If young people didn’t already feel aggrieved enough, having a generation of social-media-obsessed scrolling addicts tell them they can’t watch YouTube must really grate. 
Yet that’s what the federal Labor Party, which by the way gave almost $20 million to tech bros at Meta and YouTube to help get itself re-elected last May, has done. And the worst part about it is not that young people are going to have to use someone else’s account to get access to unproven health and wellness advice, but that this is far from the worst affront to their dignity.
On almost every conceivable measure, young people in Australia are being disadvantaged and excluded. Life milestones that previous generations took for granted are increasingly becoming luxuries, achieved later in life if at all. Society feels stacked against them, organised to enrich an obscenely wealthy elite, and governed by entitled charisma-evacuations without two political principles to rub together. 
This is most glaring in relation to housing. While no political party will even countenance stepping on the toes of property investors or developers, young people are locked out of the housing market, denied economic independence and forced to live with their parents into their late 20s either because they can’t afford rent or because it’s the only way to save for a deposit. If they can afford rent, they have to put up with substandard housing owned by landlords who think being required to remove mould is socialism. 
The result, as the Grattan Institute’s 2019 “Generation Gap: ensuring a fair go for younger Australians” report notes, is that “younger Australians are now less likely to own a home than young people were in the past. In 2016, 45 per cent of 30-year-olds owned a home; in 1981, the figure was 67 per cent. By contrast, older people are just as likely to own a home now as they were then—with about 80 per cent of 65-year-olds owning a home”. The most recent Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) report likewise found that only 18 percent of people born between 1994 and 1997 owned a house before age 28, compared to 26.5 percent of those born between 1974 and 1977. 
And if they do own a house, young people are likely to be in more debt than any previous generation—the average home loan today is $694,000, up from $416,000 ten years ago. Low wage growth is a big factor locking young people out of home ownership, the price of an average house in Australia last December being 16.4 times the average household income, up from 9.5 times throughout the 1990s and 4.5 times in the 1970s. In capital cities, the discrepancy is even worse. 
And while young people are taking on record levels of housing debt, they also have to contend with unprecedented education debt, not having had the benefit of free or very low-cost education that their forebears enjoyed. 
According to the ATO, average student loan debt for people in their 20s has increased 145 percent over the last twenty years, well above the 62 percent total inflation over the same period. Graduates now take 40 percent longer to repay these debts than they did in the early 2000s, reflecting both higher debts and lower wages graduates are saddled with.
Young people are also shouldering a disproportionate burden in relation to tax and government support. Older people have benefited from tax policies that favour investors, such as the capital gains tax concessions introduced by the Howard government, while younger people on average have been further disadvantaged by them. The result, as Robert Breunig from the Australian National University, writing for the Conversation, points out, is that “older Australians have much higher incomes than previous generations of retirees. The average 75-year-old’s post-tax and transfer income 25 years ago was little more than 75% of an average Australian income. Today it equals the average Australian income ... Older Australians also enjoy a post-tax income one third higher than Australians aged 18–30”. 
Older people typically have more assets than the young, but the gap between them has grown significantly over the last 30 years. The Grattan Institute reports:
“The average household headed by someone aged 65-74 now has more than $1.3 million in net assets, up from $530,000 in real terms for a household of the same age in 1994. Wealth for an average household headed by someone aged 25-34 increased only modestly—from an average of $190,000 in net assets in 1994 to $300,000 today. Over the past decade, wealth for younger households has barely shifted.”
Age used to correlate with economic disadvantage in Australia, and it is positive that it no longer does. But aside from the fact that the benefits are not evenly distributed even among older people, this change is in part a product of tax and welfare policies that favour the already wealthy, to the detriment of young people. 
Then there are the social and political values young people have to contend with. A case in point is the unapologetic indifference of those in charge towards the climate catastrophe they are knowingly signing up future generations to endure. Profits from fossil fuel production and export come before any consideration of the irreversible impact these industries will have on people’s lives. The cynical spin and creative accounting that pass for climate action only compound the contempt many young people feel for the political class. 
There is likewise the sense that politicians and the powerful have no human decency, demonstrated most clearly by the almost unanimous official and institutional support for the genocide in Gaza. Add to that callousness towards the plight of refugees, Indigenous people and a general tendency to blame those with the least power for society’s problems. 
Even the changes that supposedly represent the pinnacle of human achievement and that young people are told will improve their lives turn out more often than not to be the opposite. The much-celebrated advances in technology over the last three decades, for example, have not axiomatically translated into improvements in quality of life or wellbeing, especially for those raised entirely in the digital age. 
More often than not, technological innovation seems to work against people—food delivery that further reduces social contact, image-crafting on social media that bears no relation to reality, endless marketing that plays on insecurities and low self-esteem to sell shonky crap. And that’s when it’s not being used by bosses to eliminate jobs and sack people, predators to groom abuse victims, misogynists to humiliate women or right-wing cranks to spread hate. The threat posed by AI to jobs is likewise projected to have the greatest impact on the young: 39 percent of entry level jobs already being replaced by AI according to a British Standards Institution survey of seven countries. 
The net result is that there is no longer a sense that life holds promise—that you can be independent and adventurous when you’re young without jeopardising your later financial security—or that your life, and the life you can offer the next generation, will be better than what has gone before. Society seems like it is working against young people, not for them. 
It is no wonder, then, the level of anxiety and distress among the young is at record highs. Writing for the Conversation, Flinders University academic Intifar Chowdhury notes, “Between 2011 and 2021, distress among 15 to 24-year-olds more than doubled, from 18.4% to 42.3%. For those aged 25 to 34, prevalence reached 32.7% in 2021 ... The 2025 Australian Unity Wellbeing Index survey found young Australians are some of the least satisfied with life, with adults aged 18 to 34 reporting the highest levels of mental distress and loneliness, and some of the lowest levels of personal wellbeing compared to any group across the adult lifespan”. 
In the age of unprecedented connectedness, young people are more isolated, have fewer friends and are lonelier than they have ever been, with loneliness among 15 to 24-year-olds increasing from 14.4 percent in 2008 to 24.9 percent in 2022, according to HILDA.
Being connected to others in real life, accepted for who you are, valued for whatever contribution you are able to make to the collective good, is necessary for people to thrive. But it is anathema to the ideology of capitalism, and increasingly difficult to achieve in spite of it. 
Not surprisingly, all this is having political consequences. 
Young people are more leftish, in voting habits and social attitudes, than any other cohort. A 2024 YouGov poll found 53 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds preferred socialism over capitalism, well above the 27 percent national average. A similar poll taken the year before by the decidedly un-socialist Institute for Public Affairs and Canada’s Fraser Institute, likewise showed 50 percent support for socialism among 18 to 34-year-olds. It also found that Australia had the highest support for communism among under-35s (20 percent), higher than any of the other countries polled (the US, Canada and the UK). 
At the last federal election, Generation Y voters (under 29 years old) had the most pronounced two-party preferred vote for Labor (67-33) and the strongest Green vote at 27 percent, according to the Australian Election Study (AES) report on the election.
And while the traditional pattern is that people become more conservative as they age, the factors that pushed past generations to the right are no longer as strong, if they exist at all. As the AES notes, “Millennials, a group now in their 30s and 40s, are not shifting to the right as they age, rather they have been shifting to the left. Millennials’ support of the Coalition has fallen from 38 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2025”.
Accommodation of older people to the status quo is largely underpinned by a degree of financial security. But less than a third of 16 to 24-year-olds in Australia in 2017 expected to have a higher standard of living than their parents, according to an International Youth Foundation survey, well below the international average of 59 percent. And there is a basis for this sentiment. According to the Grattan Institute, if the long-term pattern of low wage growth in Australia continues, people born in the 1990s will have lower incomes than those born 10-20 years earlier.
The challenge for those holding on to hope that a better world is possible is to organise this sentiment into a force that can challenge the system and the powerful interests that are invested in the status quo. Disgruntlement with capitalism manifests frequently as resignation, partly because there is so little living memory or direct experience of the sort of collective action that can win gains. Two generations now have lived through weak workers’ movements, the advance of the right and the retreat of social movements and living standards. Despite Australia being one of the countries least affected by the global financial crisis, and with relatively high living standards, it is nevertheless unable to give a critical mass of young people confidence in the future.
This represents a challenge and opportunity for the left. History shows that when people do move, when they decide they have had enough, they look to the radical tradition of what has gone before. The more people are already committed to keeping that alive, and fighting for it today, the better are our chances of organising the next generation into a force that can win a better world.

