If you want to understand why the far-right is surging, look at your payslip and the Reserve Bank of Australia.
We are living through a deep systemic contradiction where the majority of Australia’s economy relies on consumer spending, while Australian businesses actively try to suppress wages and the RBA believes that to reduce inflation it needs to engineer the mass-sackings of 80,000 people.
The capitalist system ruthlessly treats wages as a cost to be minimised, while relying on the commodification of every part of our lives.
This constant tension between keeping production costs low and needing people to spend leads directly to the extreme inequality — and the surge in far-right politics — we see today.
Look at the housing crisis as one of the best examples. Treating homes primarily as speculative, tradeable assets rather than places to live inflates prices is the largest barrier to the creation of affordable housing.
It is not just our wallets being drained, but our time and energy. Capitalist economies free-ride on unpaid labour — primarily by women — to function. Increasingly, stagnant wages and corporate profiteering force households to take on massive debts and work longer hours just to maintain basic living standards. This pressure drains our communities and creates a severe crisis of care, leaving people exhausted, alienated, and desperate for a political alternative.
When living standards stall, the entire economic and political system faces a legitimation crisis where the old political narratives lose all credibility. People correctly register that their stress is caused by the system. This creates a political vacuum and many everyday people in the past 12 months have rationally actively searched for new stories to explain their declining quality of life. Society is demobilised.
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This is exactly where the far-right steps in to seize and direct the anger. For decades, governments pushed neoliberal economic policies that gutted the working class and middle class. Authoritarian populists exploit by convincing frustrated voters that multiculturalism, immigrants, and progressive elites are the actual cause of their economic suffering.
The far-right offers a fake rebellion. They talk about protecting jobs, wages and national pride to win over voters who simply want secure public services and a decent life. But once in power, these far-right parties have always enforced the exact same extreme neoliberal, free-market policies and corporate tax cuts that caused the misery and inequality in the first place.
The nation-state is the ultimate enforcer of these economic rules, making our domestic politics the most critical battleground. Working people increasingly view the government as run by a few big interests looking out for themselves. Most recently, in June 2026, polling shows that a significant majority of people think “the people who built this mess aren’t going to fix it”.
The left cannot defeat the far-right by defending the broken status quo that is empowering them. We must offer real solutions to these economic contradictions, while simultaneously not abandoning our political values of equality and solidarity. Calling for technocratic solutions — like “independent” central banks — where services are run by experts takes those services out of democratic control, will also fail (as it has done to-date).
Extreme wealth concentration inevitably distorts democracy and empowers the far-right; we need the reverse — more democracy!