Australia has the most concentrated industries and markets, with the least competition of any developed country. This worsens inequality and hands exorbitant power to corporate executives and billionaires.

• Supermarkets: Coles and Woolworths are the most prominent examples, with a combined market share of over 65 percent. This is significantly higher than in countries like the UK or the US.
• Airlines: The Australian airline market is dominated by Qantas and Virgin, which together control around 98 percent of domestic passenger traffic.
• Banking: The “big four” banks control the vast majority of the market, with the top two, Commbank and Westpac, controlling nearly half of all mortgage lending.
• Pharmacies: Just four companies control 50 percent of the market.
• Telecommunications: Telstra and Optus have a combined market share of over 80 percent. 
• Mining: Massive multinational firms like BHP, Rio Tinto, and local billionaire owned firms like Hancock and Fortescue control substantial resource extraction in iron and gas.
• Media: Australia’s print and broadcast media is the second most concentrated in the world, with News Corp, Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media and Australian Community Media controlling 84 percent of the market, and Google and Meta controlling 70 percent of the advertising market.
• Insurance: Just four companies, IAG, Suncorp, Allianz, and QBE, control 50 brands to make it seem like they don’t control 75 percent of the market. Three companies, TAL, AIA, and Zurich, control 60 percent of the life insurance market.
• Port operations: Two companies, DP World and Toll Holdings, control basically all of the logistics operations at Australia’s major ports.
• Share trading: The trading of shares in public companies is controlled by a for-profit company, ASX, which has an effective monopoly to set listing fees and other charges.
• Job hunting: If you want to advertise or search for a job, Seek controls 66 percent of the market, allowing it to increase fees for advertising.
• Property transactions: A single software company, Pexa, controls 80 percent of the property transactions (conveyancing) in Australia. Pexa is itself around 40 percent owned by another monopolist, Link Group, which has a near monopoly on the administrative software used by financial fund managers and superannuation funds.

Despite this — actually, because of this — Australia doesn’t have laws that allow the Commonwealth government to break up monopolies.

Monopolies are undemocratic because they transform economic size into unaccountable political power. When corporations become massive, they cease to be just businesses and act as private governments, using their wealth to capture the state and override the public will. This creates a situation where a handful of wealthy executives make decisions that affect the entire society, like setting wages, prices, and investment strategies. The fifty brands of insurance owned by four companies create the illusion that we have free choice we can choose between Budget Direct and AAMI — it’s a mechanism of political paralysis. And they can use their size and power to block any meaningful democratic control over the economy.

The lack of competition and concentration of power allows monopolies to extract value and wealth through their sheer size or through financial engineering, rather than the genuine value of what they produced. When Coles increases its prices above inflation, that is monopolistic theft from your pocket.

They are morally corrosive because they steal the right to coordinate economic activity from ordinary people. The current legal system allows massive firms to coordinate production and prices (through mergers and internal management), yet laws in Australia (and globally) restricts collective action by workers or small producers as if it were illegal collusion. Industrial action, strikes, pickets and boycotts, are all highly restricted. The ability for small businesses or producers to coordinate is also similarly restricted. This turns workers and small companies into dependent servants of the monopolistic platforms and gatekeepers.

Economically, monopolies amplify the destructive internal logic of capitalism to pursue wealth for its own sake rather than for human need. Firms are driven by a blind compulsion to accumulate profit, which inevitably leads to inequality, unemployment, pauperisation, and environmental destruction. Monopolies are not the result of superior efficiency, but of a system designed by the monopolists to concentrate wealth. They relentlessly squeeze workers, consumers and suppliers to feed an endless cycle of accumulation that is remorselessly indifferent to actual social well-being and human needs.

