The Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF), Labor’s flagship policy to address the housing crisis, described by Housing Minister Julie Collins as “life-changing legislation that will help generations of Australians”, has not resulted in a single home being built in the nearly two years since it was passed. This was revealed in Senate Estimates Committee hearings in February, when Labor’s Finance Minister Katy Gallagher tried to claim that the HAFF had “completed” 340 new homes (already a derisory number). She was quickly forced to admit that these were existing properties that had been acquired. 
From the beginning, the HAFF was a fig leaf to hide Labor’s inaction on the housing crisis. What was touted as a $10 billion boost to housing was actually an investment fund, with the money gambled on the stock market and a maximum of $500 million in returns to be spent on housing each year. Labor claimed the HAFF would build 30,000 “social” and “affordable” houses over five years, but <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/05/19/housing-australia-future-fund-10-billion-welfare/">reporting by Crikey</a> showed that it would construct around 14,000 properties at best. With 122,000 people homeless, 172,000 on the social housing waitlists and thousands more people being pushed into housing insecurity each year, the HAFF was only ever going to help a tiny number of people to afford a home.
Two years on and the HAFF hasn’t helped anyone. Anglicare’s 2025 Rental Affordability Snapshot reported that affordability has crashed to record lows. Buying a home is more out of reach than ever: you’d need an income of more than $275,000 a year to get a mortgage for a median-priced house in Sydney, according to a SQM Research report. As this article is being written, Queensland police are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/08/police-rangers-and-excavators-move-in-to-brisbane-parks-as-tent-city-residents-face-eviction">clearing a “tent city”</a> of the homeless in Brisbane’s Musgrave Park. Where these people are supposed to go is anyone’s guess. 
The Liberals have blamed the HAFF’s failure on government bureaucracy and red tape, but this is cynical rubbish coming from a party whose idea of “red tape” is a planning control requiring windows in an apartment or paying construction workers the minimum wage. The Liberals’ real objection to the HAFF is that they don’t think the government should even pretend to be building affordable housing. They’d prefer to dispense with the fig leaf and openly shovel public money into the pockets of the developers and let the market rip. 
The HAFF hasn’t resulted in any properties being built because almost none of the money was ever intended to go directly into the construction of affordable homes. The HAFF is a <a href="https://www.housingaustralia.gov.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/2024-01/HAFFF%20NHAF%20Fact%20Sheet%20-%20Developers%2C%20Builders%2C%20Financiers%20and%20Investors.pdf">financial instrument</a> that gives concessional loans and subsidies to private developers who partner with community housing providers. In other words, it’s a handout to big corporations, which can get cheaper debt to build for-profit developments in return for providing a small number of “social” or “affordable” properties. The government has no control over when the homes are built, or whether they are built at all. Instead, it’s up to developers, whose sole concern is maximising their profits. If the market looks good, then maybe they’ll build, but if not, they’ll wait and build nothing, as we’ve seen for the past two years. 
The HAFF is a failure. If the government’s priority was building affordable homes rather than underwriting corporate profits, there are straightforward measures it could implement now to tackle the crisis. It could spend $10 billion (or more) directly on housing, rather than gambling it on the stock market and drip-feeding the returns. It could establish a public builder to construct new homes, rather than holding itself hostage to the market and developers’ profits. And it could keep the properties as public housing, not hand them off as “social housing” to external providers. 
In the wake of Labor’s election win, Albanese has told the Greens and anyone who cares about housing justice to “get out of our way on housing”. Get out of the way so Labor can do what? Introduce more policies like the HAFF that can’t get a single property built? Give more cash handouts to developers like Build to Rent? Tout more token measures like Help to Buy that drive up house prices? We shouldn’t get out of the way; we should get in the way and fight a Labor government that has made the housing crisis worse.

Martin Barker

A HAFF is not a home

The ALP and the Coalition have spent roughly equal time governing Australia in the last four decades. Several elections in that period have been politically meaningful. Yet, looking at society’s wealthiest people and the companies they run, election outcomes have been largely irrelevant to their fortunes.
No matter how you measure it—the income share of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, the share of national income going to company profits, billionaire wealth as a share of the total economy—the fat cats have gotten fatter decade after decade, regardless of which party was in power.
In 1984, just after the Hawke Labor government took office, the wealthiest 10 percent of the population took home about one-quarter of all domestic income. Corporate revenues were about 21 percent of the annual gross domestic product (the total value of all the goods and services produced in Australia), and the wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 3.5 percent of GDP. 
<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/np6GS-the-rich-have-gotten-richer-for-50-years.png" alt="" /></figure>
Reviewing Business Review Weekly estimates of ruling class accumulated wealth after almost a decade of federal Labor government in 1992, Matthew Eaton and Frank Stilwell wrote in the Journal of Australian Political Economy:
“Overall, the BRW data provides a striking picture of the private wealth amassed by corporate cowboys, paper entrepreneurs, wealthy families and the ‘captains of industry’ in the last decade ... [I]t shows the powerful tendency towards increased wealth concentration.”
That was just the start of it. By 2004, after twelve years of the ALP and eight years of the Coalition (give or take), the wealthiest 10 percent were taking home about one-third of all domestic income—a 30 percent increase in their share. The wealth of the richest 200 Australians was 8.4 percent of GDP—more than double their share in 1984.
After another twelve years of the Coalition and eight of the ALP (give or take), the wealth of the richest 200 Australians in 2024 was 27.3 percent of gross domestic product—more than triple the 2004 figure and eight times more than in 1984. Corporate revenues climbed perpetually as well. If you take 1975 as the starting point, they have gone from 15 percent of GDP to 27 percent—an 80 percent increase.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/Billionaire-pigs-at-the-trough.png" alt="" /></figure>
According to the <a href="https://www.afr.com/rich-list/australia-s-10-richest-people-revealed-20240521-p5jfe4">Australian Financial Review</a>
(which took over publishing the rich list in 2017), the fortunes of the Rich 200 grew by more than 10 percent to $624.9 billion in the last twelve months of Labor in office. Even when accounting for inflation, the growth in the wealth of these people in just one year is more than the wealth the top 200 families of the early 1980s had accumulated in their entire lives.
To put the $624.9 billion figure in a different light: <a href="https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/monthly-employee-earnings-indicator/latest-release">the total wages earned by all 14.5 million people in the labour force across Australia</a> in the last six months is less than what the top 200 are worth.
It’s not just the super-wealthy and big corporations raking it in under the two-party system of Labor-Liberal governments. The upper-middle classes have also thrived.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/australia-s-property-casino.png" alt="" /></figure>
In the 21st century, residential property speculation has become one of the most reliable paths to riches among the wealthy layers below the billionaire class (although some billionaires, such as Harry Triguboff, Australia’s second richest person last year, have certainly built property empires as well).
Both the ALP and the Liberal Party have turned housing into a casino in which investors, on average, never lose. Real property prices have more than doubled since 2000. The biggest beneficiaries? The wealthiest 20 percent of the country, who “earned” three-quarters of the gains in investment property values between 2002 and 2022.<figure><img src="https://newcms.redflag.org.au/files/public/nutso-property-boom-mainly-benefits-the-wealthy.png" alt="" /></figure>
So while the smashing defeat of Peter Dutton’s right-wing Coalition is a tremendous political victory, the ultra-wealthy who have increasingly accumulated the country’s wealth will not lose much sleep over the election result.
They know that, whoever is in office, the big winners will continue to be those with the biggest bank accounts.

