Another Card-Filing Orgy Won’t Be Enough to Stop the Australian Working Class

Bourgeois elections remain futile spectacles perpetuating class oppression. Politicians posture over contrived “issues,” yet the ills innate to capitalism persist irrespective of who waves its banner. Social and economic woes are not contingent upon electoral outcomes: they are the inevitable products of bourgeois order and this mode of production.

As with every bourgeois election, the spectacle distracts from the reality of the worsening conditions of the proletariat. 

Since the pandemic, a global trend has emerged: an unrelenting rise in the cost of survival. In Australia, this is the central issue, and over half of voters identify it as their primary concern. 

Internationally, costs for basic necessities have soared tremendously. Since COVID-19 and the 2019–20 recession, consumer prices have surged cumulatively in most of the imperialist powers: roughly 22% in the US, 24% in the UK, 23% in Germany, 20% in Italy, and 19% in Australia. This is not a mere passing discomfort, it is the daily confrontation of economic suffocation and the inescapable weight of a system that feeds off inflation while wages deteriorate. Here, survival itself has become a ballot issue.

Even as a majority of working-class Australians are forced to abandon basic comforts for mere survival, Albanese’s Labor Government continues to boast about its achievements. In a recent press conference, Albanese claimed that “the families of middle Australia are the biggest beneficiaries of cost-of-living help.” Yet, it is precisely under the Labor Party that the Australian “middle class” and proletariat have faced the consequences of economic austerity. The Labor Party, just like the Liberal Party, has never attempted to champion the interests of the working-class, and it would be erroneous to imagine a future otherwise.  

Under Albo’s mentorship, Q4 of 2024 sees the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) announce the official end of Australia’s four year recession. The economy has finally broken the seven consecutive quarter streak of real per-capita GDP declines with a 0.1% quarterly expansion!

“Hurrah!” cried the regime media. Yet this supposed recovery means nothing to the proletariat as household consumption continues to recede for eight consecutive quarters (real per capita household consumption).  Nearly 60% of income is spent on essential needs—utilities, groceries, et cetera—leaving the majority of Australians near their breaking point. By December 2022, inflation surged to 7.8% before tapering off to 2.4% by the close of 2024. Trump’s return to the global stage promises more tariffs that could exacerbate international recession and escalate the trade war intensifying inflationary pressures. It is the proletariat who will ultimately bear the consequences.

Tariffs or otherwise, the economic situation in a number of industries was already far from flattering. 92% of construction businesses are overdue on payments. The hospitality sector has hit a record 9.3% closure rate over the 12 months ending in February 2025. Nationally, approximately 13,500 businesses in 2024 alone closed.

The impending collapse of countless companies will soon batter the Big Four (ANZ Bank, Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank, Westpac). Already, there has been a 47% surge in invoice defaults in the past year. Of course, the bourgeois government will have to intervene to defend, at any cost, the interests of these fundamental banking institutions. Previously in 2008–09, Australia’s largest banks solidified their domination by absorbing smaller institutions, aided by the Rudd Labor Government’s AUD203 billion deposit guarantees. Recently, the Reserve Bank funnelled around $188 billion into these same behemoths, cementing their grip on more than 75% of total banking assets nationwide. 

The banking tactics used in Australia are not unique. Internationally, the same pattern has emerged. 

“The initial response of the central banks to the 2019-2020 recession was to flood the banks with liquidity in order to enable them to support businesses and avoid a general collapse. Then, with the return of inflation, they discontinued their policy of quantitative easing and gradually increased interest rates to make money expensive and put pressure on demand to reduce inflation. This led to a real decline in inflation towards the 2% target.” (The Course of Global Capitalism, The International Communist 4).

Yet it is precisely the architects of finance capital who devise their own “solutions” to the crisis they themselves fuel. They elevate mortgage interest rates under the pretext of “risk management.” Simultaneously, they widen access to predatory credit lines, ensuring the working class remains tethered indefinitely to debt. In 2024, the volume of mortgage loan commitments surged by 12% nationally. This is the aggressive intensification of usury. 

Since the onset of the pandemic, rents have soared 36% nationally. In 2024 alone, Melbourne city witnessed rents jump by 8%, outpacing the decade’s average increase of 4.7%. Sydney endured a 6.5% climb, while Brisbane by 9%. Therefore, housing costs account for a large portion of the income of low-wage workers, to the detriment of other necessary items. Thus, the way for the perpetual rent of landlords has been created. Landlords indirectly participate in the extortion of surplus value, and thus form a parasitic caste supported by a significant portion of workers’ wages.

Concurrently, homelessness has increased, with ten thousand additional Australians onto the streets monthly—a 22% increase over just three years.