Louise O'Shea

Capitalism: zero likes from Gen Z

“Melbourne may be an unhappy home for its 24,000 homeless residents”, begins Prosper Australia’s <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/speculative-vacancies-2025-data-update/">2025 Speculative Vacancy report</a>, released on 27 November, “but it remains surprisingly hospitable to the 32,000 dwellings within the metropolitan area that sat entirely empty throughout 2024”.
In a humane world there would be a simple mathematical solution to this problem: 32,000 houses minus 24,000 homeless people equals no-one homeless and at least 8,000 homes to spare. Instead, we live in a world where property hoarders speculate while the homeless are left to die on the streets.
The report uses water usage to map empty homes across nearly 2 million dwellings in the greater Melbourne area. Those using zero litres of water per day over the year are classed as completely empty—that’s the 31,890 dwellings referenced above, the number of which has increased by 16 percent since the previous year. In addition to that there are the houses averaging between zero and 50 litres per day (50 litres is about equivalent to a dripping tap). The average daily water use in a single-person Melbourne household is 200 litres, so these houses are likely occupied for less than a quarter of the year. Many may be empty all year but have water leaks or use water for gardening.
When you factor in these “underused” homes, the total number of vacant homes in Melbourne totals a shocking 100,945. As the report points out, these houses “could theoretically house everyone on the Victorian <a href="https://www.homes.vic.gov.au/applications-victorian-housing-register-vhr">social housing waiting list</a> twice over”. That housing list includes people like Maya, interviewed recently by Kate Ashton in her <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-15/social-public-housing-wait-times-victoria-family-violence/105655044">ABC article</a> “Family violence survivors waiting years for social housing as demand surges in Victoria”, published on 15 September. Maya fled an abusive relationship in 2017 and was eligible for social housing as a priority applicant on the Victorian Housing Register. Despite this, she was left waiting eight years for housing for her and her two children.
Thousands pay with their lives for this artificially maintained scarcity of housing. In October the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare released its <a href="https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/homelessness-services/specialist-homelessness-services-feature-analysis/contents/about">Specialist Homelessness Services: feature analysis</a> report, which collected data on those who have received support for homelessness. It estimates that in 2023 there were an average of “nine potentially avoidable deaths per day” in this cohort—that is, nine people every day who might have lived had they received the necessary care and support. Their lives are cut brutally short in a society that could have ended homelessness, but instead, politicians continue to allow the number of empty homes to grow while the social housing waiting list grows longer and longer.
So why are so many homes left empty?
Prosper Australia describes it as a “rational decision” on the part of the owners. And it is, in its twisted way. But this seems counterintuitive—surely, they’d want to make money from renting out their properties? The thing is that the real estate market is so hot, and the taxes on it so porous, that in just a few months the potential profits in capital gains can eclipse a whole year’s rent. Domain’s <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/research/house-price-report/september-2025/">“September 2025 House Price Report”</a> found that Melbourne house prices rose 2.2 percent from the June quarter, a median increase of $23,045 in just three months. In the same period an owner receiving Melbourne’s median rent of $580 (according to Domain’s <a href="https://www.domain.com.au/research/rental-report/september-2025/">“September 2025 Rental Report”</a>) might make around $7,500.
If an owner is leasing their property, then they risk missing a peak in the market while they’re giving a notice of eviction to their tenants—losing potentially tens of thousands in profit. 
Governments aren’t just aware of these problems. Their policies have created them. Capital gains and negative gearing tax concessions have cultivated a financialised housing market that is not primarily about making money from rent, but about the increasing value of capital. The human right to shelter has been made dependent, in Australia today, on the whims of an investor class for whom housing is primarily a commodity rather than something designed to meet basic human needs. Rental properties at least have the side effect of housing people. Investment properties don’t even need to do that.
Taxing empty properties would be a good start. But Labor’s Vacant Residential Land Tax (VRLT), which applies to residences that are empty at least half the year, was collected on only 1,779 properties in 2024. “It’s a farce”, housing activist and former Victorian Socialists Senate candidate Jordan van den Lamb told Red Flag. “Labor is taxing less than a fiftieth of the 100,000 homes that we know are empty for most of the year. They get to look like they’re doing something while they let property hoarders get away with murder.” 
Van den Lamb, known for his social media handle “purplepingers”, has managed to build a database of more than 1,000 vacant homes in Victoria alone, some of which are squatted by those in need of housing. If he can do that with the help of community submissions, you can only imagine what state and local governments could do if they took this issue seriously. “But they’d rather spend millions <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-19/israel-gaza-protests-in-melbourne-victoria-police-bill/105792396">policing anti-genocide protests</a> and <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/being-homeless-is-not-a-crime-cbd-security-guard-program-under-scrutiny-20250918-p5mw3r.html">hiring security guards</a> to harass homeless people than police the criminals responsible for our housing crisis”, Jordan says.
Even if the VRLT were applied to all the empty houses, though, it’s unlikely it would make a big difference. Properties are taxed 1 percent of their total value for the first year they’re vacant, up to a maximum of 3 percent after three years. Given Melbourne’s median house price rose 7.7 percent this year, this is only a seventh of what property speculators stand to gain. If they’re willing to give up rent, this tax is unlikely to change their minds.
A simple solution would be for empty investment properties to be seized and turned into public housing. This is the kind of drastic measure that would be appropriate for what amounts, in the context of our growing homelessness crisis, to a form of social murder. For Australia’s capitalist governments, though, this would be regarded as the greatest sacrilege against the right of property investors to turn a profit.

Cormac Mills Ritchard

‘We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas’: Labor turns blind eye to Melbourne’s 100,000 empty homes

House prices are soaring, and wealthy property investors are making a killing. Over the past year, the median national <a href="https://propertyupdate.com.au/latest-my-housing-market-home-prices-update/">house price</a> has surged 8.3 percent, or $96,424, to $1,253,522. In Sydney, the median house price is now a shocking $1.75 million. Prices have risen fastest in the past couple of months, up by 1.1 percent in October alone. 
This jump in already unaffordable house prices is a consequence of a housing market that subordinates people’s need for a home to the profits of developers, wealthy investors and banks. Within that general framework, Labor’s 5 percent deposit scheme is supercharging price increases, and investors are benefiting at the expense of working-class households. 
Labor’s scheme allows first home buyers to apply for a mortgage with a 5 percent deposit, instead of the usual 20 percent. It is a policy that saddles buyers with more debt, increases competition at the lower end of the market and signals to sellers that they should hike prices to take advantage of purchasers’ increased borrowing capacity. 
Red Flag published <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-scheme-to-worsen-the-housing-crisis">an article</a> about this policy last month, and the prediction that it would raise prices and make the housing crisis worse has already proven correct. Research by Cotality <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-11/the-suburbs-and-towns-where-entry-level-house-prices-are-growing/105996180">reported</a>
by the ABC shows that prices for properties that could be bought using the scheme increased much faster than those that couldn’t. For example, in Melbourne’s inner east, properties under the $1.5 million threshold increased by 1.7 percent in October, while those above it increased by 0.4 percent. 
Despite Labor’s assurances that the inflationary effect of the scheme would be minimal, property investors could spot the obvious: house prices were going to rise. Investors got in early, buying properties before the scheme began, in the expectation that prices would rise. As Greg Jericho reported in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2025/nov/13/the-5-first-home-buyers-scheme-is-a-miserable-policy-failure-and-the-latest-chapter-in-australias-housing-disgrace">the Guardian</a>, investor lending in September rose 18 percent, the biggest increase in twenty years, and investor loans are at their highest point since 2017. 
Those investors are now making significant gains. If you’re able to buy a third, fourth, fifth or 100th property, a scheme sold as helping struggling working-class families is delivering you windfall returns. The median-priced property you bought in September is already worth almost $20,000 more in just two months, and with prices predicted to keep rising, so too will your profits. 
It is the rich who are benefiting from this Labor-backed investment bonanza, not the “mums and dads” of political myth. “The Everyman Archetype”, a <a href="https://documents.parliament.qld.gov.au/com/CSSC-0A12/HLAB2021-37A9/tp-20july21-2.pdf">2019 study</a> published in the Housing Studies journal, found that households that own investment properties have, on average, double the income and three times the net wealth of those who don’t. The professions that claim the most tax breaks for rental properties are surgeons, anaesthetists and barristers. 
Only around 15 percent of Australian households own an investment property, and the majority of properties are owned by those who have two or more. Only 2,500 investors own more than ten properties, 172 investors own twenty or more properties, and the top 1 percent of investors own 25 percent of all properties. 
Contrary to another myth, these investors are predominantly not foreign buyers or migrants. Data from <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-27/foreign-buyers-china-hk-india-want-australian-property-housing/104024004">the Australian Tax Office</a> show that in 2023-24, foreign buyers purchased only 1 percent of properties. There are no direct statistics on how many migrants are property investors, but a <a href="https://www.propertyology.com.au/the-truth-about-australian-housing-and-overseas-migration/">Propertytology</a>
report based on Bureau of Statistics data found that, between 2013 and 2023, recent migrants accounted for 7 percent of all property purchases, including owner-occupied purchases, so they can hardly make up a significant number of investors. 
It’s people like Nathan Birch who are getting rich from property, not ordinary mums and dads or migrants. Nathan owns 300 properties worth almost $250 million and dreams of becoming a billionaire. Earlier this year, he told the <a href="https://www.realestate.com.au/news/aussie-who-owns-more-than-300-homes-drops-bombshell/">Daily Telegraph</a>: “My goal is to have 10,000 properties one day ... I hope that when I die, my life will be like a corporate entity”. 
Asked whether she thought that Labor’s deposit scheme was a failure, Housing Minister Clare O’Neil told the<a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-12/are-five-per-cent-first-home-deposits-pushing-up-prices/105979708">
ABC</a>, “What these numbers tell us is that this program is working”. Working for who? It’s not working for working-class households, who are being gaslit by Labor policies that promise to make housing more affordable but only increase the profits of the rich.