Ben Hillier

The biggest winner of the federal election? Capitalists

Whyalla, four hours’ drive north of Adelaide, is a working-class town dominated by steel. The 60-year-old steelworks commands the skyline and underpins the local economy. Just under half of Whyalla’s workforce is dependent on the steelworks and the plant produces three-quarters of Australian structural steel.
Yet the industry is in trouble. Last week, the operation was placed under administration for the second time in less than a decade. British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance, the current owner, owes at least $300 million to creditors, including local contractors and the South Australian government.
The crisis in Whyalla reveals catastrophic failures of the market and of successive governments’ embrace of partnerships with the private sector.
In 2017, GFG purchased the steelworks from its then owner, Arrium. To much fanfare, Gupta marched alongside politicians and union leaders to mark the handover. He promised over $1 billion to expand the plant, decarbonise operations and repair aging infrastructure. Gupta was feted by the corporate press as the “saviour of steel”. Adelaide’s Advertiser predicted “the most exciting time in Whyalla history”.
Gupta returned the plant to profitability, but none of the desperately needed investments materialised. Like Arrium, GFG was unprepared to forego revenue to upgrade the plant. Last year, despite <a href="https://www.amwu.org.au/correction_on_misreporting_of_a_deal_with_whyalla_steelworks">warnings by union members</a>, the blast furnace responsible for smelting was damaged during a botched repair operation. When operations were forced to shut down for many months, GFG responded by axing 56 jobs and slashing wages by 30 percent.
As workers’ pay packets shrunk and contractors were left unpaid, Gupta refused to subject himself to such fiscal restraint. Instead, he announced plans to renovate his $35 million harbourside mansion in Sydney’s Potts Point, including installing a cinema and whiskey tasting room.
Many of the steelworks that comprise Gupta’s debt-ridden global empire are idle, bankrupt or for sale. GFG has pursued a dramatic restructuring program following the collapse of its primary financier, Greensill Capital, in 2021. Falling commodity prices have also hit company profits. 
Europe’s IndustriAll trade union federation <a href="https://news.industriall-europe.eu/Article/1122">warns</a> that thousands of steel jobs in Czechia, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere have been lost at plants owned by GFG. Workers in Whyalla and abroad are being asked to pay for a crisis of their bosses’ making.
To guarantee jobs and ensure the long-term viability of manufacturing, the steelworks should immediately be placed in public hands and run to benefit workers. Despite pledging $2.4 billion to help entice a private buyer, Labor has ruled out nationalisation. Such a course of action would mean breaking with corporate interests and the public-private partnerships that have been so devastating for Whyalla’s workers.
Whyalla, the largest of three towns in South Australia’s once-powerful “Iron Triangle”, is in long-term decline. A former industrial centre of steelmaking and shipbuilding, today the region is burdened by high unemployment and economic disadvantage.
In 2016, government support to keep the steelworks open was contingent on cutting wages. A 10 percent pay cut was <a href="http://redflag.org.au/node/5535">accepted by union officials</a>, who have been more than ready to go along with the slashing of wages and conditions with no guarantee of job retention in return. 
It’s a familiar story. In 2018, Port Pirie’s Nyrstar lead smelter shed more than 100 jobs despite a $291 million state government guarantee. Nor did wage freezes and billions of dollars of public subsidies prevent the automotive industry pulling out of Australia.
While the government’s latest promise of funding has been greeted with understandable relief, many locals are right to remain cynical about their future. With more public money being thrown at private investors ahead of a possible sale of the steelworks, the promise of well-paid, long-term jobs remains elusive.

