Australian political debate remains trapped in a singular and toxic obsession: pushing economic growth higher regardless of the human, social and ecological cost.
However, despite enjoying material wealth far beyond subsistence, Australians report skyrocketing rates of stress, burnout, and disillusionment. The ANUpoll data, for example, shows “life satisfaction is lower than during the COVID-19 lockdowns and more than one in three Australians are finding life difficult or very difficult on their current income”. Most people are also disillusioned with politics.
The promise that endless market growth will deliver human happiness has proved to absolutely be a moral and practical fraud.
Our capitalist economic and political system rests on a series of contradictions: mistaking capital for income, and paper wealth for social prosperity. This is most obvious in recent times with how finite natural resources like coal, gas, farmable topsoil and fresh water, and a stable climate are treated as if they were endlessly replenishing and freely available to be converted into quarterly corporate profit.
A business that consumes its own capital — for example a factory that slowly tears up its machines, and sells the roof and walls — to show a temporary profit is considered bankrupt. Yet our entire economic system is based on the permanent destruction of our natural resources to fund the ultimate of ultimate short-term profits. The market recognises no intrinsic value in clean air, living soil, public housing or healthy communities because they cannot be privately monetised and turned into profit. Happiness and health are simply not profitable.
In Australia, our neoliberal political system pretends that we have solved the “problem of production” through technology and market efficiency — in plain English this means that our political system assumes we have achieved a system that creates genuine, endless abundance of material, consumer goods. Under neoliberalism (and social democracy before), the main political challenge is how to ensure enough profitable demand for the vast quantity of stuff that is being produced.
The reality is very different. We have turned rivers and oceans into sewerage reservoirs, strip-mined farmland and clear-felled forests, dug deep scars into the land to dig up iron ore, copper and lithium. Global industrial production has merely accelerated the destruction of the Earth’s irreplaceable natural resources in the name of economic success — and hidden this planetary destruction behind plastic wrappers on supermarket shelves and the endless scroll of an online marketplace.
Perpetual market-driven growth is fundamentally immoral because it relies on promoting human vice. Capitalist economic logic requires a permanent, insatiable frenzy of greed and envy to coerce — literally and metaphorically — people into buying things they do not need. Neoliberalism has enshrined and institutionalised selfishness as supreme social policy — “greed is good” remains the motto of the ideology — and the mainstream political, business and media class perpetuates and aggressively promotes this ideology, to the detriment of our intelligence and collective public morality.
Australia and the Global North nations are in the dire spasms of the crisis of the status quo precisely because advanced material living standards have failed to deliver human wellbeing. When economics and politics treat treats consumption as the sole purpose of life, it shrinks our freedoms across every plane of our lives. When an economy measures success strictly by how much is consumed, it reduces you and me and our fellow humans to mere macroeconomic units of domestic aggregate demand.
The result is an society that is affluent on paper but plagued by loneliness, mental breakdown, and deep existential frustration.
Neoliberalism and the plutonomy have systematically degraded human work to be mechanistic, atomised and soulless. Instead of work being a creative activity that “ennobles the mind and body”, modern industry redesigns jobs to be soul-destroying mechanical chores — where the repetitive and degrading work was once limited mainly to physical labour, over the past 40 years this has been enforced on knowledge and service workers as well, culminating in what Graeber termed “bullshit jobs”. Reducing workers to minders of automated machines, whether in a factory or a data-centre, serves corporate profit while stripping people of their dignity. This is the opposite of what was promised by generations of global captains of industry and political leaders.
While it may seem like rhetorical over-reach to describe it this way, the capitalist economic system imposes a historically unprecedented level of violence on humanity. This violence can be literal, physical violence where people (mainly workers and women) are press-ganged into factories and mines — especially in the Global South. But the violence is also through large-scale extraction and pollution. The poisoning of communities with forever chemicals or lead-tainted water is a form of violence. The industrial spraying of toxic, synthetic industrial chemicals on our food is a form of violence. The use of nuclear energy and fossil fuels — both in production of the energy, but also the extraction of the fuel from the earth — is a form of violence. Being economically coerced under threat of homelessness and starvation into work at an Amazon fulfilment centre and working until you literally die — that is a form of violence. Being nine times more likely to die early while on “disability, unemployment or carers payments” is a form of violence.
What is the basis and justification for this ideology? Modern “neoclassical” economic theory is founded on the absurd and demonstrably false premise that the person who consumes more is automatically better off.
Common sense demonstrates the exact opposite: true economic rationality aims for maximum human satisfaction with minimum consumption. A society that constantly creates more and more consumer demands also creates permanent anxiety and leaves people feeling perpetually poor.
One of the weapons used to prevent any criticism of neoliberalism is that because you, as an individual, consume within the economy, you are responsible for the problems. For example, the oil company BP invented the concept of “carbon footprint” to divert its responsibility for climate disaster onto individuals and admonish them for driving or flying.
The truth is that the ultra-rich elites — the oligarchs, billionaires, technofeudalists, and oil barons — are directly responsibility for economic, social, climate and environmental crises we experience. This crisis has been imposed upon us because capitalism reduces the infinite complexity of life to a single metric: profit.
When an economic system treats the entire living planet as a mere quarry for private gain, social and ecological devastation is the inevitable outcome.
The business and political elites are responding to growth-induced social and ecological crises by proposing even more violent technology. Whether promoting fossil fuel expansion, or costly high-risk technical fixes like generative AI, the ruling ultra-rich elites want to shift problems from one sphere to another, creating far larger hazards for future generations. You cannot solve a crisis of overconsumption by escalating the pace and violence of production.
The social fragmentation, isolation, anger and frustration we experience in Australia is the consequence of the extreme concentration of wealth and corporate power. The executives in boardrooms of the transnational corporations that control our economy are draining the life from our communities and fuelling the rise of far-right extremism.
Free-market fundamentalism forces people into cities, while destroying regional areas and communities. The mainstream neoliberal policy of favouring capital-intensive, giant cities ensures that the ultra-rich grow even richer while local communities are used as extractive sites of profit.
To fight back, we must reject predatory extraction. People, communities, land, animals, and ecosystems are not disposable inputs into production. We and our environment have value as ends in themselves.
Eventually, we must abandon the destructive logic of endless mass production. Mass production relies on high energy inputs, massive capital, and human degradation and concentrated ownership, combined with collective organising — primarily unions but also other forms of mutuals.
We do not suffer from a lack of technical resources or capacity, but from a failure of moral courage and will.