Martin Barker

Investors are making a killing from soaring house prices

The federal government’s expanded 5 percent deposit scheme is its latest market-based non-solution to the housing crisis. It will drive up house prices, saddle buyers with more debt, and put billions of dollars in the pockets of banks, investors and property developers. 
First introduced by the Liberals in 2020, it allows first-home buyers to apply for a mortgage with a 5 percent deposit, instead of the usual 20 percent. In addition, the government guarantees 15 percent of the loan, so buyers don’t need to take out lender’s insurance. Labor has expanded this to remove income and participant limits and has raised the cap on the price of properties it can be used to purchase. Announcing the scheme, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese <a href="https://www.pm.gov.au/media/uncapped-5-cent-deposits-available-first-home-buyers-today">crowed</a> that he is “making it easier for young people and first home buyers to achieve the dream of owning a home”. You wonder how he can say it with a straight face.
The median house price in Australia is $800,000, and the median income is $55,000. With a 5 percent deposit, a first home buyer would need to borrow $760,000, paying 71 percent of their income in mortgage repayments. Of course, even the notoriously profit-hungry Australian banks aren’t going to approve that loan; a mortgage lender interviewed by SBS’s <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPk_w3yAHFX/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">The Feed</a> estimated that a first home buyer on the median income with a 5 percent deposit could borrow around $250,000. Some car spaces in Sydney sell for more than that. To purchase a median-priced house in Sydney, a household would need an income of more than $300,000, which is three times the average. 
Most first home buyers will not be able to use the scheme to buy a house without taking on unmanageable debt. If people do use the scheme, the effect will be to drive up house prices. A study by <a href="https://insurancecouncil.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/HGS-and-LMI-report-Lateral-Economics-final.pdf?utm_source=substack&amp;utm_medium=email">Lateral Economics</a> estimates that the inflationary impact on overall house prices will be 3.6 to 6.6 percent by next year. The price increase will be even higher in the bracket of properties that first home buyers might realistically buy, going up by 5.3 to 9.9 percent. As the report notes, most buyers will pay more in increased prices than they will save through the scheme. 
There’s good reason to think these predictions are correct. Deakin University academics estimate that the First Home Buyers Grant (through which the government gives first-time home buyers money towards the purchase price of a home) increased house prices by $57,000 between 2002 and 2012. 
If the aim is to make housing more affordable, then the scheme is perverse. It is not accessible to most first-time home buyers, but the more people use it, the higher the prices will be, shutting out precisely the people the scheme purports to help.
If shifting more wealth from working-class households to the rich is the aim, the scheme is perfect. An article published by <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/DQAOE47CcJy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&amp;igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==">Deepcut News</a> estimated that banks will make $141,000 in extra interest on the average loan, or $24 billion, over the next five years. Investors will be licking their lips—further increases to house prices mean bigger returns when they sell. Developers will also be happy because they can set higher sale prices for properties and increase their profits. 
Labor claims it is taking action on the housing crisis, but in reality, the government is making it worse. It is ideologically committed to the market, the buying and selling of residential property for profit, as the only way to provide and regulate housing. The government’s role is limited to lubricating the market, pumping it up with public money that ultimately goes to increased profits, not more affordable homes. Labor rejects any idea that the government should intervene to undermine the market and profits to bring down prices. 
Instead of driving up house prices, Labor could use public money to build houses that people can afford. Instead of bankrolling debt to the banks, Labor could establish a public lender providing low-cost loans. Instead of protecting and promoting the interests of billionaires, Labor could improve the lives of millions of working-class households. 
Labor won’t do any of this; instead, it will continue to use the housing crisis as an opportunity to increase the profits and wealth of the banks, developers and wealthy investors. If we want homes that are for people, not the profits of the rich, we must fight Labor and its pro-market agenda.