Nix Herriot

Trouble at the Whyalla steelworks

For most of the time since the 2022 federal election, the Labor Party has held office in almost every state and territory. Such a strong political position could have been used to introduce reforms that would help ordinary people. Instead, the party has ruled for the rich, while overseeing the most significant attack on working-class living standards in generations. By nearly every measure, workers, renters, pensioners and students have gone backwards under Labor, while the billionaires’ wealth has increased.
The private rental market has been one of the greatest sources of insecurity and poverty for the one-third of the population that rent, while being a boon to the roughly 8 percent of the population who are property investors. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese seems proud to be part of that elite 8 percent, having recently bought his second investment property for a cool $4.3 million (and listing it at $1,500 per week). 
As a property investor, he also enjoys a share of more than $20 billion in annual tax concessions. So while he and his cabinet of landlords (together, they own 57 properties) continue to rig the market in their own favour, rental prices have hit record highs under the current government. The median rental price in Australia now sits at $640 per week, up $43 per week in a year.
Of the one-third of the population with a mortgage, most are from the middle classes. But thirteen consecutive interest rate rises have been a colossal hit for working-class households that owe the banks. Since just before the pandemic, the average monthly repayment has increased by $2,100, according to Mozo, a financial comparison site. According to Roy Morgan, around 27 percent of owner-occupiers are living in mortgage stress. Meanwhile, the banks are recording record profits. The Commonwealth Bank, for example, which holds a quarter of all Australian mortgages, just announced a half-yearly after-tax profit of more than $5 billion.
Pensioners are another group that has faced the brunt of the cost-of-living crisis. Around 2.6 million people are on the age pension, and millions of others are dependent on other forms of pension payments. Most pensioners own their own homes, which will not be true, if current trends continue, when today’s young people retire. Twelve percent of pensioners rent—and most live in poverty. It’s particularly bad for pensioners who rent in the private market: two-thirds live in poverty. 
This is the grim reality for the working class under Labor. Even when the government has offered crumbs as “cost-of-living relief”, it has served corporate interests. For example, the much-touted energy bill rebates do nothing to put downward pressure on energy prices. Instead, the energy companies continue charging exorbitant prices, but taxpayers subsidise them.
The cost-of-living crisis, however, has not been a crisis for all. The billionaires of Australia—there are nearly 50 of them—have used their political and economic control to turn the misery of millions into new yachts and mansions. The government helps to facilitate this system through a network of tax breaks available only to the rich and major corporations. 
Tax office data show that, in the 2022-23 financial year, nearly one-third of big companies paid no tax. The top ten of those companies by total income—including household names like Qantas, Virgin, NewsCorp, Netflix and Mastercard—had a combined $56 billion in income yet did not pay a cent in tax.
This system has caused the wealth disparity in Australia to reach eye-watering levels. According to a recent Monash University report, the top 1 percent of the population now own 24 percent of all wealth, and the top 10 percent own 57 percent.
As rage-inducing as the current state of affairs is, there is nothing natural about it. The rich and powerful consciously work to ensure that society’s wealth flows to them while denying it to the workers who produce it. 
They do so because they can. The only way to begin challenging their power is by building a political force that looks to a different power—the working class. When workers go on strike, they show that, without their labour, the whole system comes grinding to a halt. This is the power that can seriously challenge the system. Building this type of political force is today’s most important task for anyone who wants to challenge the rule of the rich and build a better society.

Tom Sullivan

Under Labor, workers suffer while billionaires rake it in

There’s an obvious wealth divide in Australia. Drive through or use Google street view to peruse Perth’s Cottesloe, Melbourne’s Toorak or Sydney’s Darling Point. You will find no shortage of decadent mansions worth more than any working-class person will likely make in their entire life. Walk through any capital city CBD. You’ll see flashy shops selling luxury items to the richest few alongside desperate people begging for loose change.
The <a href="https://www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/news/2024/04/wealth-gap-widening-new-report-acoss">Inequality in Australia 2024</a> report, published in April by the Australian Council of Social Service and the University of New South Wales, estimates that the richest 10 percent of households have on average fifteen times as much wealth as the bottom 60 percent. Almost half of Australia’s wealth is concentrated in the top decile, and less than a fifth in the bottom six.
Home ownership, or lack thereof, is the biggest contributor to the wealth gap. This is unsurprising, given that many working-class people find it difficult to find an affordable home to rent, let alone buy. And when they do rent, they’re probably paying that top 10 percent, who own (or rather, hoard) two-thirds of all investment properties by value.
Workers who do own their home are usually still paying off the mortgage, and are therefore subject to the whims of the banks that set their interest rates. Being squeezed for cash by the banks via home loan repayments is not a problem if you own your home outright and are adding a second, third, fourth, or fifth property to your portfolio.
Inequality in Australia 2024 compares household wealth in 2023 to 2003. To put the findings bluntly: the rich are getting richer while most Australians are falling further behind them. Since 2003, the top 10 percent accrued almost half of the overall growth in household wealth. Their average wealth went from $2.8 million to $5.2 million per household, an increase of 84 percent. The bottom 60 percent went from an average of $222,000 to $343,000—a 55 percent increase.
Why is wealth accumulating at the top? One part of the problem is government policy that favours the rich.
Negative gearing and the capital gains tax (CGT) discount are the most notorious housing policies. The latter was introduced by John Howard’s federal Liberal government in 2000, but every subsequent government, Coalition and Labor alike, has defended them.
Negative gearing lets investors deduct any losses on properties they own (including interest payments on property loans) from their taxable income. This subsidises investors and shields them from needing to sell their extra houses.
The CGT discount favours the wealthy. It lets investors who profit from capital assets (investment properties are one category) halve the amount of tax paid on that profit if they hold the asset for twelve months or more. By the Treasury’s own estimates, this left more than $23 billion in the coffers of property investors in the 2022-23 financial year instead of in public hands, where it could have been used to boost social welfare or—here’s an idea—build public housing.
Both of these policies primarily benefit landlords, especially big landlords. They make it less risky and more lucrative for investors to speculate on the housing market. They create an incentive to accumulate properties and endlessly push up house prices, driving the wedge between the wealthy and the rest of us ever deeper.
Scrapping negative gearing and the CGT discount would slow down the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a minority and alleviate the housing crisis. Even better would be forcing landlords to sell homes that are vacant for too long. But none of this is likely when parliament is full of landlords. That includes PM Anthony Albanese, who this year evicted a tenant from one of his several properties so he could sell it and put the money toward the $4.3 million mansion he bought in October.
Beyond real estate, other factors in wealth inequality include savings, superannuation, and assets like cars. These are all obviously heavily dependent on a household’s income level and necessary expenditures like rent and mortgage repayments.
To address this area of inequality, the simplest solution is a real wage rise for workers. In 2021 inflation exploded ahead of average pay rises. The Consumer Price Index (CPI, how much more expensive basic goods are than a year prior) peaked at just under 8 percent at the end of 2022, while wages were growing by 3.4 percent on average, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Only this year did wages start rising more than CPI, and then only barely. 
So Australian workers have been set back by years of real pay cuts. But the Labor government doesn’t seem at all interested in doing anything to get them caught back up to where they were, let alone substantially ahead. Many of their “cost-of-living relief” policies don’t do anything about inequality. For instance, the Stage 3 tax cuts gave all taxpayers an income boost, including the rich, who gained the most.
It’s not as though Albanese’s hands are tied. His government could raise welfare payments to the minimum wage and wipe out student debt. It could give public sector workers enough of a pay rise to make up for years of declining wages, which would put pressure on private employers to do the same.
It could pay for all this by taxing the living daylight out of the rich. Undoing the Stage 3 cuts for the top earners would give the budget $148 billion extra to work with over the next ten years—turning the dial back the other way and increasing their taxes would net even more.
If we wait around for governments to be nicer, nothing will ever get better. Things meaningfully improve only when the fucked-over fight back. And the most powerful force in this category is the working class.
Workers can strike to demand higher wages. By refusing to work, they hit their boss in the only place the boss cares about: the bottom line. The recent strikes by workers at Woolworths distribution warehouses should be defended and celebrated as the path forward for winning better pay and conditions.
But as powerful as they are, strikes are rare. The leaders of the trade unions, the highest body of which is the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), have, for the most part, collaborated with governments and bosses, rather than fighting them, for decades. 
Any discussion about the working class’s declining living standards has to account for the failures of its organised leadership. Concessions can be forced, and bad policies overturned, but it takes a fight. Instead, this year, the ACTU has been helping and justifying the government’s hostile, undemocratic takeover and hamstringing of the CFMEU, one of Australia’s strongest unions.
But the main reason there’s a wealth divide in Australia is not government policy or the weakness of the trade union movement.
The main cause of inequality is capitalism itself. Capitalism is based on a tiny minority of the population owning and controlling society’s productive economic assets. Most of the rest of the population have to work for the capitalists, making their profits for them and getting paid relative scraps in return.
In capitalism, everything is commodified and organised via the market—including housing. For capitalism, houses exist primarily, not for living in, but for making money from. The housing market being rigged for landlords isn’t just because of negative gearing and the CGT discount. That housing is bought and sold on a market means it will always favour those with the most economic resources.
In a society organised around profit, workers will never get a fair deal. Every cent of profit the bosses keep for themselves is in effect stolen from the people who actually did the work. So, if we want an equal society without poverty and destitution, we need to end capitalism.