Even among employed workers, those whose survival relies upon public aid has grown from 10.9% in 2018 to 15.3% by 2023. Simultaneously, social housing has dwindled from over 4% of total dwellings in 2006 to 2.7% in 2023 (a 33% decrease). The crisis gripping Australian households now extends into food insecurity, affecting 3.4 million households (approximately 8% of the population) in 2024 alone. These hardships have been exacerbated by the price gouging of Australia’s supermarket duopoly, Woolworths and Coles 

To cope with rising living costs, workers are more and more compelled to take on additional employment. The proportion of Australians working multiple jobs has risen by ~26%, increasing from 5.3% in 2012 to 6.7% in 2024.

In the current year, the economic recession that hit Australia has nominally come to an end, to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. However, its effects on Australian proletarian families are certainly not over and are still felt within them.

Real per-capita household disposable income has faced unprecedented erosion, declining by 11% since late 2021. The media’s pandering in the face of the latest economic data serves only to mask the worsening exploitation of proletarians. 

This sustained collapse of working class living conditions surpasses Australia’s severe downturns of 1982–83 and 1990–91. It’s a symptom of capital’s necessary intensification of the exploitation of labor-power. 

In 2008 Australia suffered less severe consequences from the great recession, relative to other imperialist powers. Bourgeois commentators usually credit this to the Labor government’s economic policies. However, these accolades conveniently ignore the severe consequences born by the working class. Between 2008 and 2010, underemployment surged to nearly 8%, affecting around 900,000 workers. Furthermore, wages stagnated significantly during this period, allowing inflation to outpace income growth. Labor’s policy response transferred the crisis’s burden onto workers, consolidating wealth and protecting—thereby sustaining—bourgeois order. Statistically, household disposable incomes exceeded OECD averages by roughly 15% in 2008. This lead would be systematically undermined post-2011. Labor’s Fair Work Act (2009) led to synchronised expirations of numerous industrial agreements around 2011, forcing renegotiations under significantly worse conditions. The Act imposed severe constraints on wage negotiations and drastically curtailed industrial actions, effectively criminalising most strike strategies and amplifying employers’ advantages. And with the Liberal Party’s inauguration, a near decade of austerity-driven economic policies further constrained workers, eroding wages and intensifying pressures.

However, the worsening of the Australian proletariat’s living standards is not the result of poor handling of a few, nor is it a governmental failure. Instead, it is the byproduct of the absolutely inevitable contradictions within the capitalist system in which the bourgeois order directly opposes the immediate and historical goals of the proletariat. 

Manufacturing once dominated the national economy, peaking at 25% of GDP during the 1960s. Today, however, the Australian economy, a world leader in lithium and uranium extraction, is ever more so dependent on profits generated by the mining industry. The latter represents around 15% of the country’s GDP, an ever growing number. The Q2 ABS report for 2024 showed that 268,000 jobs were created in government-funded roles in 2023-24, whereas only 33,000 new jobs were created in the market sector. This is an annual growth of 7.6% for the non-market sector and just 0.1% for the market sector. In a similar vein, total public sector wages surged by around 5% in Q2; but non-farm private sector wages rose by just under 1%. The economy is now increasingly becoming solely reliant on the public sector: 27% of GDP is now public demand and growing. While public investment has surged since pre-covid’s by around 23%, government recurrent spending is also rising much faster than nominal GDP growth.

Initiatives such as high-speed rail projects, NDIS, and Dutton’s speculative nuclear-energy schemes—framed as remedies for mounting energy deficits—cannot but increase public debt. Simultaneously, they push the economy into further dependence on state-driven investments. At the start of 2007, the Australian Government gross debt was under $52 billion. The debt for 2022-3 is now $783 billion. A 1400% increase! This, however, must be seen internationally. After the 2008 crisis, virtually all countries have become heavily indebted, and continue to do so.

It is precisely through 1) intensifying the exploitation of labor 2) the growing participation of the state into the economy (by also onboarding private debt) that the ruling-class tries to contain the decline in the rate of profit, which is an intrinsic and fatal law of the capitalist mode of production. These “maneuvers” have thus enabled the Australian (and global) bourgeoisie to partially mitigate the effects of the crisis and maintain a dominant position. 

However, Australia, alongside other old imperialist nations, finds itself mired in an irreversible decline. Historically, the capitalist mode of production is destined to successive crises of ever greater magnitude. This continues until all produced surplus is eventually destroyed, in order for capital to start its cycle of accumulation anew. Such is our revolutionary analysis. Increasingly frequent crises necessarily lead the proletariat onto the ground of economic struggle, and towards social revolution, if the Party is able to take the proletarian movement’s lead. Once again, the proletariat, with nothing to lose and a world to conquer, will “storm the heavens” against the bourgeoisie and for communism.