Labor’s scheme to worsen the housing crisis

If someone took $20,000 from you, you’d probably want it back. In fact, you’d probably think it’s worth quite a bit of effort to get it back. That sort of money can mean a lot of extra security, comfort and dignity for most workers. 
And if you and every single one of your workmates had that kind of money taken out of your pay packets, with most of this missing cash flowing to the already filthy rich, it’s pretty likely you’d expect your union to try to organise to win it back.
The reality, however, is that most unions in this country have done very little to organise a fight to reverse the massive hit to our incomes due to inflation over the past four years. Before looking at why this is the case, it’s worth exploring just how much we’ve gone backwards over that time.
Writing in the Guardian in May, economist Greg Jericho <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2025/may/15/australia-wage-growth-remains-solid-but-now-the-recovery-needs-to-be-sustained">pointed out</a> that a worker on the average wage is 4.4 percent behind where they would be if wages had kept up with inflation over the past four years, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. This means that someone earning the average wage ($93,000 per year in 2021) is around $4,000 per year worse off, in 2021 dollars. Adjusted for inflation (CPI), that’s the equivalent of around $90 per week in today’s money, or $180 missing from each fortnightly pay packet.
But even this is a significant understatement of the financial pain many wage earners are experiencing.
Jericho points out that the CPI is designed to exclude changes in average mortgage costs, which have been a massive burden for many workers over the past four years. These mortgage costs are included in another measure of inflation compiled by the Australian Bureau of Statistics—the Employee Living Cost Index (ELCI).
Using this measure, Jericho calculates that the average wage earner in Australia is not 4.4 percent behind inflation, but double that: on average each of us is a staggering 8.9 percent behind where we would be had wages kept up with inflation since 2021. Put in dollar terms, this amounts to nearly $180 per week or $360 per fortnight.
What if we add up all these weekly losses? How much have we lost in total during the inflationary surge since 2021? <a href="https://github.com/jimb0w/Inflation/blob/master/Inflation.pdf">Detailed statistical modelling</a> carried out for Red Flag quantifies this loss:
<ul>
 <li>Someone on the average wage ($93,898 in 2021) has lost a total of $23,374 since July 2021, compared to if they’d kept up with the Consumer Price Index.</li>
 <li>This figure rises to a staggering $33,919 in wages lost to inflation since 2021 if we use the Employee Living Cost Index instead of CPI.</li>
 <li>Average wages are skewed upwards by a minority of very highly paid wage earners like senior managers. The median wage is $20,000 lower, and is more representative of what most of us earn: half of us earn less than the median, and half earn more. Still, someone on the median female full-time wage ($71,666 in 2021) has lost $12,767 over four years compared to inflation measured by the CPI—or $20,815 if we use the ELCI.</li>
</ul>
Wages set by enterprise agreements will vary from this average, but the big majority will give a similarly bleak picture.
Of course, all of these are average figures. Many of us will have been impacted less than this, others more. But they give us a general picture of the staggering degree to which wages have gone backwards over the past four years.
This money has not simply disappeared. Much of it has been redistributed from wage earners to corporations and the super-rich. A <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/corporate-profits-increase-inflation-fact-sheet/">study</a> by the Australia Institute in 2023 found that surging corporate profits accounted for more than half of the price increase since 2021.
There’s no austerity for the corporate elite and their super-rich pals. Since 2021, while wages have fallen behind prices by 4.4 percent (CPI) or 8.9 percent (ELCI), the total value of companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange has jumped from $2,500 billion to $3,155 billion. This is an increase of 26 percent, well ahead of the inflation rate. And the combined wealth of the annual Rich 200 list published by the Australian Financial Review has soared from $480 billion in 2021 to $668 billion this year—a jump of 39 percent in just four years.
Companies fattening their profits and their balance sheets while the rest of us go backwards isn’t some law of nature. It’s a policy choice by the rich, by the capitalists, and by the governments that serve them—both Liberal and (mainly) Labor over the past four years.
In the face of this onslaught, our unions have been largely passive. So much so that it no longer goes without saying that it is actually possible to win pay rises: they can be achieved through industrial action, and unions are supposed to play a role in making this happen.
A small number of unions showed this back when inflation was lifting off in late 2021, winning <a href="https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/thousands-of-workers-to-get-5pc-pay-rises-off-inflation-spike-20220320-p5a672">a sprinkling of enterprise agreements</a> that included CPI-linked pay clauses at major companies including Toll Global Express, Teys meatworks and STC trucking. These clauses ensured that workers at these companies at least didn’t go backwards relative to CPI. The Australian Financial Review spent plenty of words <a href="https://www.afr.com/work-and-careers/workplace/inflation-guarantees-in-union-deals-trigger-7pc-plus-wage-bumps-20230621-p5di8v">sooking</a> about these results in the months and years that followed; anything that moves the burden of inflation from workers to employers is a scandal, according to them.
But as inflation increased, the union movement actually retreated from pursuing claims along these lines. In 2022 and 2023, there were very few examples of pay rises being won that matched or exceeded inflation. Some of the few in the private sector were from the offshore gas industry in Western Australia. The Offshore Alliance (the MUA and AWU) demonstrated that going <a href="https://awu.net.au/national/news/2022/09/17897/76-days-230-workers-and-15-billion-how-oa-members-won-a-landmark-ea-on-the-shell-prelude/">straight for the jugular</a> of major corporations can still win <a href="https://offshorealliance.org.au/news/phi-offshore-alliance-keeps-moving-up/">spectacular results</a>.
The largest-scale recent example of a union winning an above-inflation wage result is the Victorian branch of the ANMF. Last May, a mass meeting of 3,000 union members employed in public hospitals unexpectedly rejected the government offer of 3 percent per year, along with the nebulous promise of a Fair Work Commission gender equity adjustment at some point.
Faced with the plausible threat of an industrial campaign waged by a large and very popular group of workers willing to defy their own leadership, the government caved in, granting the nurses a pay rise of 28.4 percent over four years. Shortly after, Ambulance Victoria staff won <a href="https://vau.org.au/in-principal-agreement-reached/">increases of 24-33 percent</a> over four years, after a six-month industrial and political campaign.
It’s important to note that the real increase in nurses’ base rate of pay between 2021 and 2028 will total only a little more than 3 percent above inflation, if Reserve Bank inflation forecasts are correct. If we include increased allowances, this figure rises to between 6 and 8 percent ahead of inflation, over seven years. Many senior grades have the largest pay increases concentrated in the last year of the agreement, meaning they will stay behind inflation for most of the period up to 2028. And this is meant to include a historic fix for more than a century of gendered underpayment of nurses too. Despite these limitations, the nurses’ 28.4 percent result has understandably become a benchmark for public sector wage claims more broadly.
But while Victoria’s Labor government may have crumbled at the plausible threat of a prolonged industrial campaign from rebellious nurses, it has refused to move far from its wages policy of 3 percent per year for other groups of workers, preferring to tough out prolonged but low-intensity industrial campaigns. 
Last month, public mental health workers voted to accept a union leadership recommendation to settle for a deal far short of the initial claims rather than escalating the industrial campaign. Thirty-eight percent voted against acceptance, but to win against a government digging in its heels will need a much more vigorous industrial campaign, one capable of creating a crisis for the government.
Outside of Victoria, one of the few other high-profile examples of a successful fight for above-inflation pay rises is government teachers in NSW, who in late 2023 won <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2023/09/20/government-puts-pen-to-paper-inking-pay-rises-for-teachers/">an immediate pay rise</a> of between 8 percent (for top of scale teachers) and 12 percent (for graduate teachers). This followed a lengthy <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/apr/26/nsw-teachers-to-strike-next-week-over-pay-and-conditions">industrial campaign</a> under the previous Liberal government, and the teachers’ <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-08-03/nsw-teachers-wage-negotiations-stall-after-government-offer/102683528">rejection</a> of a pathetic 2.5 percent offer from the incoming Minns government. This is a significant result, though the NSW teachers’ 2024 <a href="https://www.nswtf.org.au/news/2024/12/12/significant-gains-for-school-members/">pay deal</a> was only 3 percent per year over three years.
The failure of most unions to pursue wage rises aggressively is painfully squeezing household finances. Added to this, many essential industries—including health care, education and community services—struggle to retain experienced workers because of punishing workloads and low wages, which jeopardises and threatens the many services working-class people rely on. Winning back the money lost to inflation matters: it can be the difference between thousands of experienced staff staying in a vital industry, or being forced to look elsewhere for a living wage, intensifying the spiralling crisis in many essential services.
And whatever industry we’re in, the benchmark we set—by either accepting a massive hit to our pay or by fighting for a real pay rise—has the potential to demoralise or inspire others. Fighting is therefore not just about winning something for ourselves, but for every worker who deserves a pay rise.
A determined fight over wages can also be an important step to rebuilding the sort of unionism we need: the sort of unionism that used industrial action to win breakthroughs in pay, shorter hours, life-saving health and safety—and which didn’t stop there.
Historically strong unions like the Builders Labourers’ Federation, the metalworkers and the maritime unions all developed into powerful industrial units through fights over wages—and then used that industrial strength to fight for a better society, in dozens of different ways.
So why are there so few unions following this path today?
We know from ballooning corporate profits that the money is there. The precious few examples we have of workers fighting show that governments and corporations can be compelled to fund decent wages. We know from these same examples that to shake this money loose requires a serious industrial campaign, sometimes combined with the political pressure that strikes by groups like nurses, teachers and ambulance workers can create.
So the reason this is not being pursued on a wider scale is not that it is impossible. Rather, it’s a political choice. To put it simply: the majority of the leadership of the unions in Australia have a decades-long track record of pursuing a policy of class collaboration rather than conflict. The most notorious example of this is the <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7336">Prices and Incomes Accord</a> of the 1980s. 
Under this policy, union leaderships teamed up with a federal Labor government to impose industrial peace and wage restraint. Profit share rose while wages share declined—not by chance but as a matter of state policy, with the union leadership as active partners. With the active or passive assistance of almost all of the top union leaders, it was Labor that imposed the neoliberal agenda of privatisation, deregulation and booming corporate wealth that still plagues us today.
This important fork in the road for the Australian union movement wasn’t just a matter of industrial strategy. It was a political choice, one of prioritising the supposed “national interest” rather than the uncompromising pursuit of workers’ interests.
The politics of the union movement’s leadership hasn’t improved since that time. It’s notable that in countries where neoliberalism was imposed by conservative forces such as Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US, this produced a somewhat more combative and oppositional legacy in some unions. Both of those countries had a notably <a href="https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkstp.pdf">higher level</a> of <a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/britains-historic-strike-wave">strikes</a> over the peak of the inflationary wave in 2022 and 2023—the UK <a href="https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/employmentandemployeetypes/timeseries/bbfw/lms">recording</a> ten times the decade-long average of strikes in those years—whereas the strikes over pay in Australia, while welcome, <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/industrial-disputes-australia/latest-release">barely moved</a> the statistical dial. The legacy of the class-collaborationist approach of the Accord is still entrenched in Australian unions.
There’s an obvious consequence of this for those who want our unions to take a different course: building a more combative union movement is a political project, not simply an industrial one. Of course we should be pushing our unions to fight to win back those missing tens of thousands of dollars. At the same time, we need a political strategy: one that rejects the politics of class collaboration, and instead sets out to rebuild the politics of class struggle. Pushing for higher wages has to be one part of this wider project.