Danica Rachel

Why do so few have so much wealth?

The annual hysterics about a “war on Christmas” is a tradition almost as sacred as the Boxing Day shopping spree. This year, before we even broke December, Australian media, politicians and big business had the finger pointed at pro-Palestine activists and striking Woolworths warehouse workers.
Victorian Labor Premier Jacinta Allan was “furious” at “morons” for “politicising Christmas”, telling <a>3AW radio on 15 November</a> that “we cannot let ugly protests ruin a beautiful Christmas tradition”, after a handful of Palestine solidarity protesters announced plans to disrupt the annual unveiling of Myers’ Christmas-themed storefront displays in Melbourne.
In the end, only a dozen gathered to protest on 17 November. Yet word somehow reached the British Isles, the UK tabloid Daily Mail
running a headline just long enough to convey the enormity of the crime: “Shocking moment 70-year Christmas tradition is interrupted as clown-faced protester leads disgraceful demonstration in front of iconic display in Melbourne—ruining the fun for families”.
Next were the unionised Woolworths warehouse workers. On 14 November, the Sydney Morning Herald began warning of the <a>“Strike threat to Christmas liquor supplies in NSW and Victoria”</a> as the United Workers Union prepared for an indefinite shutdown of five Woolies warehouses.
The Australian Industry Group (AIG), a national association of employers, came out swinging for all the little boys and girls on the verge of Tiny Tim-dom. “Stop holding Australian families to ransom”, pleaded AIG chief executive Innes Wilcox. “[They] are struggling through soaring costs of living and trying to provide a happy Christmas for their loved ones. This is the last thing they need after a stressful year.”
The establishment is up in arms over all this unbridled Grinchian bloodlust. Interrupting grocery store super-profits, obstructing retail chain dioramas: What hallowed holiday custom will these godless, tinsel-burning leftie ferals target next? Will climate activists pinprick Big W’s stock of inflatable Santas-in-boardshorts (<a>$99.99 a pop</a>) and officially kill Christmas?
The pages of Red Flag might be an unusual place to stand up for the right to enjoy a bloody good Christmas season. But permit this socialist rag to ask: Who’s really ruining the festive season?
Stock is quickly returning to Woolworths shelves after the conclusion of a heroic seventeen-day strike. Yet who can afford any of it? <a>Comprehensive research</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for its inquiry into supermarket price gouging calculated a 20 percent spike in grocery prices since 2019. The result is that 56 percent of the population plan to cut back on Christmas food and drink this year, with 48 percent buying fewer gifts, according to <a>a November survey</a> by the Salvation Army.
“Cossie livs” (slang for cost-of-living) Christmas, already last year’s theme, is set to get much worse as price hikes and the housing crisis churn on. Consumers plan to spend 16 percent less on gifts, decorations, travel and leisure over this holiday period than last—a drop to $1,002 from $1,192, according to <a>Deloitte’s Retail Holiday Report 2024. </a>
It’s the opposite story for company executives and shareholders. SANTA (Stopping At Nothing To Accumulate) has been very good to them this year. “Australian families struggling through the cost of living” has meant record super-profits for everyone over at the Australian Industry Group.
Take Woolworths. New CEO Amanda Bardwell has snatched a starting salary of <a>$2.15 million this year</a>, with up to $6.9m in possible bonuses. This would outstrip disgraced ex-CEO Brad “<a>Can’t Get Throughcci One Interviewcci</a>“ Banducci’s total take home pay of $8.6m for 2023. That’s equivalent to almost 150,000 Christmas lunches, based on an average cost of $62 per person calculated by YouGov. 
In fact, the company’s record profits last financial year—an eye-boiling $1.7 billion—could buy a sumptuous meal for every single person in the country. Meanwhile, the Salvation Army’s survey found that half of those forced to access charity over the holiday period will be doing so for the first time. A Perth-based community food program called Backpack Buddies, which provides children in need with food for school, <a>told the ABC</a> in late November that demand has risen “from a handful of children at the start of this year to 135 each week”, and predicted being totally overwhelmed come Christmas.
At least we can all enjoy time spent with our families, right? Wrong. To make up for lost cash, a record 7 million people, or 57 percent of the working population, intend to <a>work through Christmas</a> to make ends meet. According to survey data by jobs listing provider Indeed, this is the first time that 5 million of them have ever considered it. It sounds like, to quote AIG again, the “last thing they need after a stressful year”. But Indeed career expert Sally McKibbin told Sky News it’s “positive news” that so many workers are hustling all the way to December 31 to “weather cost-of-living pressures”.
For the rich, every day is Christmas. For a growing number of workers, Christmas is starting to look like any other day.
That is, if you can get the work. Reserve Bank governor Michelle Bullock has told the country interest rates will remain high over Christmas, until the number of unemployed increases by at least another 75,000. ’Tis the season to be jobless.
“If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population”, Bullock said in a 28 November address. Apologies: I have Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol open next to the newspaper. That was Ebenezer Scrooge, not Michelle Bullock. She <a>put it more politely</a>: “Conditions in the labour market remain tighter than what would be consistent with low and stable inflation”.
Looks like everyone who doesn’t exploit another for a living is on the naughty list this year. What surprise will the bosses put in your stocking? A real wage cut? An extra shift on Christmas Day? Or maybe redundancy?
Just don’t expect the traditional lump of coal: they need to burn all that. The federal Labor government on 3 December refused a legal request to consider the climate impacts of three new mines, giving the green light to about 850 million tonnes of greenhouse emissions from the Boggabri, Caval Ridge and Lake Vermont projects, and providing an <a>early Christmas present</a> to the coal companies. It just wouldn’t be a 2020s Christmas without the risk of bushfire Armageddon.
If you’re thinking of cooling off from the record-breaking heat, just be careful where you swim. In an unprecedented move to stop kayak-borne protesters blocking ships to and from the world’s largest coal port, NSW Labor went so far as to impose <a>a four-day exclusion zone</a> around Newcastle harbour in late November, threatening fines and arrests for even setting foot in the water. This Boxing Day dip, ensure no-one nearby is trying to make the world a better place: it might be illegal to paddle there if you aren’t a gigantic coal-bearing SS Grinch.
It could be worse; you could be a little baby born in Bethlehem. None of our Christmas crusaders seem to care about a literal war on the scriptural birthplace of Jesus Christ: surrounded by an apartheid wall and facing down violent settlers <a>accelerating their land theft</a> under cover of an ever expanding genocide. Just last month, Israeli occupation forces fired tear gas at young Palestinian schoolgirls in a village adjoining Bethlehem. “Israeli soldiers hurled the <a>toxic gas canisters</a>
directly as the students entered the school grounds, causing them to experience suffocation and breathing difficulties”, a 17 November report from Middle East news website The New Arab reads. 
Yet for Labor Party leaders, calling attention to the crimes of an ironclad Australian ally is ruining the true meaning of Christmas: gawking at tacky window dioramas of upmarket retail chains. “[They’re] more distressed about Christmas windows than about stopping Israel’s genocide and its war on Palestinian children”, said Nasser Mashni, president of the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network.
While millions struggle to eat, drink and be merry—or even just stay alive—this Christmas, be thankful that the strikes are over, the protests are repressed, and the mahogany tables of our betters can once more groan under the weight of champagne, cocaine and caviar. 
If you’re lucky, you might get 31 December off to see in a New Year of price hikes, wage cuts, job losses and record quarterly profits. The Grinch will be gone by then, but Australia’s bosses and their lackeys will be watching the fireworks from helicopters and superyachts, plotting to steal another whole year through.

