workers urgently need unions to reclaim power at work, but young people especially so. Concentrated in less-unionised and ‘fissured’ private services jobs like retail, fast food, hospitality and cleaning, insecure workers are systematically shafted by bosses. Many live suspended lives held at ransom by irregular rosters, and without safety from the sack. Minimum wages and legislated breaks are routinely thieved by the biggest, most profitable companies, and young people work in profoundly disrespectful environments in which sexual harassment, bullying and discrimination are commonplace. A recent study of hospitality workers by the University of

Queensland found that over 60 per cent of respondents had experienced sexual harassment, verbal and psychological bullying or racial abuse, with customers the main offenders, and 42 per cent of respondents saying abuse came from managers or supervisors.7 Unionisation is difficult in youth-dominated sectors riddled with insecure work, which makes new experiments that engage the wider community, and provide young activists more flexibility to take risks, important. There have been two notable Australian projects in broader social movement unionism, both of which marry public campaigns with intra-workplace collective power. The digital hospitality union Hospo Voice ran several successful wage theft campaigns against high-profile employers, including chef and TV personality George Calombaris, which resulted in the recovery of young workers’ stolen wages.8 (The union ceased to operate in 2022, folding into the amalgamated United Workers Union.) The Retail and Fast Food Workers Union (RAFFWU) was formed in late 2016 with a focus on building rank-and-file young activists to lead campaigns for more representative collective bargaining in unionised workplaces like Readings and Better Read than Dead bookstores. RAFFWU has also undertaken successful legal work contesting the approval of collective agreements that fall below the minimum award, putting millions of dollars in young workers’ back pockets from big companies like Coles and Domino’s. Beyond the highly casualised, youth-dominated services sectors, Australian young unionists are active in maintaining and expanding union power across many industries, activating new members, as well as contributing internally to their unions’ priorities and direction. For instance, a new organisation of Victorian pre-service school teachers emerged during the pandemic aiming to expand unionism into the university qualification system (similar to unionised apprentices), and formalise as a sub-branch of the Australian Education Union. Using traditional union organising methods, the pre-service teachers have campaigned for paid placements, and to expand unionism to new layers of young future teachers. Internationally, young workers have led exciting and dynamic unionisation drives. In the United States, several national union drives are underway in multi-billion-dollar corporations, even though the United States has among the lowest levels of unionisation in the developed world, and union revival remains an uphill battle. Under the US system of closed shops, once employees vote to unionise, the site becomes a union, all

employees are members, and the employer must engage in collective bargaining for wages and conditions. This turns union recognition drives into ‘winner-takes-all’ battles, with US employers investing enormous resources into highly coordinated, vicious union-busting campaigns to avoid locking in a permanent union presence. In Australia, employers can invest in strategies to avoid or delay bargaining with unions, though new laws introduced by the government will help stop employers avoiding genuine negotiation. Still, in Australia, any employee can elect a union as a bargaining representative, and unions have some workplace access. With the US high-stakes conditions in mind, young workers are leading inspiring and highly visible union campaigns at Starbucks, Amazon and Trader Joe’s stores, which have now spread across hundreds of locations. Adopting unconventional organising methods, they’ve cultivated confident, more autonomous young organisers, combined with Zoom training and mentorship of store-level and regional activists. At the time of writing, Starbucks Workers United had won unions at more than 235 stores, while the Amazon Labor Union, established by former Amazon worker Chris Smalls, won a historic win at the Staten Island warehouse. It is not yet clear if the spontaneous outburst in unionisation will result in legal recognition of unions, collective agreements that improve pay and conditions, or sustained renewal in the US labour movement. There are other powerful ways to organise that young people are leading globally. While the Bernie Sanders movement is known for completely altering the landscape for young progressive electoral politics in the United States and wider anglophone world, a lesser-known project is the grassroots youth-led organisation Momentum in the United Kingdom. Founded in 2015 after Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the UK Labour Party, Momentum is an intra-party campaign group that seeks to expand the number of progressive candidates and policies within the Labour Party, bolster community campaigns, and increase levels of political education. Momentum had around 25,000 members in 2021.9 Despite Corbyn’s significant defeat in the 2019 election, and a more restricted environment for progressive campaigning under new Labour leader Keir Starmer, Momentum continues to explore strategic ways to win progressive reforms, running campaigns on issues like renters’ rights during the pandemic, and has pulled a layer of British youth into sustained political participation.

Staying in the United Kingdom, broad social forces are culminating to address the cost-of-living crisis, where inflation is expected to exceed 18 per cent in 2023, in a campaign called ‘Enough is Enough’. The campaign, founded by community groups and trade unions, is demanding wage rises, price caps on energy bills, 100,000 public houses built each year, and a wealth tax. The dynamic young UK Labour MP Zarah Sultana has endorsed the campaign, and the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers UK railways bargaining campaign has created a powerful industrial backdrop, supported by the formidable break-out leadership of the union’s general secretary, Mick Lynch. Across the Tasman, the Living Wage Aotearoa movement, comprising three streams of civil society – unions, faith-based groups, and secular community groups – is lifting thousands out of poverty. More than 100 employers across multiple industries have committed to paying a living wage, independently calculated by experts at $23.65 per hour, $2.45 higher per hour than the minimum wage. The FIRST Union’s Worth It campaign has now won living wages at companies like Bunnings, Kmart and department store The Warehouse. Young Kiwis have won pay increases of up to 20 per cent over the next two years at Australia’s supermarket giant, Woolworths (called Countdown in New Zealand), even as the company denies the same for its largely cheap and youthful 230,000-strong workforce in Australia, commits wage theft and lobbies against minimum wage increases. Crucially, unlike Australia’s junior wages system, all workers will get the higher wage, regardless of age, because NZ unions have largely curtailed discriminatory youth wages systems. This is just a sample of recent exciting, brave union drives led by and involving young workers globally. They show how widely felt economic problems, like insecure work and low wages, can be woven into big bold campaigns to win back resources and power. Young workers in Australia should feel bolder for these achievements, because they all emerge from the same roots. After decades of expanding insecure work, low-paid service workers globally have sensed that the game is up. Union campaigns in the United States and New Zealand show us that inexperience and age needn’t be barriers to effective action. Bold strategies for collective action among under-represented precarious workers can win. By adopting a more

ambitious approach, unions can win their demands for high-quality service jobs, including within the most powerful multinational corporations, break through workers’ malaise and reinvigorate unionism in the public domain. It would be remiss of me to present unionisation as a straightforward process. There are many structural barriers to ununionised workers simply becoming active. Permanent, often older workers underestimate how powerful the fear-based rat wheel of chronic precarity is – how workers risk the sack for complaining about poor conditions or non-compliance with wage law, let alone being active unionists. But unions themselves also erect barriers to renewed activism of their own. Many unions haven’t adapted to the reality for many young workers. Solving this adaptation problem will require reconsidering how unions organise themselves. Perverse signals are still sent out about what unionism is all about. Where young workers seek empowering solutions to bad jobs, social isolation, and the lack of forums to unite and fight effectively, unions can still pitch membership as an arms-length insurance product, a passive service, or worse, a shopping benefits scheme. New, young activists often find routes to meaningful participation have been closed by internal organisational structures that narrow members’ activity, prevent freer communication, and don’t actively facilitate their participation in designing campaigns. These perverse signals are problems of ‘Big U’ unionism. This is where unions see themselves as extra-workplace institutions, perhaps contacted by members when there’s a workplace problem or bargaining is undertaken. Decisions about the union’s direction or strategy aren’t determined collectively by membership, and instead become by-products of operating within a highly legalised industrial relations system, often unconsciously, managed through paid leaders, lawyers and other officials. This is ‘Union’, the proper noun. But what many workers need, and especially young workers, is to unionise, the verb. There are, of course, very good reasons for the existence of ‘Big U’ unionism. It stems from Australian unions’ unique corporatist history of struggle and reform, which tied them into both defending and remaking the world of work simultaneously. Locked in a vicious bind defending institutions created in the ‘old world’, like the present incarnations of the Fair Work Commission and the modern awards system, unions must also keep pace with the new ways in which business punctures holes in the