Jerome Small

Higher pay: a serious fight is still needed

In April, US President Donald Trump announced, on what he dubbed “Liberation Day”, a regime of tariffs on every country in the world, based on a sketchy formula that assigned higher tariffs to countries with which the US has trade deficits.
Stock markets went into free fall, there was a huge sell-off of US bonds, and Wall Street and other business titans spoke out against the tariffs. Trump pulled back, said he would make multiple deals over the next 90 days, and the stock market returned to setting records. Wall Street coined a term for Trump’s move: “TACO” for “Trump Always Chickens Out”. 
In early August, with very few deals negotiated, the administration instituted broad-based tariffs. But unlike in April, the market took it in stride, even though they amount to the highest tariffs in a century: a 15-20 percent levy on all imports to the US. Trump carved out some countries for higher tariffs: Brazil at 50 percent, due to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro for trying to lead a coup after he lost the 2023 election. Trump set tariffs on <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/27/trumps-india-tariffs-take-effect-which-sector-will-be-hit-whats-exempt">India at 50 percent, reputedly to punish it for importing Russian oil</a>, but possibly also for refusing to <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/has-trump-lost-india-punitive-tariffs-and-nobel-peace-prize-insults-erode-once-close-relations">support his delusional bid for a Nobel Peace Prize.</a>
Then, on 29 August, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upheld an earlier decision declaring most of these tariffs illegal. Their fate will now be in the hands of the US Supreme Court.
A tariff is a tax on imports paid to the US government. US importers pay it. In fact, many of them are unable to claim their products until they pay the tariff. Ultimately, the cost falls on consumers who pay higher prices on imported goods such as coffee, or who pay higher prices on products containing imported inputs. Think, for example, of cars or household appliances whose prices increase because tariffs have increased the prices of imported steel and aluminium. Prices may not have spiked much yet, but if the tariffs remain in place, we will likely see prices increase by the end of the year.
The Yale Budget Project estimates <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-14-2025">that tariffs will add about US$2,800 to the average household’s costs over the next year</a>. And some estimates suggest they could add $4,000-$5,000 to the cost of a new car. So much for Trump’s promise to lower prices on day one!
Government statistics are <a href="https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/short-run-effects-2025-tariffs-so-far">starting to show a pick-up in inflation on particular goods and sectors that rely on imports</a>. There are three main reasons why most people have not yet experienced big tariff-fuelled price increases. First, many companies, anticipating that Trump would impose tariffs, “front ran”—meaning that they built up their inventories before the tariffs went into effect. It’s likely that the decline in the first quarter gross domestic product, which most economic analysts attributed to an abnormal increase in imports, reflected front-running behaviour.
Second, companies are eating the costs, eroding their profits, rather than passing them on to consumers. It’s possible that some companies were relying on the courts tossing out the tariffs, or a mercurial Trump deciding to lower them. <a href="https://moneymorning.com/2025/07/23/gm-and-stellantis-lose-billions-as-tariffs-reshape-u-s-auto-industry/">Both GM and Ford reported losses in the billions that they attributed to tariffs. They have yet to raise prices across the board.</a>
Finally, other countries have yet to retaliate with tariffs of their own.
But these strategies merely postpone the tariff shock to the future. Unless companies want to accept lower profits, or lay-offs or bankruptcy, they will be forced to raise prices. 
Much of the neoliberal commentariat treats Trump’s tariffs as an absurdity, akin to RFK Jr’s anti-vax demolition of science or the crackpot beliefs of flat earthers. But the left <a href="https://youtu.be/f1CdbCsetpw">Keynesian economist Yanis Varofakis, the former finance minister in the Syriza government in Greece,</a>
says we must take Trump’s tariffs seriously. Trump has been ideologically committed to tariffs and an autarchic or nationalist view of the US’s role in the world economy for decades. In recent decades, economic nationalism has been rising across the entire US ruling class, as administrations of both major capitalist parties seek to compete with China and to prod the European Union to increase its military spending.
Besides the fact that Trump seems to believe that tariffs will ignite a US “golden age”, he also views them as a way to wield his clout, both domestically and in foreign affairs. He has arguably been more successful on the domestic front, as his on-again, <a href="https://www.npr.org/2025/03/07/nx-s1-5318785/tariff-dodging-companies-exemptions-engineering">off-again threats to levy tariffs on certain industries lead those industry CEOs to make concessions or donations to Trump.</a> The opportunities for corruption are endless.
On foreign policy, Trump has reset the US’s average tariffs on imports to somewhere between five and six times what they were in 2024, without yet experiencing widespread blowback from US trading partners. He and other tariff “hawks” in the administration calculate that other countries have more to lose from being locked out of the US than the US has to lose in trade with them.
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, elected in an anti-Trump “Canada </a><a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods"></a>strong<a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/canada-to-remove-25-tariff-on-some-u-s-goods">” campaign earlier this year</a>, recently lifted retaliatory tariffs against the US, the destination of 75 percent of Canada’s exports. Canada is now attempting to negotiate a deal that will limit US tariffs on certain targeted Canadian exports, such as lumber, steel and aluminium.
On the other hand, Trump’s impetuous decision to place a 50 percent tariff on imports from India threatens to undermine the decades-long US cultivation of India as a counterweight to China in Asia. The <a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/india-alliance-jake-sullivan-kurt-campbell">symbolism of leaders of India, China and Russia meeting together in Beijing</a>
wasn’t lost on mainstream foreign policy hands.
<a href="https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/04/on-channel-4-is-donald-trumps-tariff-war-about-to-totally-backfire/">Varoufakis thinks that tariffs may slow the US economy, but the US is still sucking in massive amounts of capital from the world</a>. If that continues, Trump may get away with the tariffs, even if they don’t produce the things he promised: reshoring American industries or replacing income taxes, among some of the more far fetched. But if Trump succeeds in cutting the US trade deficit, other countries will have fewer dollars to reinvest in the US stock market and in other assets.
To Marxists, tariffs are neither good nor bad. They are no better nor worse than “free trade.” They are just one mechanism capitalist states use to gain an advantage over other capitalist states in the international economy.
“Free trade” is most often the policy of the global economic and military hegemon. Britain in the nineteenth century pushed for “free trade” as a way of expanding markets for its industrial economy. Similarly, since the 1930s, it has been a policy of the US government to expand free trade.
The breakdown of free trade today is part of the breakdown of the unipolar US empire that existed in the decades following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR-dominated Eastern bloc. Now that China is in a close competition with the US, the US government and its business leaders have embraced more protectionist measures against it. Here is where the politics of tariffs enters the discussion.
For now, if most people associate tariffs with higher prices, <a href="https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/trump-is-underwater-on-trade-in-40">they are among the most unpopular parts of Trump’s already very unpopular agenda</a>. But one place where they are not condemned—outside of MAGA world and a few favoured industries—is in the US labour movement.
Unfortunately, leaders like <a href="https://jacobin.com/2025/04/uaw-fain-trump-tariffs-nafta">United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain</a>, Teamsters President Sean O’Brien and the United Steelworkers of America have embraced the Trump tariffs. This isn’t anything new. “Buy American” has been part of the labour movement for decades. But for labour to buy into Trump’s tariffs now, when <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-parliamentary-cretinism-of-the-democrats-opposition-to-trump/">Trump and his administration are waging an existential war against labour</a>, is letting MAGA off the hook.
Industrial union leaders support tariffs to prop up US industries where their dwindling ranks work. But support for tariffs targets the wrong enemy. The socialist labour scholar Kim Moody has shown that declining jobs, unionisation and living standards in the US owe more to automation and speed-up than to trade.
Socialist labour activist Andy Sernatinger’s critique of the <a href="https://tempestmag.org/2025/04/nationalism-workers-power-and-the-myth-of-auto-tariffs/">UAW’s position, titled “Nationalism, workers’ power, and the myth of auto tariffs”</a>, showed that there are as many autoworkers today in the US as there were in 1992 (before the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA). But far fewer of them are in unionised jobs. That’s because the unions have conceded control of the shop floor and have only weakly competed for non-union workers in plants in the southern states, where much of the job growth in recent decades has occurred.
For labour to sign on with policies that are shot through with nationalism and anti-Chinese racism is extremely dangerous. Labour activists <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Vincent_Chin">should remember the 1980s case of Vincent Chin</a>, a Chinese American man who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by an auto industry supervisor. Chin’s killing took place at a time when the UAW was leading an anti-Japanese car campaign that featured media events in which union members smashed up Japanese-made cars with bats and hammers. Chin’s killer shouted racial slurs at him while he beat him.
Not only does this sort of politics sow divisions among workers, but it also contributes to the general racist and nationalist climate that the Trump administration is leading from the top. It lays the foundation for political support for further economic, political and military confrontation with China.
Even if tariffs don’t have the catastrophic effects—like COVID-era empty store shelves and price gouging—that many predicted, they will still contribute to a slowing economy, higher prices and potentially mass lay-offs. The jobs economy <a href="https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/whats-news/hiring-slowdown-spells-a-weakening-labor-market">is already weak</a>—the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/03/job-opening-data-falls-to-levels-rarely-seen-since-pandemic.html">number of job openings is around the level it was during the COVID recession</a>.
It’s not clear that Trump’s tariffs are the cause of all these problems. There is solid evidence that consumer spending was tapped out at the end of last year, before “Liberation Day”. But tariffs are not going to improve the situation. And in the current context, Trump’s tariffs are just another attack on the working class.
First published at the <a href="https://internationalsocialism.net/the-trouble-with-trumps-tariffs">International Socialism Project</a>. Lance Selfa is the author of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Democrats-Critical-History-Updated/dp/1608461920" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Democrats: A Critical History</a>
(Haymarket, 2012) and editor of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/US-Politics-Age-Uncertainty-Reality/dp/1608468534" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">U.S. Politics in an Age of Uncertainty: Essays on a New Reality</a> (Haymarket, 2017). He lives in Chicago.