April Holcombe

How the rich stole Christmas

Living standards in Australia have been pushed down more than in any comparable country over the last three years, the economy has been in a per capita recession for two years, and households are among the most indebted in the world. 
Working-class households have it worse than the most quoted statistics suggest and have been left with little breathing space after decades of increasing net wealth transfers from employees to bosses.
The findings—drawn from Red Flag’s analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Reserve Bank—paint a diabolical picture. The following charts tell the story. 
<div id="datawrapper-vis-yqbv2"><figure><img src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/yqbv2/full.png" alt="" /></figure></div>
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<a href="https://www.datawrapper.de/_/yqbv2/?v=4" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Click here for an interactive version of the chart</a>. 
According to OECD data, wages have failed dismally to rise fast enough to compensate for consumer price rises, mortgage rate increases and a higher working-class tax burden. Real household disposable incomes are more than 10 percent lower than in 2021.
While that year’s high came from significant government subsidies and historically low interest rates during the worst phase of the global pandemic, incomes today are lower than before Covid-19 swept the world. In fact, they are not much higher than they were ten years ago. 
“The impact on our living standards has been far greater than anywhere else. There is no argument that the fall is bigger than anything we have seen since 1959 [when the living standards’ index was started]”, economist Chris Richardson told the Australian
newspaper last month.
“Real disposable income” measures the money left after inflation, taxes and mortgage payments are subtracted from wages. Household incomes across the rest of the OECD—sometimes called the club of rich countries—have, on average, increased solidly over the last two years. In the US, incomes are about 25 percent higher than in 2014.
For Australian workers, it’s been a lost decade.
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The decline in incomes has not been uniform. Households with more savings than debts have been able to increase spending because of higher interest rates. But households with high levels of debt and those with little savings have copped the worst of rising prices and rates. 
Economists, politicians and the media (Red Flag included) usually highlight the gap between wage growth and the consumer price index. However, the Bureau of Statistics has other measures of price inflation, the “cost of living indexes”, which measure the effects of rising prices and interest rates on different sections of the population.
Its employee living cost index has been running far higher than CPI inflation for more than two years, which helps to explain why household incomes have been destroyed so rapidly. While general inflation peaked at 7.8 percent in 2022, workers’ living costs climbed 9.6 percent per annum at their peak in 2023. 
They increased by almost 2 percentage points above CPI inflation over the last year (to the start of October); they were 3.6 percentage points higher over the previous year.
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The Australian economy has continued to expand, albeit slowly, primarily because of government spending and high immigration. However, economic growth has been slower than population growth, meaning that output and income per person have been declining.
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In fact, growth has gone backwards in eight of the last nine quarters, the most prolonged per capita recession in decades. “Over the past 44 years, when GDP has remained flat over the year, unemployment rises on average around 1.1 percentage points”, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/grogonomics/2024/dec/05/australia-gdp-figures-economy-september-quarter-abs">Guardian
columnist Greg Jericho points out today</a>.
The unemployment rate is currently 4.1 percent, up from 3.5 percent two years ago. It has been lower in just two of the past 50 years: 2008 and 1974. Which makes it all the more astounding that living standards have gone backwards so much. If people start losing their jobs in greater numbers, the economic pain will only be magnified.
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The more immediate issues noted above should be framed within two longer-term trends. First is the incredible build-up of household debt over several decades. 
The ratio of household debt to annual income is 128 percent higher than 30 years ago. This primarily reflects out-of-this-world increases in property prices, which have climbed much faster than wages over the same period.
Australian households are among the most indebted in the world. But only one-third of households, primarily working class and middle class, are paying a mortgage. They bear most of the debt burden.
In contrast to the US, the UK and the Euro area, where debt levels have declined in the last decade, Australian working households have taken on increasing liabilities to secure a place to live. And with the interest rate on most housing loans changing in line with the Reserve Bank’s “cash rate” (its benchmark interest rate for lending between financial institutions), small movements on such large debts translate into significant changes in mortgage holders’ monthly interest payments.
No wonder the living cost index has climbed much faster than inflation.
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A second long-term trend is the declining share of national income going to the working class. According to ABS figures, the share going to workers is 16 percent lower than 50 years ago; the bosses’ share is 65 percent higher.
The shifts have been expressed primarily in rising income and wealth inequality. For example, a recent Australia Institute research report, <a href="https://australiainstitute.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/P1689-Wealth-and-inequality-Updated.pdf">Wealth and inequality in Australia</a>, estimated that the richest 20 percent of Australians own more than 63 percent of the wealth, while the poorest 20 percent own just 0.4 percent.
Wealth inequality measures not just the accumulation of riches in fewer hands but the relative decline of working-class economic resources, which resulted in the lack of a significant financial “buffer” for hard times like recent years. 
Recovery?
While real incomes might finally be starting to rise for some groups, many working-class households could struggle to make up lost ground this side of 2030. It is still unclear when the Reserve Bank will begin cutting interest rates and where they will land once the cutting is complete. 
It’s unclear how high unemployment will go, or when the per capita recession will end. Certainly, the huge debts will not be paid down anytime soon (they grew again in the last quarter). And to cap it off, wage growth is now slowing, which means any gains in real wages and incomes will be smaller.
It’s also not clear whether Australia will continue to avoid an absolute economic contraction, as it has, for the most part, for more than 30 years, unlike pretty much every other economy in the world. If that luck runs out, many people will end up pining for the current hard times, which might look like better times by comparison.

Five charts showing the destruction of workers’ living standards

The federal Labor government has overseen the biggest fall in living standards in at least half a century. And Australian household income has dropped by more than in any comparable country in the last two years, <a>according to a recent report</a> published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Young people in particular <a>have been screwed</a> by rising rents and falling wages.