system of labour protection, primarily by expanding insecure work. All the while, harsh anti-union laws prohibit basic union activities. It’s quite the juggle. But young people who’ve started their working lives in the era of insecure work have no visibility, experience or connection to union battles waged before them. Telling anyone totally unfamiliar with unions that they’ve done so much for them when they’ve only known shitty work and never met a unionist on the job is more likely to frustrate than inspire. Of course, maintaining the ‘old world’ is critical, including for young workers who depend on the system of minimum protections and rights even more than older workers. But organisational upkeep has sucked the vitality from organic union organising and the flexibility young workers need to make unionism their own. This includes amalgamations and the promotion of super unions as survival strategies, without adequate attention to new designs of intra-membership communication and decision-making. Without wider channels for ground-level member participation, unions can’t recast themselves in ways that they need to attract young members. This includes providing the terrain for connecting collective power built in the workplace to a wider array of issues, including secure housing and climate action – two campaigns absolutely critical to young people’s economic security. It’s a resourcing catch-22, but effective strategy requires tough calls that position you for long-term success. Revitalising unions and attracting new layers of young active members are too often conceived as separate challenges, but are actually one and the same. In the words of US union organiser and author Jane McAlevey, ‘people participate to the degree they understand – but they also understand to the degree they participate’.10 If unions can reconnect with the work of raising knowledge and confidence among workers through their participation, they can set the renewal wheels in motion. New members, including youth, need organisations that have confidence in their people to take charge of matters impacting their own lives. By putting theory into workers’ hands and delivering widespread education and training in workplace organising, unions can empower workers to be brave and to take risks in their uncertain conditions. By supporting self-organised members to connect with other workers, share experiences and plan campaigns, unions can help unleash the full capacity and fire of young workers looking for a home, and hungry for systemic change.

If unions are given the space to breathe again, they can retake their place in the historic battle for nation-defining change that we so desperately need. They can enlist new waves of energetic activists to co-create a new, upgraded, 21st-century Fair Go.

You’ll be backed in To strengthen popular participation in campaigns, unions, parties and communities, and set them on a trajectory towards mass action powerful enough to remake Australia, we need sound strategy. This chapter has offered some tools to help push against the growing tide of political fatalism, focusing on the potential to utilise and reinvigorate unions as the largest volunteer-based organisations in the country. Although it’s hard to see right now, the conditions for us to embark on this journey are actually quite favourable. Young voters had a major impact on the 2022 federal election, which uprooted a corrupt anti-democratic Coalition government attempting an Australian brand of Trumpism, and Millennials were the largest and most influential voter block behind the reelection of the progressive Labor government in Victoria, led by Premier Daniel Andrews. The pandemic crisis demonstrated clear societal expectations for the prioritisation of human wellbeing over profits. From popular public health measures implemented by states and territories, to the heartening mass pushback against the unfathomably cruel, ultra-austerity budget attempted by Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey in 2014 – which tried to cut GP bulk-billing practices and welfare benefits to the young unemployed – Australians still have a social democratic pulse, expecting government to play a positive role in the economy. Young Australians should confidently take up the mantle for a bold new equitable, sustainable vision for the country. The legacy of egalitarianism – putting government to service of better living standards – is enduring, and primed for resurrection. Australia will back you in. But it requires us all to bravely enter the waters and embrace trial and error to get the ball rolling. Unlike other items on the to-do list to avoid, being proactive and taking action with others will uplift, inspire and reframe our collective outlook. Whether it’s joining campaigns or unions, attending local community groups, or even just checking in with your

elderly neighbour, the reconstruction of Australia’s economy and society from the neoliberal rubble must begin somewhere. We’re building a pulse of popular political movements that will beat across all sections of society – workers, students, the unemployed, carers, everyone. Cultivating that vibrant pulse will take many years of hard work, but the only option is to get started. And hopefully have some fun along the way.

6. MAKING THE MODERN FAIR GO

Hope is inseparable from how we view the future. Becoming more active in political change can set the hope wheels in motion, and transform how we see our individual and collective future. But there’s a missing puzzle piece here: a clear articulation of what our future could be. What programs and policies are we pursuing? Without a long-term vision for the reorganisation of our society, we have nothing to guide us. An ambitious program for government’s re-entry into the economy that can create the architecture of opportunity and prosperity for all its people, delivering a new type of economic growth that is shared, inclusive and sustainable. A regular in the Australian political lexicon, politicians of all stripes claim to serve the Fair Go, but it’s rarely defined. It’s at once ubiquitous and nowhere, as it becomes harder to believe we live in a society that pursues equality and fairness for all. This is especially the case for many First Nations peoples, who face entrenched deprivation, inequality, and continued state violence, reflected in incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples that are higher than for black South Africans during apartheid. For many young Australians, the Fair Go’s mythology of good jobs and living standards is superficial, only knowing the 24/7 insecure work hustle, the punitive bureaucracy of employment services

providers, and chronic share-housing. For many on the outer, the Fair Go feels like a cultural artefact from a bygone era. The Fair Go is a powerful and enduring idea, but politicians and big business have been subverting it. In 2019, Prime Minister Scott Morrison infamously said ‘I believe in a fair go for those who have a go’, implying individuals navigating policies designed to fail them were somehow lacking effort. Blaming people for misfortune is of course a core tenet of the neoliberal religion. If you ‘believe’ (against all facts and evidence) that government’s main job is to pursue the enrichment of a minority of people, and that their private resources will somehow ‘trickle down’ and construct ladders of opportunity for everyone else, then you believe people fail because they’re not climbing hard enough. It’s time to put the Fair Go back into gear. As I outlined in the previous chapter, the Fair Go didn’t fall from the trees, but was painstakingly built over generations of everyday people working together against the odds. The Fair Go’s core principles include good standards of living for all by addressing disadvantage and deprivation, equality between citizens with a more equal distribution of income, and the opportunity to improve your lot in life. It’s about lifting everyone up, and leaving no one behind. It includes good jobs and affordable housing – the two cornerstones covered in the first two chapters of this book. It’s a strong egalitarian social compact in which all people should be given the opportunity to live decent, dignified lives regardless of the money they’re born into. Crucially, government has a big role to play in delivering it. That is, don’t leave it to markets. It’s about how our elected representatives and workplaces deliver and fortify justice. Putting the ideas, experiences and hearts of Australian people back into public life demands bold change. By pursuing a new, expanded, modern Fair Go, we can build an economy that channels resources and power back to everyday people, to create a future worth fighting for. This chapter lays out some key components of a Fair Go that blends Australia’s internationally leading egalitarian mission with some new twists, ensuring a better fit to our current realities.

Fair Go 3.0?