Lance Selfa

The trouble with Trump’s tariffs

The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites, writes Martin Barker. 
--------------------
The Nazis and far-right racists (including the son of one of Australia’s largest property developers) who called the reactionary March for Australia on 31 August are demanding an end to mass migration because “Aussies are sleeping on the streets”. 
It’s not just fascists linking migration to the housing crisis. Before the last election, both the Liberals and the ALP had migrants in their sights. “We’re going to cut immigration because Labor’s brought in a million people over two years and that has created the housing crisis”, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said at the time. Labor criticised Dutton but conveyed essentially the same message in more acceptable language. Treasurer Jim Chalmers said of a proposed cap on international students: “Enrolments have grown ... this puts pressure on prices and rents ... it makes finding a house harder for everyone”. 
Politics and the media blame migrants for the housing crisis, and it can seem to make sense. We’re told there aren’t enough houses to meet demand, so the more people there are, the more prices rise. 
But the argument doesn’t stack up.
First, there is no shortage of houses in Australia. As the Australia Institute think tank <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/">reported in March</a>, the construction of new dwellings has outpaced population growth for the last ten years. Indeed, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the number of residential properties in Australia exceeds the number of households by almost 1 million.
Second, there is no meaningful connection between immigration levels and rents. As TikTok user @acutallyadu has <a href="https://x.com/ArtistAffame/status/1958698381779579363">pointed out</a>, the proportion of housing relative to the population in 2014 was roughly the same as today, but rent price growth in 2014 was 1.2 percent compared to 8.1 percent in 2023. Similarly, the <a href="https://www.tenants.org.au/blog/rents-and-migration-what-does-data-tell-us">Tenants Union of NSW</a> has created a dashboard comparing rental price changes to population changes, which shows that there isn’t a strong link between the two. (One example: rent prices in the Sydney suburb of Ryde fell by 5 percent in 2019 and rose by more than 7 percent in 2022, but 33 percent more migrants moved into Ryde in 2019 compared to 2022.) 
It’s the same with house prices. At times, prices have fallen while immigration has increased, and prices have gone up when immigration has reduced. During the COVID-19 border closures, there was negative net migration, meaning more people left the country than came in; but house prices rose by <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/migrants-are-not-to-blame-for-soaring-house-prices/">20 percent</a> in eighteen months. 
International students in particular have been blamed for high rents and low vacancy rates in the suburbs surrounding major universities. The <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-24/international-students-did-not-drive-rents-inflation-higher-rba/105562616">Reserve Bank of Australia</a> found that the return of international students after lockdowns had a marginal effect on rents, contributing at most 0.5 percentage points to rent increases. The majority of rent increases occurred before the borders were reopened, jumping by 13.8 percent between 2021 and 2022. 
So if migrants aren’t to blame, why are house prices and rents so unaffordable? 
House prices and rents are soaring because access to housing in Australia is dominated by a for-profit market that is rigged in the interests of billionaire developers and wealthy investors.
Developers like Mirvac and Meriton (owned by Australia’s second-richest person, Harry Triguboff) are making a killing from high house prices. Meriton made $290 million in profits last year, and Mirvac more than $500 million. And that’s only two of the companies that dominate the housing market. 
Their only concern is profit, and they have a clear interest in higher house prices. In April, the Melbourne Age newspaper reported that <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/the-melbourne-suburbs-with-hundreds-of-cheap-brand-new-apartments-20250329-p5lni7.html">developers in Melbourne were letting 8,000 properties sit empty</a> because prices weren’t high enough, and selling them too quickly would bring down the cost to buyers. 
Developers receive tax and development concessions from the government and benefit from policies like the First Home Buyers scheme, which claims to make it easier for people to buy, but actually drives up prices. 
The tiny proportion of investors who own most investment properties (1 percent of taxpayers own more than 25 percent of them) also want to drive up prices. They receive massive handouts from the government that subsidise their speculation, which increases prices and allows them to out-compete first-home buyers for properties. 
Negative gearing (when a property costs more to maintain than it generates in income, even if it is increasing in value) allows them to claim losses as a tax deduction, and capital gains tax discounts mean they pocket more of the returns when they sell. The ABC <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-17/one-million-australians-are-negatively-gearing/104737164">reported last year</a> that CGT discounts cost the public $23 billion, with 80 percent of the benefits going to the top 10 percent of taxpayers. 
These government handouts mean that investors and developers can sit on properties until the price is right. Some rent them out, others leave them empty, knowing they’ll get a tax concession when they sell. That’s why Prosper Australia, a research and advocacy group, estimates that there are <a href="https://www.prosper.org.au/2024/07/report-100000-vacant-homes-in-melbourne/">100,000 empty or “barely used” properties in Melbourne</a> while 30,000 Victorians are homeless. 
Blaming migrants for the housing crisis shifts the blame away from those who are actually responsible: big corporations and banks, the super-wealthy and Labor and Liberal governments. Migrant bashing is about dividing workers to make it harder for us to unite and fight against our common enemy. The super-rich would much rather have us blaming each other for unaffordable homes than aiming our sights on them.
The argument that migrants are responsible for the housing crisis in Australia has no basis in fact and is propaganda in the service of the economic elites.
Even if there were a housing shortage and migration was having a measurable impact on housing affordability, socialists would still oppose blaming immigrants and imposing migration controls. 
Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. We have more than enough resources and productive capacity to comfortably house a significantly larger population. The problem is that the vast majority of that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny minority of the population, whose sole concern is making profits. 
The housing crisis won’t be fixed by blaming migrants or limiting immigration. The solutions lie in challenging the market’s domination over access to housing, the power and wealth of developers and investors, and the Labor and Liberal governments that act in their interests.

