Australia, like much of the world, wrestles with a glaring paradox: a first-world status propped up by a third-world economy. Despite its vast natural resources, the nation trails the developing world in disciplining its workforce. Outdated labor laws, pandering to socialist trade unions, and relentless demands for higher wages—both in cash and benefits—stifle progress.
Instead of curbing the cost of living, freezing prices on essentials, or slashing utility bills for gas, electricity, rent and water, Australia has surrendered control. Essential services—health, education, and utilities—have been outsourced to a private sector with little oversight, free to hike prices unchecked. The working class bears the brunt, turning to unions as their weapon against a complicit government. The faded and jaded fleeting promises of Milton Friedman’s capitalism does not even work in his native USA. Thee is no substitute for hard work and savings.
Meanwhile, labor is shipped off to low-cost hubs like China and India, where disciplined, motivated workforces train fast and displace Western jobs permanently. Millions of outsourced roles will never return. At home, a generation—across Australia and the West—drowns in identity politics and self-obsession, stripped of national pride or communal duty. Governments, trapped in the revolving door of democracy, breed instability. Short terms in office thwart bold policy, so they bloat the public sector instead—expanding departments to fake job growth, where permanent roles mask low productivity. No one dares tell the emperor he’s naked.
“The best thing about the working class was getting out of it”-Neville Wran former Premier of NSW and Federal Labour President
Even the working class, hardest hit by this mess, rejects reform. Indoctrinated to worship the American dream, they dismiss Asian models—like China’s—as backward, blinded by prejudice against “lesser” peoples. No Australian leader has yet seized the reins to reverse this decline. Bold moves—reining in unions, incentivizing the unemployed back to work, dismantling identity politics and laws that support it, slashing subsidies to its advocates—are nowhere in sight. Rather than funding idleness with welfare, why not subsidize low-wage workers directly? Why not cap costs for food, power, transport, education, healthcare, and water, shielding the vulnerable from the whims of unaccountable private players and unregulated unions?
There’s no guts, no vision. Capital spending to rebuild crumbling infrastructure—unlocking thousands of jobs—languishes. Bringing back outsourced telecommunications and manufacturing, or investing in homegrown goods and services, remains a pipe dream. For any of this to work, Australia needs a fearless, ethical judiciary to back it up. Instead, the legal system is a sham—rotted by political correctness, morally and legally bankrupt.
Which political party has the spine, the will, the clarity to tackle the rot plaguing Australia and the West? Certaily ot the ALP, teh Greens, the Liberal NAtional Coalition, One Nation, the Teals or the embarrassment of Clive Palmer’s “trumpet of patriots”. Time will tell—if it’s not already too late.
Krishna Murthi and Alice Goh