Finally, monopolies are dangerous because they perpetuate the myth that the market is a “natural” force beyond our control. Dominant firms thrive on the ideology that their power is the natural, inevitable result of merit, technological progress or superior efficiency, rather than political decisions and power. However, markets are constructed by people and societies who create laws. Monopoly power is the result of specific laws that give special privileges and protections to massive corporations. Accepting monopolies as natural creates a sense of political helplessness, rather than the truth which is that we have agency to rewrite the rules and restructure the economy to serve the public interest.

Breaking up monopolies is a vital, highly effective and strategic transitional demand. It allows for a fundamental redistribution of economic and political power, and would give people and politics democratic agency over the economy. Reducing monopoly power would also enable new forms of collective action, especially in workplaces, but also in the broader economy.

A central argument for breaking up monopolies is that it challenges the capitalist monopoly on coordination. In practice, the legal right to coordinate production and set prices is concentrated in the hands of massive firms like Coles, Telstra, Microsoft, Amazon or Allianz. The two supermarkets for example have such enormous market power over its workforce, suppliers and logistics that they operate as a for-profit planned economy, no longer subject to meaningful market competition or democratic oversight.

Meanwhile, workers and small producers are atomised and heavily restricted from coordinating. Restrictions on unions and industrial action for example. Anti-collusion laws are almost entirely enforced against small or medium businesses rather than mega-corporations.

By breaking the vertical control of dominant firms, anti-monopoly reform opens the door for “horizontal collective action”. This allows workers, gig workers, independent contractors, and small business owners to organise for genuine productive autonomy, while restricting coordination of massive capital holders.

Anti-monopoly laws help demonstrate that markets are structured by law and that the economy is a political construct. Neoliberalism likes to argue that market concentration and dominance is an inevitable outcome of the natural laws of capitalism — literally “monopolies are good” and that legal reforms are either futile or actively anti-capitalist.

However, laws and societies literally make markets. There is nothing natural about them. Anti-monopoly laws help challenge the learned helplessness that underpins capitalist realism. It also breaks the “monopoly is good” ideology of the Chicago School that says that monopolies are evidence of success and are therefore moral.

It builds broad, anti-oligarchic coalitions that is practical and self-reinforcing. Although ultimately anti-monopoly laws don’t fundamentally challenge the exploitation and expropriation inherent in capitalism, breaking up monopolies offers a practical way to construct a majoritarian coalition.

A strategy that unites workers’ interest in autonomy with consumers’ interest in fair prices and services through anti-monopoly improves material conditions for everyday people, while simultaneously reducing the real economic and political power of the monopolist oligarchs. Simply, the divide between the extractive power of corporate monopolies and everyone else is so large that there are shared material interests between workers and “normal” capitalists.

Anti-monopoly creates space for alternatives to for-profit corporations. In this way, it is a complement (not a substitute) to the other goals that the Left has, such as cooperatives and public, democratic ownership. By reducing the political and economic leverage of massive corporations, the primary blockers of other progressive reforms have less power. It is difficult to pass a wealth tax or land tax when a handful of billionaire monopolists decide to oppose it.

What about nationalisation? If the supermarket duopoly has already created a planned distribution system, why fragment them? What if we take them over and democratise them for public need? This is certainly the program that Chifley proposed in 1945 for the banks:

based on the conviction that the Government must accept responsibility for the economic condition of the nation … the Government has decided to assume the powers which are necessary over banking policy to assist it in maintaining national economic health and prosperity.

At the top of this post, I noted that anti-monopoly is a highly effective and strategic transitional demand. As we saw with Chifley, there was an immediate and unprecedented reaction to oppose nationalisation. A similar dynamic occurred under Rudd when the mining industry opposed the most timid of super-profit taxes on the industry’s massive windfall gains. Lacking a powerful, militant union movement and civil society to force the issue, the Australian state cannot simply choose to nationalise major corporations.

Ultimately, we must not advocate for breaking up monopolies because we love competition. Instead, we want to give real economic and political power to everyday people, to workers and to communities.

The choice is stark: we either break the monopolies, or we accept our status as their serfs.