For so long we’ve been told that globalisation made governments impotent in the face of social ills. It’s the inevitable fallout of opening up to the world, and we don’t want to become protectionist laggards, they said. In this time, conjuring up images of hopeful government action to lift living standards is hard for many. Almost none of us have experienced it. But there was such a time in Australia’s history. As we know, after World War II, Australia embarked on a bold project to reconstruct the national economy. Government pursued new planning and spending measures across many areas of society, creating public vocational training, social security, affordable housing and better communications. These leaps forward still live with us today. Before the late 1940s revival, we’d only just crawled out of the Depression, and were far more unequal. An enlarged working- and underclass faced worse pay, job security, education levels and access to secure housing compared to the middle and upper classes. We were also still a dominion of the British Empire, not officially autonomous in internal and external affairs until 1942. Pulling people through the war effort required a collective project of social renewal – one that delivered broad-based prosperity, and the basis for an independent Australia. Undertaken under two Labor prime ministers, John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and aided by public servant extraordinaire Nugget Coombs, all motivated to prevent the terrible effects of depression on the people’s living standards repeating, the post-war reconstruction created a frenzy of policy planning by administrators, unions, academics, politicians and civil society. It’s a period that sits nestled in our history, ready for revival, animated by legends like the historian Stuart Macintyre, who coined it ‘Australia’s boldest experiment’. By investing in the people’s economic security, reconstruction laid the foundations for more than two decades of rising living standards. By the 1980s, Australia was one of the most egalitarian countries in the world, according to a detailed study on living standards by sociologist Peter Travers and economist Sue Richardson, which accounted for the impacts of government-provided education, health services, housing and non-cash social welfare benefits on income inequality.1 But it wasn’t policy wonks driving. It was the wider public mood for big change that propelled the dream of a better Australia.

The weakening of unions, and the retreat of government from promoting equality is why it’s so hard to see the Fair Go at work these days. But its legacy is everywhere, from public hospitals and schools, to the awards system of industry-level minimum wages. As this book went to print, the new Labor government had just passed a major industrial relations bill called ‘Secure Jobs Better Pay’, led by Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Tony Burke, which will start repairing the broken system for wage increases and collective bargaining. We may be more unequal than ever before, but the Fair Go continues to permeate expectations about fairness and justice. Polling shows Australians want higher corporate taxes, better public services and better paid, more secure jobs. Minimum wage laws remain potent, with rolling popular wage theft campaigns led by young workers in low-wage service industries. The Fair Go was also on display in Australia’s response to the lockdowns, particularly in 2020, where a strong collectivist mentality persisted in response to hysterical media, business and special interest campaigns. Australians may be less likely to join unions, protest or hold neighbourhood street parties, but there are clear signs our egalitarian senses still tingle. We’ve many real challenges ahead. Australia’s economy resembles a giant quarry, existing to serve the last vestiges of the global fossil-fuel economy. Shifting our power source to renewables, and upgrading our homes and cities to survive climate change and airborne viruses are just some of the challenges ahead for us, made harder by the resource curse. Gathering skills, technology and know-how so we’re capable of addressing these challenges over the long term presents one set of problems. But I’m not concerned primarily with correct answers to technical problems. In many respects, we know the answers. The climate science is clear, and reports on how to design sustainable economies that maximise human wellbeing gather dust on shelves. What keeps me up at night is the political challenge. Where is the participatory collective power to stop the deadly disaster logic of neoliberal capitalism in motion? Where is the driving force for a bold, brave transformation of our country? The spread of fascism in the 1930s was the result of the failure of capitalist democracies to deal with the misery of the

Depression. What becomes of us if we don’t deal with the misery of neoliberalism? Millions of Australians live an everyday financial crisis, including many young people. Disconnected and disempowered, they need dependable incomes to breathe easier, and to think. And they need the right institutions around them to fight for a better world. It was the impact of unshackled, greedy private interests that got us into this mess. It’ll be the unshackling of our collective efforts over years that will dig us out. But without a long-term vision for the reorganisation of our society, we have nothing to guide us. Australia’s post-war reconstruction is an inspiring framework for action – proof we’ve done it before. But it can’t be simply replicated today. The scale of damage to our public institutions and lack of trust in democracy is too great. That’s why we need more of a ground-up approach, to replenish and renew the Fair Go.

Creating good jobs Half of us are now unsatisfied with our jobs, and one in ten actively hates them. In recent years, proposals for a universal basic income (UBI) have captured the imaginations of many, especially young people who’ve adopted an ill-fated ‘anti-work’ frame. Many have mistaken state cash payments as some form of radical non-participation in capitalism, or the only way to pay people for meaningful work. When you’ve only known disrespect at work, and tech companies peddle fallacies everywhere about automation taking your job, UBI’s popularity is understandable. But the idea that giving everyone a minimum income is necessary to shield against supposedly inevitable unemployment, or to enable meaningful, artistic or other socially useful work is misguided and defeatist. What goes on in employment is anything but static or immovable. It’s the key ground for people-power building. Far from tapping out of paid work, we need to embrace thinking that cultivates ownership over the jobs we do, as part of recrafting an economy that meets our needs. The spread of neoliberal policies and the demise of unions have left a gaping hole in our workplaces. Workers have lost their voice on the job and the capacity to problem-solve and find solutions to shared problems, and

real wages have declined while inequality has risen. So many workplaces are marked by bullying, harassment and unhinged management. As I argued in the previous chapter, rebuilding strong unions and good jobs is the first major pillar of a new Fair Go. Strong unions created the Fair Go – they show us where we’ve come from, and they constitute the major force that can lead us to a better, fairer future. When it comes to bargaining, businesses want to be the only ones at the table. They’ve been shutting down efforts by unions to bargain by using aggressive legal tactics, blocking basic union organising. They carve up their businesses, outsourcing and obfuscating who is in charge of employing workers. And they’ve been using insecure jobs to keep millions of workers in quiet servitude and away from the bargaining table. A collective bargaining system should extend the right of workers to pursue their economic and social interests – to band together to demand better pay and job conditions. Since we don’t get to vote for employers, an effective and accessible bargaining system is critical to democracy. The agenda for rebuilding unions to drive the Fair Go at work requires workers having significantly improved rights. Legislating to reduce insecure work will extend to workers the most basic of dignities – security in knowing that income will flow next week, next month, next year. Abolishing the archaic junior wages system is of huge importance to young workers, who deserve full adult citizenship in our wages laws. To build power, we must create infrastructure that allows workers to organise. We should introduce laws that give incentives for workers to join unions, including the capacity to charge non-members a small fee to cover the costs of negotiating agreements to improve their pay, and allow unions to attend workplaces to engage in basic recruitment and organising. Unionisation can make bad jobs better. For starters, overworked Australians are overdue for a reduction in their working hours, which haven’t changed since the legislated standard 38-hour week was created in the 1970s. We can also fight for more holidays, four-day working weeks, more paid time for union activities, and jobs that support the kind of lives we want. There’s also a powerful lever at our disposal: the public sector. It exists to support socially important jobs like health care and education, and areas where markets fail to deliver. There’s no reason why this logic can’t extend

to expanding the number of jobs in any other work we deem important to a better society, like regenerating ecosystems, advancing sustainable manufacturing, beautifying cities and creating artists’ fellowships. Stronger unions can form the backbone of a large progressive bloc, which can cohere constituencies in favour of the new Fair Go, and provide real countervailing power to business interests that will try to stop our momentum.