People are rightly pissed. According to <a>polling in mid-October</a>, Anthony Albanese’s net approval rating has fallen to a new low of negative 14 percent, and the ALP’s primary vote has sunk to 31 percent. 
Yet, if you took the Labor PR machine seriously, you’d think the government was doing all it could to help people economically. There is endless talk about “cost-of-living relief” and bragging about the measures Labor has implemented. But what has the government really done?
The prime minister’s website has a special “cost of living relief” page that highlights every policy Albanese is trying to promote. At first glance, the listed measures appear to be designed to put more money into the pockets of struggling people. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a different story. Many big-ticket relief items are just handouts to big business—a transfer of tax dollars to mega-corporations already raking in super-profits from charging higher prices. 
Take the energy rebate, which reduces annual household energy bills by $300. While it has helped millions struggling with eye-watering bills, it is also a $3.5 billion gift from taxpayers to the energy companies that have been ripping us off in the first place. And it’s hardly one they need. AGL, Australia’s largest electricity generator, recorded a 189 percent increase in underlying profit to $812 million in the last financial year. Origin Energy’s profit surged 172 percent to $1.2 billion, on top of an 83.5 percent increase the previous year. They are raking it in. 
The government could have capped energy prices, or imposed a super-profits tax on the energy behemoths, and saved the tax money for something else, like housing. But it is too wedded to the idea that companies have an ordained right to extract as much profit as possible through the market, regardless of the social consequences. 
It took the same approach to child care. Last year, the Child Care Subsidy was lifted and broadened to include more households. Once again, the government is just handing stacks of money—$10.7 billion, to be precise—to, in many cases, private for-profit childcare centres.
A <a>report released at the end of last year</a> by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission found that any financial benefits from increases to the government subsidy were largely, if not wholly, eroded by increased day-care fees. It also found that “childcare fees across all services have grown faster than inflation and wages since the introduction of the subsidy”.
Like the energy companies, childcare companies are rolling in cash. G8 Education, Australia’s biggest listed childcare company, posted a 53 percent profit increase in 2023 and paid its CEO a $3 million package. That same year, G8 increased its fees by nearly 25 percent. 
So the government’s great plan means that parents are out of pocket just the same, the Treasury is poorer, while the companies increase their margins. Great “relief” if you can get it.
Then there’s the housing crisis, which needs no introduction. Labor promises to fix it by building 1.2 million homes by the end of the decade through the $32 billion Homes for Australia plan. It’s already failing: forecasts from Oxford Economics in July showed that the government will miss its target by more than 20 percent. 
More to the point, Labor’s entire plan follows the same investor- and developer-first model that created the housing crisis in the first place.
This is most notable with the Housing Australia Future Fund (HAFF)—Labor’s answer to affordable housing. It’s another handout to private developers, construction firms and investors. The HAFF fact sheet repeatedly states that “one of the key objectives of the program is to encourage private investment in social and affordable housing”. The model is designed to get private investors to team up with a social housing provider to purchase, renovate or build new housing stock by handing over government money to ensure each project remains profitable. 
Take it from Conscious Investment Management chief investment officer Matthew Tominc, who has established a $200 million fund to cash in on the plan. He told the Financial Review that the HAFF would likely offer investors a net 8 to 12 percent return, guaranteeing no losses. So the big winner will again be—you guessed it, the investor class.
As for anyone not in the social housing sphere, which is most people, the government is basically hoping and praying that spending money on infrastructure will encourage developers to build more homes. But it’s doing nothing to ensure those homes will be affordable—the generous tax concessions and other incentives for investors remain untouched.
Another category of cost-of-living relief is the Stage 3 Tax Cuts, which could also be called “tax cuts that will help ordinary people a bit, but disproportionately benefit the rich and further entrench economic inequality”. Accurate, if a bit wordy. 
Finally, there are measures that aren’t objectionable but are so small that it’s almost like the government is playing a joke on the rest of us. 
For instance, the government claims it’s “delivering a better deal for renters” by raising Rent Assistance. The payment is available only to eligible welfare recipients—a fraction of the renting population. It’s also minuscule—it was raised by 10 percent to a maximum rate of $211 a fortnight for a single person with no children (the current median fortnightly rent is about $1,250). 
Eligibility for the single-parent payment has been extended to when the youngest child turns 14, up from 8, but still below 16—where it was when the Gillard Labor government reduced it in 2013. It’s also a maximum of $987.70 per fortnight. How anyone is supposed to live on that is one of society’s great mysteries. And despite a recommendation from the government’s own Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee, the below-the-poverty-line JobSeeker payment has hardly been touched.
Wage rises also slide into the “did you even notice?” category. The government congratulates itself for backing a 3.75 percent pay rise for minimum- and award-wage workers and a 15 percent pay rise for aged care workers. It’s good that the workers got a pay rise, but it’s hardly enough. 
Even with two significant wage increases, aged care workers will still receive only $25 to $30 an hour, depending on their role. We’re talking about small bumps to extremely low wages. As of July, average real wages for all workers were still nearly 5 percent lower than before the pandemic.
To top off this list of do-little policies, Labor’s latest offering is banning debit card transaction fees, which banks charge when you buy something with a debit card. Obviously, the move is supportable. But touting it as a game-changing measure is absurd. 
It’s like the Albanese government is parodying itself. In the last financial year, Australian banks made $40 billion in profit, an 8 percent increase on the previous year. Prolonged high interest rates have been a windfall for the so-called Big Four—the Commonwealth Bank, ANZ, NAB and Westpac—which charge a higher interest rate on loans than they pay into savings accounts. 
Debit fees range from 0.5 to 1 percent of the cost of a transaction. Sure, we should all hang on to that money, but will it make the slightest difference to the crushing weight of rising rents, mortgages, bills, groceries and everything else? No.
Labor is taking us for a ride. They know there’s a crippling cost-of-living crisis and they don’t want to take on big business, but they also want to win the next election. So they’re giving handouts to big business, throwing pennies at the rest of us and calling it relief.