Migrants are not to blame for the housing crisis

Twenty years ago, Eddy Groves blazed a trail as the first of Australia’s childcare industry capitalists to make the annual Rich List. As Groves’ portfolio of childcare centres ballooned, so did his personal wealth—from a hundred childcare centres and $40 million in 2002, to a thousand childcare centres in Australia, a similar number overseas, and a fortune of $260 million in 2006. By this stage, Groves owned a ranch in Nevada, a house in France and the Brisbane Bullets basketball team.
Groves’ empire collapsed in 2008. But he had proved in practice that it was possible for cashed-up operators to make a fortune in care industries governments were retreating from. So long as there is a steady flow of government money, rapid expansion of the corporate footprint, poorly enforced regulation and a ruthless, cost-cutting approach to staffing and conditions, there is money to be made. 
Just look at Pejman Okhovat, the CEO of G8 Education. His total remuneration was $3.3 million in 2024, up from $3 million the year before. G8 Education is the biggest childcare provider in Victoria, with 130 centres across the state. An <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/victoria-s-largest-childcare-chain-repeatedly-failed-to-protect-children-20250805-p5mkg0.html">investigation</a>
by the Age following a major alleged child abuse scandal reveals a chronic shortage of trained staff in multiple centres and a failure to report incidents in which a child was harmed or at risk of serious harm: “One mother said she believed it was ‘painfully obvious’ the childcare giant prioritised its reputation over providing adequate care”. 
Child care today is highly profitable. The public financial advice website <a href="https://www.finexia.com.au/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-the-average-profit-of-daycare-centers-in-australia#:~:text=Average%20Profit%20of%20Daycare%20Center,explore%20in%20the%20subsequent%20sections.">Finexia</a>
claims that a profit margin of 10 to 20 percent is typical—which is significantly more than Woolworths’ reported profit rate of around 6 percent of sales. 
But the big money comes from accumulating the centres themselves, which ensures larger streams of government cash. News.com <a href="https://www.news.com.au/finance/real-estate/revealed-the-cashed-up-players-making-millions-from-childcare-centres/news-story/5c5075f0aed1143a007795d20b399b09">carried a story</a> in March this year profiling just a few of the characters who have enriched themselves in this way. The list includes Brendan McAssey, who sold off his “Only About Children” childcare chain to private equity company Bain Capital in 2016 for $400 million. The deal set him up for a $22.5 million luxury home at Noosa and (according a <a href="https://bigsteps.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/spitting-off-cash-uwu-report.pdf">report</a>
from the United Workers Union in 2018) a “44 metre superyacht, helicopter, private jet and $17 million mansion at Balmoral Beach on Sydney Harbour”. 
Vijay and Phyllis Narula sold their 14-centre Little People’s Places childcare business for $40 million in 2021. This cash funds what news.com describes as their “opulent lifestyle played out online with pictures of their beachfront mansion, Lamborghinis, and first-class global travels, regularly updated on social media”.
Adrian Fonseca already owned a $14 million mansion in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. Selling his 12 childcare centres to Affinity in 2022 for around $40 million no doubt helped him find the $15.6 million needed for the mansion next door in 2023. 
We could continue the list, but even this is all chickenfeed. The big players in the industry aren’t motivated by luxury lifestyles, though they no doubt enjoy them. The real game is capital accumulation, on a spectacular scale. 
This is enabled by steady government money and a regulator uninterested in creating barriers to private enrichment. In 2016, the model was attractive enough to entice private equity firm Anchorage to buy Affinity Education, one of Australia’s biggest childcare operators, for $210 million. Anchorage achieved an extraordinary return on this investment, tripling their money in just five years by selling Affinity off to Quadrant, another Sydney private equity company, for $650 million in 2021. 
The executives at incoming owners Quadrant were then faced with the task of squeezing even more money out of Affinity Education. The <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/the-big-money-behind-childcare-operator-at-the-heart-of-alleged-sex-abuse-scandal-20250717-p5mft7.html">plan</a>
seems to have been a simple one: load up on debt, crack down on costs, expand the corporate footprint by buying up more centres—and then cash in. 
The ABC’s reporting shows that breaches of mandated legal minimums on staffing—and intense pressure on staff to leave regulatory breaches unreported—are part and parcel of this business model.. Loretta Dodwell was one of the childcare workers who <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298">spoke to the ABC</a> in May about what she’d seen while employed by Affinity Education. “The cost cutting and the lack of staff really caused serious incidents in the centre”, she said. “They were also putting on lots of trainees, like young trainees that were cheap to employ and that put a lot of pressure on the qualified staff ... They [Affinity] are just not suitable to be in the childcare industry because they are just so greedy ... They cut staff, they put the staff under so much pressure ... they’re just a big company that wants to make money out of children.”
The head of this “big company that wants to make money out of children” is Chris Hadley, the executive chairman of Affinity Education’s current owner, the private equity firm Quadrant. Hadley is a legend in Sydney money circles. He’s probably a billionaire, although, as the Australian Financial Review <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/inside-the-dog-eat-dog-world-of-australia-s-most-successful-pe-firm-20230822-p5dyf6">reported</a>
in 2023, Quadrant’s “labyrinthine corporate structure” makes it impossible to be certain. 
For the workers, it is a different story. “Food or rent. I can’t afford both.” This is how one member of the United Workers Union responded to a union <a href="https://www.fwc.gov.au/documents/sites/am2024-19/am202423-sub-uwu-020625.pdf">survey</a>
of early childhood educators last year. Others reported working a second job, not being able to afford essentials, or not being able to afford a holiday with their kids. 
This is the reality of caring being left to the market. Capitalism has always seen care as a high fixed cost that generates no direct profit, and that therefore should generally be cut to the minimum. This counts double for those too old to make a profit for a boss, or too young, or with a disability that makes someone less profitable to employ. So even before our current neoliberal age with its mania for privatisation, aged care, childcare and other community care facilities were often overcrowded institutions with underpaid and overworked staff. 
But it’s also true that all of these problems have become dramatically worse as the Chris Hadleys and their ilk moved in. Instead of local councils providing the bulk of aged care and child care, with some basic level of political and legal accountability, the profiteering wannabe billionaires (and actual billionaires) are interested only in making a buck. 
Tripling your corporation’s wealth, as Anchorage private equity did with Affinity child care in five years, and as Quadrant hope to do, is the highest mission for any capitalist. More than a hundred and fifty years ago, Karl Marx explored the desperation of capitalists to multiply their capital in volume one of Capital, quoting the British trade unionist Thomas Dunning: “With adequate profit, capital is very bold. A certain ten percent will ensure its employment anywhere; twenty percent certain will produce eagerness; fifty percent positive audacity; hundred percent will make it ready to trample on all human laws; three hundred percent, and there is not a crime at which it will scruple, nor a risk it will not run, even to the chance of its owner being hanged”.
The quote sums up the ethos of capital perfectly. The only difference today is that there’s no chance of any of the childcare profiteers being hanged for their crimes. In fact, it’s an absolute rarity for any of them even to be prosecuted, let alone convicted. Modern day neoliberal “regulators”, in child care and anywhere else, are generally no impediment at all to companies systematically breaching the regulations in pursuit of profit. 
So back in the day, Eddy Groves walked free despite leaving over $1 billion in bad debt. And 20 years later, Affinity look to be following in his footsteps. Adele Ferguson and Chris Gillet <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-05-12/video-shows-childcare-worker-hitting-baby-at-affinity-education/105268298">reported</a>
on the ABC in May this year that, despite constant pressure on staff not to report regulatory breaches, between 2021 and 2024 Affinity childcare centres “were hit with more than 1,700 regulatory breaches, averaging more than one a day” in New South Wales alone. “Despite this”, Jones and Gillet reported, “the NSW regulator issued just nine infringement notices, totalling less than $2,000 in penalties.”
Labor’s reforms, at best, tinker at the edges of this grotesque system—a system that they’ve helped to create since the 1990s, and which they have no interest in transforming. 
In the wake of Eddie Groves’ spectacular implosion, academic and gender equity advocate Deborah Brennan outlined Labor’s track record on child care, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald: “How did we get into this mess? Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard has blamed John Howard for ‘letting the market rip’, but it was the Hawke government, in 1991, that introduced market forces into the sector. It did this by extending child-care assistance to the users of for-profit care and then by changing the structure of Commonwealth funding to encourage private provision and marginalise the community sector ... The Howard government intensified Labor's market focus, ending operational subsidies to community-based care in 1997”.
This whole architecture needs to be scrapped. ABC investigations are important, but far from sufficient to drive this level of change. In aged care, for instance, there have been incremental improvements to wages and staffing since the royal commission triggered by a shocking 2018 Four Corners investigation. However, the fundamental structure of the industry remains untouched and, with it, many of the problems. 
For more far-reaching reforms, the crisis in child care will have to be transformed into a political crisis for the government and the profiteers. The actions of workers in the sector—which we saw a glimpse of in the Big Steps campaign of walk-offs and protests organised by the UWU—can be crucial in this. 
We should be fighting for a society that puts human dignity first—in early childhood education, disability, aged care and far beyond—and relegates the profiteers, their Lamborghinis and their obscene, dog-eat-dog system to history.