The Fair Go needs a home What use are stronger systems for workers to lift wages if rising housing prices constantly outstrip any gains they make? After the war, strong unions made sure government kept up with people’s expectations of a Fair Go. It made home ownership a reality for the average worker. But besides this brief period during the post-war reconstruction period when state governments focused on building public housing, Australia’s housing system has been otherwise dominated by private provision. In fact, giving investors the reins in the housing system has plunged us into dark territory before. The working class and poor were subjected to untrammelled landlord power in the rental market during the Depression – the only tenure available to them. People were packed into overcrowded, unsanitary homes, without regulations or controls against the exorbitant rents that consumed their paltry incomes. During the Depression, rental housing became emblematic of a society failing to provide basic economic security to all people, to the benefit of a minority of property owners. Sound familiar? Let’s not make the same mistake twice. Homes aren’t commodities. We can transcend our past solutions to the same problem of private housing provision that we faced then. In the immediate post-war years, we expanded owner occupation to workers as the housing arrangements of civility and dignity. Today, we must resolve the housing crisis by dramatically expanding public and social housing – dwellings constructed and leased at low cost by both government and community housing providers. Australian workers once aspired to a humble home to call their own. But the era of public-bankrolled housing riches is a shameful turn in our history. It’s time to stop subsidising property investors. Winding back multi-billion-

dollar housing tax concessions will help us fund an upgrade to the Fair Go’s remit for public services, with the right to secure housing too. Building quality public and social housing alternatives to owning a home isn’t just about fixing a crisis in which over 500,000 people languish waiting for social housing. It’s also about shifting the focus of our nation’s culture and identity. From the late 1990s, Australians were told to keep their head down, work hard, suffer honourably like the diggers, and find solace in the rising value of their homes. This was John Howard’s ideological project, which sought to dismantle working-class identity and replace it with ‘Aussie battlers’. But defining people’s value based on economic conditions over which they have no control – like interest rates – has resulted in many workers becoming passive and without agency in the areas in which they can build power, like at work. While the poorest suffer in material deprivation, Australia’s housing system, running on a ‘get in, cash out’ mantra, has fostered a toxic political constituency, and a deprived national psyche. Are we really a nation of onedimensional wealth-builders? If we could avoid locking people into the mortgage rat-race, huge amounts of time would be freed to explore more fulfilling jobs – and lives. This is already the reality in Nordic countries, where there is a wide repertoire of pro-social housing models like housing cooperatives, which amount to 22 per cent of the total housing stock in Sweden, and 40 per cent of all housing stock in Norway’s capital, Oslo.2 A national public housing construction program could build hundreds of thousands of units, with local materials and labour where possible, cofunded and delivered in partnership with state governments. They could be well-planned, high-quality, beautiful units, affordable and accessible to all. We could also purchase existing privately owned dwellings, and renovate and repurpose them. Establishing a network of public housing community bodies could ensure new units were designed well, with residents helping manage the day-to-day running of their homes – just like they do in Sweden’s housing cooperatives – rather than the present highly bureaucratic, paternalistic system. There are others for whom owner occupation will remain important. Indeed, the majority of young Australians say owning a home is still a key goal. Government could extend concessional loans, or even consider

creating a public bank to extend cheap credit, and change regulations to slow commercial investor lending. It’s a mighty challenge for Australia. We’re weaning ourselves off a drug. But normalising public and social housing, coupled with the campaign for good jobs and dignified, secure incomes, would help redirect the enormous economic and cultural value Australians place in the individual ownership of land and property. This priority shift is one of the most critical updates we can make to the legacy of the Fair Go, built on unceded Aboriginal lands, and our nation would be the richer for it.

Expanding dignified incomes Australia’s social security system is in need of an urgent upgrade to generalise the call for dignified incomes to all. People in need are being plunged into a humiliating, taunting regime of proving their ‘worthiness’ for meagre survival incomes. They do this for contracted operators – many of them for-profit businesses – that monetise vulnerability, forcing people into ‘make work’ activities, including referring job seekers to their own training courses.3 A larger pool of human misery, precarity and dodgy McJobs just means a bigger unemployment market. The incentives are perverse. Payments are arbitrarily denied for groups in need. For instance, 450,000 students aged 18–21 are excluded from Youth Allowance because Centrelink rules them financially dependent on their parents until the age of 22, regardless of their real circumstances.4 Financial penalties are imposed for failure to tick correct boxes, magnifying the misfortune. The social security system is riddled with contradictions and tensions that have been carried over from our dark history of bureaucratised punishment. It systematises the rejection of citizenship to its own desperate citizens, with eerie shades of the early convict apparatus designed to catalogue, control and reform human beings. Convicts were freed after years of forced labour, and a good behaviour record, with redemption achieved through passage into lives of ‘dignified’ waged workers.5 Beyond the systematised punishment, the social security system is just not fit for purpose. The notion of a safety net is outdated. By assuming only a minority of unlucky ones fall through the cracks, the implication is that

the employment system otherwise provides jobs good enough for the majority to prosper. But it clearly doesn’t. Significant numbers of people can’t work due to disability, sickness or caring demands. Ask the homeless with jobs living in cars and tents, and they’ll tell you working and earning isn’t enough to secure life’s basics anymore. People can’t find suitable jobs that pay enough with enough hours. That’s why it’s so common to combine the two lowly incomes – from both Centrelink and work – to make ends meet. Over half a million people do this now. Employment can’t be the only source of dignified incomes for many women too, who face massive barriers from child-care fees and employers who don’t care if they have a family. They will always have a greater need for income support. This structural mismatch between the social security system and the scale of human need has been navigated before. During the 1930s Depression, with so many working men out of jobs, payments like child endowments were introduced to support desperate families. But this period of reform just bolted on relief to the male wage-earner model, and in reality, soon outgrew it, with more women joining the workforce from the 1970s – many part time – and governments abandoning the idea of full employment. Fast forward another four decades, and today social attitudes about who can work have dramatically progressed. The breadwinner norm has been tried on for size by new groups of people, who have found it is an ill-fitting suit. The breakdown of job quality combined with the pandemic caring crisis has revealed the inadequacy of our minimum income system. It’s still rigidly designed around the idea that there are enough good jobs ‘out there’, and that performatively demonstrating an effort to return to wage independence is the only way to validate one’s access to income support. So, the ‘wage earner’s welfare state’ has come back to bite us. It’s a major trip-wire in Australia’s history of egalitarianism. Now, we must progress our worker-powered welfare state to the next level. The fight for dignified incomes on the job is also the fight for liveable incomes in the social security system. The interrelationship between these historic missions is clear. Cutting access to social security and vilifying recipients parallels the decline in workers’ rights. Less generous public services and a punitive social security

system combine to magnify people’s dependence on whatever scraps they can get from paid work. Hungrier, more desperate workers haven’t been able to defend themselves in an intensifying wages war, and they can’t now in the new inflation war. It’s worth acknowledging women are always the most dependent on the scraps. For decades, there’s been a tension between government and business about who pays for all the caring and household work that holds up the economy, and women can’t keep being punished for caring. Better, more accessible income support for private caring work, alongside a program for better-quality part-time jobs, can dramatically expand women’s future choices. Evolution in our social security system will help us all evolve politically too. Have you noticed the ATO’s ‘where do my taxes go’ handouts, delivered to your mailbox now, the brainchild of former Treasurer Joe Hockey? Even though Australia’s expenditure on social spending is far below the OECD average, we’re continuously told social security funding is excessive, a dead weight on workers and their hard toil. Paid work has been counterposed to social security expenditure, in a direct, paternalistic relationship. It’s a potent and divisive weapon that stops workers and people receiving benefits seeing their common interest in a better, fairer Australia. Meanwhile, our tax base is artificially constrained, and the wealthy escape their proper contribution to the public coffers. By expanding capital gains taxation and closing multinational tax loopholes, we’d build stronger foundations for overcoming poor-bashing and tired austerity thinking. By focusing on where the real fat is, we can collectively punch up. Our social security system must evolve – from a system investing billions to drag down the quality of jobs, to one that lifts them up. To do this, it must be at least partially unshackled from its wage-earner history, and extended to all people in need of dignified levels of income. It must be finally transformed to catch up with the introduction of millions of women into the paid workforce, and hence all of society’s caring and household labour. It should embrace the fact that generous income support helped save the Australian economy during the pandemic, and will help us weather future storms. Creating a new social security system requires that we give ourselves the best chance of shedding the system’s DNA of punitive bureaucracy-

building and illiberalism. Ending the benefits policing regime is one step. Establishing a statutory social security commission to determine the adequacy of existing payments is another important step. As is a longstanding proposal from the Australian Council of Social Services, which was just agreed to by government during its negotiations with ACT Senator David Pocock on its industrial relations bill. All allowance payments should increase in line with basic living costs and wages.