Eleanor Morley

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

If you have been following the commercial press, you would think that the Labor government is trying to fix the housing crisis. Headlines such as “Why this is the housing fight that Albanese had to have” and “Bulldozer PM blasts Senate in election clash on housing” in the Sydney Morning Herald were prompted by parliament blocking two bills that Labor says are “critical” to addressing the housing crisis. 
The Help to Buy scheme promises to assist up to 10,000 households a year to buy a house through a shared equity scheme, in which the government provides 30 to 40 percent of the purchase price. In a press release promoting the bill, Minister for Housing Julie Collins said, “Right across the country Help to Buy will be life-changing, bringing home ownership back into reach for thousands of Australians, particularly renters”. But the scheme is tiny and at best would help only 0.2 percent of renters or 8 percent of the estimated 120,000 first-home buyers each year. 
Government measures like these also push up house prices. The existing First Home Buyers Grant, which gives eligible purchasers $10,000 towards the price of their first property, is estimated by Deakin University academics to have increased the median price of a house by more than $57,000 between 2002 and 2012. The Grattan Institute has said that the effect of Help to Buy on house prices will be only a marginal 0.016 percent. But as economist Saul Eslake told SBS News: “The fact that it’s only a small percentage is a reflection of the fact that this scheme isn’t going to help many people”.
Far from being “life-changing” for renters, Labor’s flagship housing bill is a tiny drop in a vast ocean of housing unaffordability. It’s a scheme so insignificant that it will help only a tiny number of people buy a house, and so market oriented that if it did help more people, it would make housing more, not less, expensive. 
Labor’s other measure, the Build to Rent bill, is a handout to property developers wanting to cash in on the lucrative rental market. It offers tax concessions to multibillion-dollar companies like Mirvac and Meriton to build apartments that will be rented out at market rates. In return, developers must designate just 10 percent of apartments as “affordable housing”. The meaning of “affordable” is stretched to breaking point at 75 percent of market rents, which would be $558 a week if based on the median rent in Sydney—that’s 42 percent of the median weekly income. 
In case even that is too much of a drain on developer profits, they will have to keep the apartments “affordable” only for fifteen years, after which they can charge however much they want. A similar scheme, Kevin Rudd’s National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS), gave developers $11,000 for every $4,000 in “reduced” rents. The Grattan Institute estimates that one third of the $3 billion of public money spent on the scheme went to developers as windfall profits. Like the NRAS, Labor’s Build to Rent bill is a public subsidy for developers that will only increase rents, not lower them. 
Two reports released this week highlight the depth of the crisis that these schemes will fail to address. PropTrack data on the housing market reported in the Guardian showed that only 13 percent of homes across the country are affordable for a household with a median income, down from 40 percent only three years ago and the lowest share since records began in 1995. For those on low incomes, there is no prospect of being able to buy a home, an estimated 20 percent of Australian households being shut out of the housing market entirely. 
The Everybody’s Home campaign’s “Priced Out” report confirmed the dire situation for renters. Record rents, combined with stagnant wages and benefits payments, mean that those on the age pension would be left with just $8 a day if paying the median rent, while those on the minimum wage would be giving 68 percent of their income to a landlord. 
So far, the Greens have blocked Labor’s housing bills in the Senate and demanded that the government introduce rent caps and reduce tax breaks for investors. In response, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has painted the Greens as “unreasonable” populists who are letting “the perfect be the enemy of the good” and siding with the Liberals to form a “No-alition” (yes, Albanese’s rhetoric really is that bad) of the “extreme right” and “extreme left” to stop young people buying a house. The government has even threatened an early election if these policies are not passed.
But the Greens were right to block the bills, and they should continue to refuse to pass them. Labor’s Help to Buy and Build to Rent are not small steps towards fixing the housing crisis, they are backward steps that hide Labor’s inaction, put more money in developers’ pockets and do nothing to help the millions struggling to pay for their homes.

