Australia is currently the third wealthiest country in the world. Most Australians would probably feel like that statement cannot be correct. And that’s median wealth, so overall a lot of Australians are wealthier than most of the world. Yet despite that, the average Aussie worker is feeling the burden of the crisis of capitalism within this country today.
The country owns vast resources, both raw and developed. It has a robust, modern mining industry and a highly organised service-based and export-oriented economy. Its population boasts one of the most well-educated working class bases in the world – outranking the United States by OECD standards.
But how do we reckon a conversation would go if a regular worker was asked how they feel about living in one of the world’s wealthiest countries?
Millions live below the poverty line. Over 100,000 people are homeless, according to five-year-old census stats, likely more today. Well over a hundred thousand people are on the waiting list for social housing, and face a decade-long wait.
The country may not look like it has high unemployment, but many workers work less than eight hours a week, and are expected to survive on such a meager wage. Others move between casual, part-time, labour hire, contracting, and gig work with next to minimal job security, or none at all, with scarce organised bargaining power.
And that’s just the workers who are employed. Many more that fill the ranks of the reserve army of labour on Centrelink unemployment benefits are forgotten about, and dreadfully are somehow meant to live on payments that barely reach half the amount of minimum wage. The current bourgeois government’s own advisory committee correctly classifies it as inadequate; an understatement to say the least.
Universal healthcare is eroding in real time, with expensive private health businesses slicing away at more and more pieces of the system. Nurses and doctors work tirelessly to fulfill the growing demand, but are stretched impossibly thin, with nurses and midwives wages naught much for newer generations of students to find remotely appealing.
Schooling is much the same. Teachers barely hold public education together by thankless, grueling work. They are rewarded with hundreds of thousands of hours of unpaid overtime and a worsening quality of life.
These are not simply anomalies within an otherwise functioning system. These problems are the expressions of Australian capitalism in deep crisis. They have become permanently worsening features of Australian capitalism.
Workers are not taking these conditions lying down, however. Industrial action is finally appearing to show a nominal resurgence, generally organised around common bread and butter issues such as inflation outpacing wages. Workers can see the disparity glaring, rudely and indolently. The Australian ruling class flaunts their consecutive record breaking profits in our faces, and gaslights us with explanations that “Australia’s economy is doing very well!” – is it just! While the ruling class grow fat off their record profits, we are told to deal with the worsening conditions we face.
What a sordid state of unnecessary affairs.
Poverty and Wealth
1 in 8 Australian workers live below the poverty line. 3.7 million. That would leave anybody to question how it is that one of the world’s wealthiest countries can have this many of its citizens living in such barbarism. But it gets worse.
Our children make up a huge percentage of that figure. Almost a million children are currently being left to suffer in poverty.
The average amount of money this destitute layer of the working class can barely rub two coins together with is less than half of the legal minimum wage.
After decades of technological advances and economic growth, millions of Australian workers and youth are still being left to suffer in barbaric and inhuman conditions. Modern, and internationally connected capitalism has developed the productive forces enormously; and this is precisely why this persistent poverty today is such a damning indictment of the capitalist system.
This is neither an unfortunate byproduct, nor a fixable mistake – fixable through reforms to capitalism, that is. Capitalism has outlived its purpose, and we are left to live with the contradictions of a system that cannot be saved and refuses to die.
And these contradictions run deep within Australian capitalism today.
But hang on a moment, did we not just establish that Australians overall – and that includes workers – are nominally wealthier compared with most of the world? Absolutely, this is true, but let us examine where this wealth lies exactly.
The “wealth” of Australians
A great deal of Australia’s wealth found within the working class is tied to housing and superannuation. In other words, not money that can be felt and used, but wealth that is tied up both in personal debt and mandatory employer funds, that workers cannot access until they are retired. And the alienable wealth found in housing has been inflated beyond limits, even repayable to these workers saddled with enormous mortgages, not even mentioning the rates which the Reserve Bank of Australia has been raising in attempts to reign the rampant inflation back under control. Australia ranks as one of the most expensive country to live in, often sitting within the top 10, notably most of the countries that outrank it are tax havens. Most of the money Australian workers are paid is spent on simply surviving. High rents and mortgages. As well as expensive grocery and energy bills.
So no, not even “wealthy” Australian workers are exempt from the worsening life within this fetid system.
Capitalist governments often tend to point to unemployment figures as proof that the economy is doing well, and for the most part it is a useful snapshot when examining the health of an economic period – in August 2026 the official unemployment rate sat at a ‘reasonable’ 4.6%. That is considered an acceptable amount by the capitalists. Some half a million unemployed workers, though surely if one of those workers were asked how excited they were about the health of the economy and their role within it they would have choice words to express that ‘excitement’.
But unemployment figures do not give the whole picture. What is often not considered or mentioned is how many of us are underemployed. An additional 6.4% of the masses make up these ranks. This is hardly living. Scraping by on meager hours and pay. The unemployment statistic therefore describes only part of the problem.
Reformism – papering over the deep wounds.
Reforms that benefit the working class are always a good thing, and communists must always understand this, however what must be stressed is the limitations that are inherent within reformism.
Many on the reformist left argue that we simply need stronger regulations against unchecked profiteering, and for taxing “a fair share’s worth” out of the super wealthy big companies. This social democratic view often comes from the best of intentions of aspiring parliamentary candidates. And they aren’t unfounded views! History within this country points to many gains for the working class won through reforms.
Medicare, public education, public housing, Centrelink, minimum wage, etc. But the reason these reforms could be won, and have since been slowly eaten away at by the capitalists – is not due to parliament leaders losing touch with the working class or ‘betraying their roots’ and simply choosing to do the more evil of options – it is that Australian capitalism fundamentally cannot allow such reforms today. This is the state of things in which we exist here and now. This is precisely what we mean when we say capitalism is in crisis. The world is teetering on the edge of a potential economic crash, and the times when the economy was healthy and there was plenty of money for reforms are long gone.
Australia is not floating outside of such global conditions. We are deeply enmeshed within them. No social democratic reforms will pull us out of this mire, if they are even possible at the present time. The only way out is through the complete transformation of society, and the international socialist revolution.