Taxing big wealth The new Fair Go must rectify the growing wealth divide carving up society based on the ‘born into’s’ and ‘not born into’s’. Wealth denotes power, and it’s eating up the substance of life for others, including affordable housing for future generations. While many Australians think it fair that people earning higher incomes, like lawyers, pay a higher share of tax than people earning lower incomes, like cleaners, we don’t apply the same logic of fairness to people holding excessive wealth and earning incomes from that wealth, or to corporations earning record profits. Currently nearly half of all government revenue comes from personal income taxes. These are the taxes we pay on our salaries, wages and benefits at each pay packet. But taxes on companies represent only 18 per cent of government revenue.6 Why should workers do the heavy lifting to fill the public coffers while the wealthiest stash income in businesses, houses and other assets, and avoid proper taxation? These taxation inequities, tilted entirely to the benefit of the wealthiest, mean Australia misses out on a larger tax base to fund our Fair Go. To demonstrate how central untaxed capital gains are to understanding inequality in Australia, the wealthiest 10 per cent of taxpayers declared 71 per cent of all capital gains, but only 21 per cent of all conventional taxable income,7 and the benefits are highly skewed to older people, feeding wealth disparities between young and old.8 Australia is throwing billions at rich asset-holders who don’t lift a finger, but we expect younger workers – who are less likely to have assets – to keep carrying the tax load. In fact, as economist David Richardson finds, the average dollar earned from working is more than ten times more likely

to be taxed than a dollar made in capital gains.9 Nice (non)work if you can get it! Big, untouchable wealth hangs heavy on us, and without proper redistribution it’ll swamp us, fuelling destabilising inequality, making the whole economic pie smaller for the majority of people. If we don’t start asking those with the most wealth to contribute more, by 2060 the value of capital gains will outstrip the size of the whole economy, growing to a whopping 127 per cent of GDP, or $18 trillion.10 It is absurd and unsustainable to allow these kinds of riches to accumulate outside the normal taxation system – especially in light of suggestions by consecutive Treasury Intergenerational Reports that Australia somehow can’t afford to deliver government services amid an aging population.11 There are plenty of old rich people now, and there will be plenty in 40 years’ time, well able to contribute to society’s resourcing needs. A far bigger and more immediate problem is the vulnerable elderly without assets. Many are older women, often divorced or separated, who dedicated their lives to caring but don’t have any superannuation and can’t easily work. And young people’s exclusion from the housing system has set off a powerful inequality ticking time bomb, set to detonate when today’s pool of people under 35 with lower rates of home ownership approach retirement in a system predicated on the idea that people will retire with a home paid off. Meagre pension payments and the private housing system aren’t prepared for the explosion in poverty and housing stress coming in the next 30 years. A modern Fair Go that prevents absurd wealth and power disparities and strengthens the revenue base to fund opportunity for all Australians requires the introduction of a proper progressive wealth tax – one that captures past capital gains. There are many wealth tax proposals which Australia could explore, including French economist Thomas Piketty’s suggestion (in a European context) of a 1 per cent tax on individual net worth between €1 and €5 million, and 2 per cent on fortunes over €5 million.12 The US Biden administration’s proposed Billionaire Minimum Income Tax would impose a 20 per cent income tax on households with fortunes exceeding $100 million. Estate duties and inheritance taxes levied on deceased estates can

prevent concentrations of family wealth and are other options, ones that all Australian states at one time implemented.

Cradle-to-grave education and training Access to quality education, just like health care and decent incomes, reduces inequality and greases the wheels of the Fair Go. Young people starting their lives especially depend on government spending in these areas to build economic opportunity over their lifetime. Education and training are funded and delivered by government because they’re so important, unlocking society-wide benefits like democratic participation, more productive workers, social cohesion, mobility, less inequality and happier, more fulfilled people. We know those benefits accrue to everyone. But it takes time for the fruits to be borne, which is why it’s a mistake to let for-profit providers dominate education. Fees can block access to the essentials of life, and screw up the nutrient-rich flow of society-wide benefits. Australia once understood this. But the life has been squeezed from our schools and TAFE system – the jewels in our Fair Go crown – and for-profit operators have been allowed to breed everywhere. More tax revenue flows to woollen blazers, lacrosse sticks and Olympic swimming pools in elite colleges, while the learning, empowerment and opportunities of millions of young Australians are being sabotaged. Cutting funds from public schools is an active policy choice that drags back working-class and poorer people from meeting their potential. It’s unconscionable. And it has far wider impacts too. By choosing privateschool ‘winners’, Australia neglects the widespread investment in all its people, the very foundations of economic growth. And the very basis of a functioning democracy, which should give all people the knowledge and tools needed to influence the systems determining their lives. Australia needs a decisive break from this gold-plating nightmare. It’s time for a national, multi-sector, public education system – from cradle to grave. A new expanded public education system needn’t be directly tied to the performance of paid work either, instead facilitating lifelong learning at any point in our lives. It must be free. Starting from the cradle, early childhood care and education should be integrated into the public schooling system, with centres located within or

near public schools. Public schools deserve world-class facilities, a highly paid teaching workforce, and the capacity to facilitate students’ wide interests. Properly funded public schools truly restore parents’ choice and will attract people back to the public system. Defunding has reduced the number of topperforming public schools to a handful in each state, and they focus increasingly on narrow academic achievement. Everyone’s local public school – whether in the outer suburbs, inner city or regions – should deliver quality education, and better reflect the community it serves. Australia pioneered world-class adult education, and vocational education and training, in the once-thriving Workers’ Education Associations and TAFE system. We should rebuild and significantly expand the public TAFE system, including an adult education system for everyone seeking to acquire new knowledge and skills – newly arrived migrants, stay-at-home mothers, retirees, anyone. The education programs should be cheap or free, and could offer a range of courses in demand by the local community, including learning languages, budgeting, digital literacy, creative improvisation, pasta making, anything! For too long Australia has divided vocational education from universities by regulation, institution and social class. But hands-on technical skills and workplace learning like apprenticeships and traineeships, as well as theoretical, abstract academic learning needn’t be separated. Most jobs today need a mix of practical and theoretical skills. Integrating vocational education and training institutions and universities would create more interesting learning opportunities, and help better prepare young people to solve big collective problems, like climate change, disruptive new technologies and public sector revival. There are wider social benefits, too, from a network of publicly funded spaces outside of private homes and workplaces. We can address endemic loneliness and isolation. In January 2021, more than one-third of all Australians reported experiencing loneliness, with young people more likely than other age group to have felt lonely throughout the pandemic.13 With so many buildings and facilities, like kitchens, workshops and halls, unused outside teaching hours, there’s no reason we can’t transform education facilities into vibrant community hubs. The lifelong learning system could support the growth of stronger communities, new social connections, intergenerational exchanges and cross-cultural learning.