Labor’s housing bills do nothing to fix the crisis

When the Reserve Bank announced its latest decision not to cut interest rates, governor Michelle Bullock told homeowners struggling to pay their mortgages that “some may ultimately make the difficult decision to sell their homes”. Three weeks earlier, the Commonwealth Bank announced profits of $9.1 billion for 2023-24. This is the housing crisis in 2024. Millions of households are struggling to pay rising rents and mortgage repayments, while profits soar for the banks and wealthy landlords.
This dire situation for workers, students and the poor can seem uncontrollable, the result of market forces that we have no power to shape. But here are five things we could do to fix the housing crisis now. 
1. End tax concessions to investors
The federal budget is estimated to lose $165 billion over the next ten years in tax concessions to investors. The negative gearing and capital gains tax exemptions subsidise rich landlords by allowing them to write off interest payments and agent fees from their income tax and walk away with tax-free profits when they sell. 
When interest rates rise, a working-class family that owns only their own home bears the full cost of increased mortgage payments, while the government gives rich investors a subsidy by allowing them to claim the increased payments off their income tax. The tax concessions also drive up house prices by helping wealthy investors to outbid those trying to buy a home to live in. This entrenches the power of a tiny section of society whose main interest is for house prices to rise as high as possible so they can make a bigger profit when they sell. 
Ending the tax concessions to wealthy landlords wouldn’t cost a cent; instead, it would mean billions of extra dollars that could be used to build housing and result in cheaper house prices overall.
2. Freeze and cap rents
More than 30 percent of Australian households now rent, and an increasing number of people have no prospect of ever buying a home. Renters are at the mercy of price-gouging landlords who have increased prices to record levels over the past three years. The median price in Sydney is now $750 a week, up more than 11 percent in a year, and there are no properties in the entire country that are affordable for a person on Newstart or the Disability Support Pension. 
Instead of letting landlords fleece more money from people’s need for a home, the government could intervene to freeze rents for two years and limit future rent increases. This has been done before, when the federal government introduced rent and eviction controls during the Second World War. And such measures are popular, with 60 percent of people surveyed by the Guardian
in 2023 supporting a rent freeze. 
3. Build public housing
Over the past 40 years, governments across Australia, both Labor and Liberal, have gutted public housing. Years of underfunding and sell-offs have reduced public housing to only 4.2 percent of all housing stock, while the number of people urgently needing this housing has increased by 50 percent in just the past three years. There are hundreds of thousands of people on waiting lists across the country who face a ten or twenty-year wait for a property.
Building the 950,000 properties that the City Futures Research Centre estimates are required to satisfy demand would also put downward pressure on rents generally, as hundreds of thousands of tenants exited the private rental market. It would also be a step towards asserting that the government has a responsibility to meet people’s most basic needs and weaken the dominance of the market and profits as the sole determinants of whether a person has a home to live in. 
This would cost a lot, hundreds of billions of dollars, but the money is there. For instance, ending Labor’s commitment to building nuclear submarines would free up an estimated $500 billion, more than enough to build all the needed homes.
4. Seize the empty homes
A recent survey by Prosper Australia estimates that in Melbourne alone, there are 100,000 empty or underused properties, enough to house those on the public housing waiting list in Victoria twice over. It is a scandal that amid a housing crisis, wealthy investors can let homes sit empty, waiting for house prices to go up while people sleep on the street. But this is the madness of allowing the market and profit to determine whether people have a home, instead of building and distributing housing based on people’s needs. 
The only concern for rich property owners is how much money they can make, not whether the property gets used for its obvious purpose—to provide shelter. If investors can buy low and sell high, why deal with the inconvenience and expense of making the property liveable or dealing with tenants who cause wear and tear to their asset? These empty properties should be taken from the wealthy and used to house those living on the streets, or at the very least they should be taxed so much that they are forced either to rent or to sell the property. 
5. Build a fight to end the crisis
Albanese is not going to fix the housing crisis, nor are the state Labor governments, and appealing to them to do the right thing won’t get us anywhere. They are impervious to moral or rational arguments. The suffering of families living in their cars, parents skipping meals so they can make rent or mortgage payments, or thousands living on the streets has done nothing to tweak their consciences. The politicians won’t listen because they are there to protect the power and profits of the people they truly represent, the developers, the banks and the rich, not to ensure that government provides for people’s needs. 
Fixing the housing crisis would mean taking on the power of big business and the rich. We need to force the government to act, whether they want to or not. We can’t rely on a clever negotiating strategy or having the balance of power in parliament; we already saw that didn’t work when the Greens capitulated and passed the Housing Australia Future Fund, despite not having won any substantial changes to a policy that will not fix the crisis. 
Instead, we should look to what has worked in the past: the eviction riots of the 1930s that brought workers and the unemployed together to fight the landlords and their bailiffs; the Builders Labourers Federation in the 1970s, militant workers who used the power of the strike to protect working-class housing.
They showed that workers, students and the poor can challenge the power of the developers, the landlords and the politicians who do their bidding. We should take inspiration from their struggles when thinking about the kind of movement needed to end the housing crisis today.

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Five charts showing the destruction of workers’ living standards

Labor’s ‘cost-of-living relief’ is a joke

Labor’s housing bills do nothing to fix the crisis

Five things to fix the housing crisis

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