The profiteers plundering child care

If you were to try to distinguish a house from a cave, you might ask: “Is it cold? Is it damp? Do fungi grow there?”. By this metric, some caves around the world would pass as houses, but many of our houses would pass as caves. 
Cold homes in Australia: Questioning our assumptions about prevalence, a <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629623001846">study</a>
by the Australian Centre for Housing Research, monitored homes through the winter in 2022. It found that during that time, 81 percent averaged below 18 degrees Celsius, the minimum “healthy” standard of indoor temperature set by the World Health Organization. 
The effects of cold on the human body can be deadly. Colder temperatures cause blood vessels to constrict to reduce heat loss, increasing blood pressure and raising your risk of heart disease and strokes. Likewise, cold, dry air can narrow your airways, making chronic bronchitis, emphysema and asthma attacks more likely. A report by the University of Melbourne Professor Rebecca Bentley, published in 2024 with the headline “Your cold house is bad for your mental health” also found that those who cannot afford to keep their homes warm are 49 percent more likely to report depression or anxiety.
The cold is more deadly in Australia than it is in Arctic-straddling Sweden. Research published in the Lancet in 2015, “Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study”, found that 6.5 percent of all deaths in Australia are at least partly attributable to cold weather, almost twice Sweden’s 3.7 percent. Thousands are dying from the cold, and the danger doesn’t end there.
Asthma Australia surveyed 5,041 people in 2022, finding in its report <a href="https://asthma.org.au/about-us/advocacy/housing/">Homes, Health and Asthma in Australia</a> that one in three people have mould in their homes, while one in two have problems with either mould or dampness (water damage, condensation, water leaks or flooding). Black mould spores can cause asthma attacks, allergic reactions and immune system disorders. One couple recently interview by the Sydney Morning Herald explained that the mould in their flat made them sick for months with <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/the-toxic-blooms-hiding-in-many-of-our-homes-and-a-new-way-to-find-them-20250526-p5m29i.html">vertigo and cyclical vomiting</a>. This isn’t just a problem in old, poorly ventilated homes. The 2015 Nationwide Condensation Survey found that more than 40 percent of new buildings had problems with condensation and mould.
So why are our houses so crap? It certainly isn’t because we don’t know better. Building shelters is something human beings have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. The cumulative effort of countless generations struggling against the elements has taken us from animal skins to adobe bricks to heaters and fibreglass insulation. The wind catchers used in Iran today—ingenious chimneys that use basic physics to displace hot air inside a home and replace it with cool air—date back thousands of years, while ancient Roman villas commonly used <a href="https://www.britannica.com/technology/hypocaust">hypocausts</a> that acted as a system of underfloor central heating.
The gap between the kind of housing we’re forced to endure and what science makes possible is immense. Australia’s Nationwide House Energy Rating Scheme (NatHERS) rates houses out of ten stars. A 10-star home is one that remains comfortable all year with little or no heating or cooling, while a 0-star home provides almost no protection from the outside climate at all. 
In a 2022 <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/13/freezing-indoors-thats-because-australian-homes-are-closer-to-tents-than-insulated-eco-buildings">piece in the Guardian</a>, “Freezing indoors? That’s because Australian homes are closer to tents than insulated eco-buildings”, the head of the University of New South Wales School of the Built Environment, Phillip Oldfield, calculated the amount of power that differently rated homes would require to be kept at a comfortable temperature. “If [a house] received a 2-star NatHERS rating”, he wrote, “it would need 27,349kWh’s of electricity. If we assume $0.20/kWh, the cost would be $5,470 per year. A 6-star home would require 8,249kWh and cost $1,650, while a 10-star home would need only 100 kWh, costing a mere $20 a year.” The average Australian home has a NatHERS rating of just 1.8 stars. 
Although new buildings and major renovations are now required to meet a 7-star rating (and most do not go above this minimum), 70 percent of all homes were built before national energy efficiency standards were introduced in 2003. There is no national standard for that 70 percent, which includes most of the properties leased out by landlords today. The only state requirements are in Victoria and the ACT—which now require landlords to install ceiling insulation (i.e. the absolute bare minimum).
Paying for proper insulation and double-glazed windows would eat into the profits made by property hoarders and developers. So it doesn’t happen. Instead they pass on the costs to those who end up living in their houses, who face the terrible choice: pay thousands each year to warm their homes, or suffer through the winter cold and the damaging consequences for their health. 
For most people, this isn’t a real choice. They can’t afford to stay warm. Finder’s <a href="https://www.finder.com.au/news/heating-hardship-winter-2024">August 2024</a>
Consumer Sentiment Tracker found, based on a survey of 1,049 respondents, that one in two Australians had gone cold to avoid a high energy bill, with 36 percent avoiding using heating as often as possible, and 13 percent going cold all the time.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Double-glazed windows are the norm throughout much of Europe, where triple-glazed windows are becoming common. We could raise the minimum NatHERS rating to 9 or 10 stars, reducing the need for heating and air conditioning to a bare minimum. All houses could be required to meet this standard before being leased or sold, and we could tax property hoarders and developers to subsidise those who own only a home or two to do so. 
We could mandate new building designs to feature cross-ventilation, so that we can cool our houses at night when it’s hot and avoid the build-up of condensation. We could mandate mechanical ventilation for old homes. With high standards of insulation, we could create houses that stay warm in the winter and cool in the summer, something that will be increasingly important as the climate crisis worsens.
Houses where we can live with dignity are not beyond the reach of science, or our resources. They are only beyond the reach of our for-profit housing system.

Rent freeze? No. Rent, freeze: Australia’s winter housing nightmare

If more evidence were needed that workers’ losses are capitalists’ gains, then look no further than the latest Australian Council of Superannuation Investors report on CEO salaries. It finds that the CEOs of Australia’s top 100 companies last year “earned”, on average, 55 times the average salary of an Australian worker. That’s up from 50 times the year before. 
At the top is the CEO of News Corp, who received $42 million for managing Rupert Murdoch’s far-right propaganda machine—Sky News Australia, the
Australian and dozens of other rags masquerading as journalism. Not far behind are the bosses of Macquarie and Commonwealth banks, who earned a combined $38.7 million for squeezing billions of dollars out of working-class families. Rounding out the list are the bosses of two of the planet’s most destructive corporations—Rio Tinto and BHP. They pocketed a cool $19 million each.
Such eye-watering salaries at the top end of town might have you thinking that at least some of the wealth would trickle down. You would be wrong. In fact, the opposite is true. The cost-of-living crisis has resulted in a transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top. Analysis by the Australia Institute in November last year found that a full-time worker is, on average, $8,000 worse off compared to just three years ago. A big part of the decline is due to housing. Whether someone is a mortgage holder or a renter, a bigger chunk of their pay packet is going to either the bank or the landlord.
The situation is particularly bad for workers on the bottom end of the wage scale. Just over 900,000 low-income workers on award wages have seen their real wages fall by 14.4 percent over the last four years. These workers are disproportionately young and in less stable forms of employment, like casual work.
And yet, the lobbyists of Australian businesses vehemently oppose any notion that wages should rise by even the slightest amount above inflation. The Australian Industry Group considered the Fair Work Commission’s recent 3.5 percent increase in award wages “higher than necessary” and “well beyond what current economic conditions can safely sustain”.
The growing gap between rich and poor is not an unfortunate accident; it’s capitalism working as intended. CEOs live lives of luxury while workers must be grateful for their crumbs. Only a serious fightback of the working class can start to change this.

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