A new public lifelong learning system would be a powerful public good nurturing the entire life course, from early learning and employment to retraining for new jobs and just learning new things for fun. For young people with nerves frayed from navigating a broken jobs system, a public lifelong learning system would reduce risk and anxiety associated with riding out life’s changes. Young people could look forward to more supported and connected lives.

Who are we? And what can we be proud of? The passing of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 again revealed Australia as the confused nation we’ve long been, with potent traumas and unresolved questions about who we are, what we stand for, and what we can be proud of. After decades of whiteanting our independent economic capacity under policies of free trade, de-unionisation and cuts to public services, it’s unsurprising that the nation confronts another identity crisis. We’ve lost the capacity to think for ourselves, and see what’s right in front of us. The ladder of economic opportunity and citizenship that built egalitarian Australia has been kicked away for young people, and generations to come. Young Australians, whose kite-lines never crossed with the great nation they read about in school books, see a blank slate. Rather than letting the identity void be filled with over-egged Anzac mythology or uniform Western liberalism – both of which don’t reflect Australia’s history, or its multicultural face – young people have a growing ambition to fill it with real, transformational stuff. By joining the campaign for a new 21st-century Fair Go, we can actually generate answers to these existential questions of national identity. For instance, by unleashing a big injection of public and social housing into the housing system, and taxing big wealth (much of it accumulated from owning land), we can build the social impetus and resourcing for a Treaty with Indigenous Australians. Likewise, the republican project becomes more tangible when people understand independent democratic representation free from foreign influence is critical to protecting our democracy. We must also insulate ourselves against future reincarnations of global corporate political agendas, because there will be more Friedmans and Thatchers.

There’s a powerful parallel between post-war reconstruction and today. The Depression had already inflicted a huge toll, and war brought more wasted lives. The rationing system, which virtually no one could avoid, fostered a widespread egalitarianism – a site of shared pain, togetherness and hope for a new Australia. Similarly, Australians entered the pandemic after decades of rising insecurity and inequality, our collective resolve already tested by bushfires, floods and droughts. Lockdowns curtailed freedoms, tested social bonds, and led to job and income losses, especially for people in Victoria and New South Wales. Sacrifices were made as part of a mobilisation to save lives before vaccines became available. It was our own war-time effort, only this time the enemy was a virus. The challenge to dig deep and find that collective resolve remains, as the virus is still very much with us. While many return to activities resembling normality, young Australians included, they still have a bitter taste in their mouths. Plunged into an environment of diminishing opportunity, young people have been exposed to decades of neoliberal policies that prioritise the private wealth stocks of a minority, while organising anxiety on a mass scale for everyone else. And for all their trials, they’ve been met with brick walls and tin ears. It’s why ‘snap back’ didn’t feel right then, and it certainly doesn’t now. Restoring the Fair Go under fire for Australia’s youth and future generations means restoring its profound legacy. But a defence of the old won’t be enough to win a better world. One of Australia’s most celebrated novelists, Tim Winton, reflected on his mobility from a poor working-class family, telling the ABC’s Richard Aedy how free university education changed his life, but ‘It wasn’t just the Whitlam government, and it wasn’t just my hard work. It was some weird alchemy therein. It’d be a huge mistake to say I got here because of all my hard work … somebody cut the wire and let me in.’14 As the embodiment of organised fairness, the Fair Go must be regularly returned to the people, updated for changing times and expanded to newly excluded groups. Since neoliberalism erected so many fences to fairness – including to future generations – we’ve got a hell of a lot of wire to cut to let everyone in. The new Fair Go can nurture our journey towards a society-wide transformation at the scale our era demands. By working together, we can

build the inclusive, prosperous and fair Australia we know we deserve.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Gen F’d? was years in the making but musing and journal entry scribbles does not a book make. Connecting and sharpening ideas and getting them onto pages in a short time was only possible with the feedback and engagement of a small A-team of generous intellects and friends. Special thanks to Ben Schneiders, Tony Moore, and Tobias McCorkell who built confidence into the foundations of Gen F’d? as it was in full flight. Thanks to those who took chunks and helped refine them, especially Laura Doherty, Peter Hollows, Bella Himmelreich, Daniel Lopez, Ben Peterson, Chris Martin, Matt Grudnoff, and Stephen Jolly. To Guy Rundle, Charlie Joyce, Nicholas Barry, and Miriam Bankovsky for fruitful conversations. Thanks to the Hardie Grant team for helping to birth Gen F’d? – Elena Callcott, Isabella Lloyd, Arwen Summers and copyeditor John Mapps, and especially to publisher Emily Hart who made my writing immeasurably better. Thanks also to Peter Fray at Crikey for the helpful comments. For edits and support, thanks to Mike Beggs and Adam Morton from the legendary Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney – a place that put form, method and rigour to my thinking years back, and which ultimately gave me the tools to intervene more effectively in the world of ideas. All writing is a product of the efforts of others who have gone before you, and so I give thanks to the formative theorists, analysists, narrators, activists and performers who’ve rocked my world – in books, workplaces and pubs. They lit the fire, kept me awake reading, dancing and debating until 2 am, and made efforts to articulate the exciting but fraught human journey that is trying to understand (and change) the world. My parents, Felicity Meegan and David Pennington, are included here.

Thanks to Yanis Varoufakis for endorsing Gen F’d? and for years of formidable contributions across economics, politics, education, writing and more, all of which inspire me endlessly. Thanks to La Trobe University’s Politics, Philosophy and Economics department for the research facilities, including a darling office overlooking a gum tree where I wrote half of this book. Finally, to my beloved Oscar, who has walked this road at every stage. Thanks for workshopping ideas, for late dinners, and for being a rudder for people-led change, both for myself and for many others too. Thank you for always believing in the best of us.

NOTES

Introduction 1 Haddon Gelai, ‘Contextualising the Changes in Young People’s Participation in Australia’, The Youth Affairs Council of Western Australia, 2016. 2 Tony Moore, ‘To Praise Youth or to Bury it?’, in Dennis Glover and Glenn Patmore (eds), New Voices for Social Democracy: Labor Essays 1999–2000, Annandale: Pluto Press, 1999. 3 H.C. Coombs, quoted in Stuart Macintyre, Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s, Sydney: NewSouth, 2015, p. 6.

1. The end of good jobs 1 Author’s calculations. Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Characteristics of Employment, Australia, August 2021’, Table 1b.3. 2 Foundation for Young Australians, The New Work Reality, 2018, https://www.fya.org.au/app/uploads/2021/09/TheNewWorkReality_2018.pdf. 3 Tanya Carney and Jim Stanford, The Dimensions of Insecure Work: A Factbook, Canberra: Centre for Future Work, 2018. 4 Author’s calculations. Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Labour Force, Australia, Detailed’, August 2022, Table 13. 5 Australian Industry Group, Skilling: A National Imperative, Survey report, 2018, https://cdn.aigroup.com.au/Reports/2018/Survey_Report_WFDNeeds_Skilling_Sept2018.pdf. 6 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Employee Earnings and Hours’, May 2021. 7 Samantha Rella, Peter Winwood and Kurt Lushington, ‘When does nursing burnout begin? An investigation of the fatigue experience of Australian nursing students’, Journal of Nursing Management, Vol. 17, No. 7, pp. 886–897, 2009. 8 Rella, Winwood and Lushington, ‘When Does Nursing Burnout Begin? An Investigation of the Fatigue Experience of Australian Nursing Students’. 9 ‘Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia’ (HILDA) Survey, Melbourne: Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, 2020. 10 HILDA Survey, 2021, Table 4.11. 11 HILDA Survey, 2021, Table 4.11. 12 Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, 2018 Graduate Outcomes Survey: National Report, January 2019. 13 HILDA Survey, 2021, Table 4.13. 14 Jaymes Carr, ‘Average graduate salaries in Australia (2022 update)’, GradAustralia, 2022, https://gradaustralia.com.au/on-the-job/what-is-the-average-graduate-salary-in-australia.

15 Australian Bureau of Statistics Catalogue 6333.0, Table 6.1, August 2021. 16 Foundation for Young Australians, The New Work Reality, 2018. 17 Alison Pennington and Jim Stanford, The Future of Work for Australian Graduates: The Changing Landscape of University-Employment Transitions in Australia, Sydney: Centre for Future Work, 2019, https://futurework.org.au/report/the-future-of-work-for-australian-graduates/. 18 Philip Oreopoulos, Till von Wachter and Andrew Heisz, ‘The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession’, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, vol. 4, no. 1, January 2012. 19 Eliza Littleton and Rod Campbell, Youth Unemployment and the Pandemic, Canberra: The Australia Institute, 2022. 20 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Labour Force, Detailed’, September 2022, Table 22. 21 Roger Wilkins, Esperanza Vera-Toscano, Ferdi Botha and Sarah C. Dahmann, The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey: Selected Findings from Waves 1 to 19, Melbourne: Melbourne Institute, 2021, https://melbourneinstitute.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/3963249/HILDAStatistical-Report-2021.pdf. 22 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Labour Force, Australia’, September 2022, Tables 13 and 15, annual averages. 23 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Education and Work’, May 2022, Table 34. 24 Kostas Mavromaras, Seamus McGuinness, Nigel O’Leary, Peter Sloane and Zhang Wei, ‘Job Mismatches and Labour Market Outcomes: Panel Evidence on University Graduates’, Economic Record, vol. 89, no. 286, pp. 382–95. 25 Dan Andrews, Josephine Auer, Matthew Elias, Gianni La Cava and Leah Mercier, The Effect of the COVID-19 Recession on the Youth Labour Market in Australia, Discussion paper, Sydney: E61 Institute, July 2022, https://www.e61.in/_files/ugd/afe325_f912dee6ddb144f782bb4bcb431ca85c.pdf. 26 USYD Casuals Network and NTEU, The Tip of the Iceberg: A Report into Wage Theft and Underpayment of Casual Employees at the University of Sydney, May 2021. 27 Will Mackey, ‘Most People Will Pay Less Under the New HELP Thresholds’, Grattan Institute, 5 August 2019, https://grattan.edu.au/news/most-people-will-pay-less-under-the-new-helpthresholds/. 28 Evan Young and Gabriella Merchant, ‘Stress and mortgage difficulties as inflation sees student HECS and other HELP debts balloon’, ABC News, 15 November 2022. 29 Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching, 2021 Graduate Outcomes Survey: National Report, January 2022. 30 National Skills Commission, Employment Projections, 2021, https://www.nationalskillscommission.gov.au/topics/employment-projections. 31 Arun Sundararajan, ‘The Future of Work’, Finance and Development, vol. 54, no. 2, June 2017. 32 Melbourne Graduate School of Education, Life Patterns: Ten Years Following Generation Y, Melbourne: Youth Research Centre, 2015.

2. Shelving the Australian Dream 1 John Daley and Brendan Coates, Housing Affordability: Reimagining The Australian Dream, Melbourne: Grattan Institute, March 2018, https://grattan.edu.au/report/housing-affordability-reimagining-the-australian-dream/. 2 Shane Wright and Rachel Clun, ‘Poorer Young Australians Suffer World-leading Hit to Housing: OECD’, Sydney Morning Herald, 21 July 2022. 3 Lucas Walsh et al., The 2021 Australian Youth Barometer, Melbourne: Monash University, 2021, https://research.monash.edu/en/publications/the-2021-australian-youth-barometer-understandingyoung-people-in.

4 Social housing represented 4.2 per cent of all dwellings in June 2021, with 68 per cent of social housing government-owned. Social housing refers to public housing, community housing, stateowned and managed Indigenous housing, and Indigenous community housing. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, Housing Assistance in Australia, June 2021, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/housing-assistance/housing-assistance-inaustralia/contents/social-housing-dwellings. 5 Hal Pawson et al., Assisting First Homebuyers: An International Policy Review, Melbourne: Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, July 2022, https://www.ahuri.edu.au/research/final-reports/381. 6 Matt Grudnoff and Eliza Littleton, Rich Men and Tax Concessions, Canberra: Australia Institute, April 2021, https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/rich-men-and-tax-concessions/. 7 Briefing Note: Tax Concessions by Age, Canberra: Australia Institute, 15 February 2016, https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TAI-Briefing-Note-Tax-concessionsby-age.pdf. 8 Grudnoff and Littleton, Rich Men and Tax Concessions. 9 Briefing Note: Tax Concessions by Age. 10 Why Did Young People’s Incomes Decline?, Canberra: Productivity Commission, 2020. 11 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, ‘Home Ownership and Housing Tenure’, 2022, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/home-ownership-and-housing-tenure. 12 Everybody’s Home, ‘Young Australians Crunched by Housing Crisis’, 2022, https://everybodyshome.com.au/young-australians-crunched-by-housing-crisis/. 13 SQM Research, ‘September Vacancy Rates Remain Constant at 0.9%’, 13 October 2022, https://www.adviservoice.com.au/2022/10/september-vacancy-rates-remain-constant-at-0-9. 14 Department of Social Services, Portfolio Budget Statement 2022–23, Canberra: Australian Government, DSS, https://www.dss.gov.au/sites/default/files/documents/03_2022/202223_social_services_pbs.pdf. 15 Three Middle Wealth Quintiles, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian National Accounts: Distribution of Household Income, Consumption and Wealth, June 2021. 16 Lucas Walsh et al. ‘“We Get the Raw Deal Out of Almost Everything”: A Quarter of Young Australians Are Pessimistic About Having Kids’, The Conversation, 21 February 2022. 17 Walsh et al., The 2021 Australian Youth Barometer. 18 Walsh et al., The 2021 Australian Youth Barometer. 19 Deloitte, The Deloitte Global 2022 Gen Z and Millennial Survey, https://www2.deloitte.com/global/en/pages/about-deloitte/articles/genzmillennialsurvey.html. 20 Walsh et al., The 2021 Australian Youth Barometer. 21 Australia Institute of Health and Welfare, ‘Australia’s Youth: Mental Illness’, 25 June 2021, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/children-youth/mental-illness. 22 Nassim Khadem, ‘“Big Four” Banks Made Huge Profits as Australians Took Out Bigger Mortgages for Pricier Housing’, ABC News, 10 May 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-0510/big-four-banks-profits-home-loans-mortgage-debt-interest-rates/101051100.

3. How neoliberalism consumed the future 1 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Wage Price Index, September quarter 2022’; ‘Consumer Price Inflation, September quarter 2022’. 2 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘National Accounts’, Table 7. 3 Productivity Commission, Rising Inequality? A Stocktake of the Evidence, Canberra: Commission Research Paper, 2018. 4 Poverty measured as 50 per cent of median income, after deducting housing costs. Peter Davidson, Bruce Bradbury and Melissa Wong, Poverty in Australia 2022: A Snapshot, Sydney: Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and UNSW Sydney, 2022,

https://povertyandinequality.acoss.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Poverty-in-Australia2020_A-snapshot.pdf. 5 Frank Stilwell, ‘Inequality and Neoliberal Economic “Reforms” in Australia’, Chapter 19 in Damien Cahill and Phillip Toner (eds), Wrong Way: How Privatisation and Economic Reform Backfired, Melbourne: La Trobe University Press, 2018, p. 348. 6 David Richardson, Tax: Capital Gains and Wealth, Canberra: The Australia Institute, January 2022. 7 Richardson, Tax: Capital Gains and Wealth. 8 Alan Kohler, ‘Dow Jones Hits 30,000 Points as Australians Shares Rise’, ABC News, Finance Report, 25 November 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHY57tw5Esc. 9 Harvard University Growth Lab, ‘The Atlas of Economic Complexity’, 2020, http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu. 10 Callum Godde, ‘Australia’s Billionaires Double Wealth Amid COVID’, The West Australian, 17 January 2022. 11 Lauren Evans, ‘NDIS Minister Bill Shorten reacts to bold statement from RBA Governor Philip Lowe on wages growth in Australia’, Sky News, 23 November 2022.

4. The wrong tools 1 Triple J, ‘What’s Up in Your World Survey’, 2022, https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/whats-up-in-your-world-2022-surveyresults/13965528. 2 Triple J, ‘What’s Up in Your World Survey’, 2022. 3 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘General Social Survey’, Table 1, 2010 and 2019. 4 Australian Bureau of Statistics, ‘Employee Earnings, Benefits and Trade Union Membership’, August 2010, and ‘Trade Union Membership’, August 2020. 5 Peter Hannan, ‘Climate Science to Be Gutted as CSIRO Swings Jobs Axe’, Sydney Morning Herald, 4 February 2016. 6 Troy Henderson, Tom Swann and Jim Stanford, Under The Employer’s Eye: Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance in Australian Workplace, Canberra: Australia Institute, Centre for Future Work, 2018, https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/under-the-employers-eye-electronicmonitoring-surveillance-in-australian-workplaces/. 7 Derek Thompson, ‘The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy’, The Atlantic, 13 June 2022. 8 Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention, New York: Crown, 2022. 9 Lizzie O’Shea, Future Histories, London: Verso, 2019. 10 Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror, London: 4th Estate, 2021, p. 31. 11 Australian Communications and Media Authority, The Digital Lives of Younger Australians, Melbourne: Commonwealth Government of Australia, May 2021. 12 Lucas Walsh et al., The 2021 Australian Youth Barometer, Melbourne: Monash University, 2021, https://research.monash.edu/en/publications/the-2021-australian-youth-barometer-understandingyoung-people-in. 13 Tony Moore, Mark Gibson and Catherine Lumby, ‘Recovering the Australian Working Class’, in Deidre O’Neill and Mike Wayne (eds), Considering Class: Theory, Culture and the Media in the 21st Century, Leiden: Brill, 2018, pp. 217–34. 14 Gabriel Rockhill, ‘The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling The Cultural Left’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 28 February 2017. 15 Ben Cutler and Nick Evershed, ‘CEOs of Australia’s Top 20 Companies Given Nine Times the Pay Rise of Full-time Workers’, The Guardian, 15 September 2022. 16 Tolentino, Trick Mirror, p. 14. 17 Jewel Topsfield and Sophie Aubrey, ‘“Urgent National Priority”: Pandemic’s Staggering Mental Toll on Young Australians’, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 March 2022.

5. And so say all of us! 1 Two recent powerful contributions to organising strategy include Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016; and Jane Holgate, Arise: Power, Strategy, and Union Resurgence, London: Pluto Press, 2021. 2 See: James S. House, Karl R. Landis and Debra Umberson, ‘Social Relationships and Health’, Science, vol. 241, issue 4865, 1998, pp. 540–45; Richard M. Lee and Steven B. Robbins, ‘The Relationship Between Social Connectedness and Anxiety, Self-esteem, and Social Identity’, Journal of Counseling Psychology, vol. 45, no. 3, 1998, pp. 338–45; Paul E. Jose, Nicholas Ryan and Jan Pryor, ‘Does Social Connectedness Promote a Greater Sense of Well-Being in Adolescence Over Time?’, Journal of Research on Adolescence, vol. 22, no. 2, 2012, pp. 235–51. 3 Francis Green, Alan Felstead, Duncan Gallie, Hande Inanc and Nick Jewson, What Has Been Happening to the Training of Workers in Britain?, London: Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies, 2013, http://www.llakes.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/12/43.-Green-et-al.pdf. 4 Ben Neild and Hilary Stevens, Union Learning Survey, Marchmont Observatory, University of Exeter, May 2015, https://www.unionlearn.org.uk/sites/default/files/publication/Union%20Learning%20Survey%20 Report%20-%20FINAL.pdf. 5 Cited in Trades Union Congress, Towards a High-skill, High-productivity Economy: The Role of Trade Union-led Learning and Training, TUC, 2016, https://www.tuc.org.uk/sites/default/files/Towardsahigh.pdf. 6 Hunter Jobs Alliance, ‘The Hunter Jobs Alliance Declaration’, 2022, https://www.hunterjobsalliance.org.au/about. 7 Richard N.S. Robinson, Olivier Oren and Tyler Riordan, Serving up a Fair Go? Surfacing Cultural Issues in Hospitality Employment, Brisbane: University of Queensland, September 2022, https://business.uq.edu.au/files/82074/Fair-Go-Surfacing-cultural-issues-hospitalityemployment.pdf. 8 Anthony Forsyth, The Future of Unions and Worker Representation, Oxford: Hart, 2022. 9 Nigel Morris, ‘Momentum presses for Labour to adopt radical agenda, as left-wingers condemn Keir Starmer’s policy direction’, i News, 25 March, 2021. 10 Jane McAlevey, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, New York: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 6.

6. Making the modern 21st-century Fair Go 1 Peter Travers and Sue Richardson, Living Decently: Material Well-being in Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1993. 2 Andrew Scott, Sidsel Grimstad and Heather Holst, Homes for People: How Nordic Policies Can Improve Australia’s Housing Affordability, Canberra: The Australia Institute, 2022. 3 Luke Henriques-Gomes, ‘Workforce Australia Job Agencies Rake in Millions More from Training Contracts’, The Guardian, 27 July 2022. 4 National Union of Students, Foundation for Young Australians, ‘Locked Out of Youth Allowance’, 2022, https://changetheage.asn.au. 5 Tony Moore, Death or Liberty: Rebels and Radicals Transported to Australia, 1788–1868, Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2010. 6 Phillip Hawkins, ‘Australian Government Revenue’, Parliamentary Library, 2021, https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pu bs/rp/BudgetReview202021/AustralianGovernmentRevenue. 7 Including capital gains. David Richardson, The Intergenerational Report Ignores Booming Wealth and Capital Gains, Canberra: The Australia Institute, August 2021,

https://australiainstitute.org.au/report/the-intergenerational-report-ignores-booming-wealth-andcapital-gains/. 8 Briefing Note: Tax Concessions by Age, Canberra: Australia Institute, 15 February 2016, https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/TAI-Briefing-Note-Tax-concessionsby-age.pdf. 9 Richardson, The Intergenerational Report Ignores Booming Wealth and Capital Gains. 10 Richardson, The Intergenerational Report Ignores Booming Wealth and Capital Gains. 11 Australian Government, 2021 Intergenerational Report: Australia Over the Next 40 Years, Canberra: Treasury, 2021, pp. 29–31; and Australian Government, 2015 Intergenerational Report: Australia in 2055, Canberra: Treasury, 2015. 12 Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. 13 Surveys cited in ‘Social Isolation and Loneliness’, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 16 September 2021, https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/social-isolation-andloneliness-covid-pandemic. 14 Tim Winton interviewed by Richard Aedy, ‘01 | Class Act – Where We Sit?’, ABC Radio National, 2 April 2018.

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