The Root of All Evil

In the modern world we celebrate individuality and freedom, but the truth is our mammalian nervous system loves order and conformity. The freedom to do and say as we please is the icing on an elaborate layer cake of learned behaviours.

Interestingly, it seems the precise nature of the rules often matters less than the fact they exist. Hence they vary greatly from place to place[1]. It’s illegal, for instance, to chew gum in Singapore, feed the pigeons in Venice, or wear a suit of armour into the British Parliament. We can perhaps imagine the problem which inspired each of these prohibitions. But it’s also noteworthy that nowhere else did people find them necessary.

Then there are unusual local traditions. Finland has an annual wife-carrying championship where the prize is the wife’s weight in beer[2]. I like to think this skill evolved to protect kith and kin from Viking raiders; but this is pure fancy on my part; it may just as plausibly have been invented by the raiders to achieve the opposite objective. Finland also hosts the world’s biggest hobby horse competition. Apparently these are the kinds of depravities your country may be exposed to if you put an end to homelessness and top the global happiness index.

Ideas about reality, divinity, duty, etiquette and sensible recreation are remarkably diverse. It’s therefore especially significant when we find something everyone seems to believe in.

Money

Nothing is more central to the modern story than money. But perhaps the most remarkable feature of this ubiquitous ‘substance’ is that it is quite obviously imaginary.

Unlike the factors which favoured hominid survival for the first few million years, the usefulness of money derives entirely from humans believing in it. Money sometimes takes physical form, as coin for example. But even then it remains purely symbolic, a token embodiment of what to an EFTPOS machine is just a number stored somewhere against a digital identity.

Money feels real because modern humans can do almost nothing without it. The numbers stored against our digital identities determine our access to shelter, food, energy, and everything except what is freely given by nature or other humans. In fact, the history of money is partly about the conversion of what was previously freely given into assets and commodities accessible only with money. Even now it’s possible a new generation of rent seekers is imagining a billing system for breathing, or a human genome license for future newborns.

Once we depend on money, we surrender our natural agency. We accept that without money a person has no right to life’s necessities. She may have given selflessly to family, friends, and community for a whole lifetime, but unless she lives off-grid, or someone is willing to provide for her, she must have money. Without it, she may perish, though surrounded by empty beds and stocked larders. In affluent modern societies, the condition we call ‘poverty’, and the despair, disease and premature death which accompany it, are caused not by any general insufficiency, but by a supposed personal lack of an imaginary substance.

In Australia today many people are without sufficient shelter, food, and energy because their imaginary numbers aren’t big enough, while the person in the mansion on the hill quaffs Dom Perignon and nibbles Oscietra caviar thanks to an excess of them. Perhaps his imaginary numbers accrued through a life of service. Or perhaps he colluded with corrupt officials in a land grab, profited from sex trafficking, or inherited from genocidal ancestors. The numbers don’t differentiate.

Faced with such incongruity, humans seek moral justification. It feels better to believe we live in a system which is just and fair. And happily for society’s malefactors, believing absurdities is a skill at which we excel.

People sometimes rationalise a billionaire’s spaceships and mega yachts by saying: “He earned them”. And billionaires understandably promote this view. But how can it be true?

If you’d arrived in Australia on the First Fleet, ‘earned’ ten thousand pounds on your first day – a literal fortune in 1788 – and continued to do so every day for the next two and a half centuries, you still wouldn’t have ‘earned’ a billion. And that’s only one. What would you do to ‘earn’ the GDP of a small country as some have supposedly done?

You certainly wouldn’t waste time contributing to the common good. If the system worked that way, the richest people on earth would include essential service workers. Instead, in 2023, Anglicare found that many of the people who provide for Australia’s essential needs are barely surviving[3].

To justify this, friends of the oligarchy will often reach for that great, impartial underwriter of inequity – ‘the market’. Could it be we have so many teachers, nurses, and carers that their market value has plummeted? Perhaps they should consider becoming fund managers, since ‘the market’ seems to prefer them. But here the needs of ‘the market’ and those of the human species diverge. Millions of young families and aging boomers need essential service workers more than ever[4], whereas the efforts of the fund managers are devoted to a much smaller cohort who are already well-provisioned.

Unfortunately, our politics and media are also creatures of 'the market'. We hold doors of opportunity open for billionaires and big business but can’t seem to grant our carers enough to live on[5]. Instead, we have a welfare system so punitive[6], Kafkaesque[7], and incidentally profitable for private operators[8], that it’s sometimes preferable for an essential worker to live in a car and skip meals so she can keep working for a pittance[9].

It appears we’ve learned to celebrate one kind of person and despise another. Those who contrive to claim the biggest share of Earth for themselves are heroes, while those who devote their lives to the wellbeing of others are beneath contempt. Clearly we have differing views about justice and fairness, or we would be marching together on the halls of power. Yet, strangely, I hardly know anyone who seems to care much at all. Even among the disadvantaged, suffering has hardened into resignation. “I’m alright”, I hear them say, as if to spare our discomfort. “I’ll get by somehow.” And as the best among us are pauperised, the rest of us risk emulating the callous indifference of old-world aristocrats.

The device which makes this possible is money. It turns plenty and paucity into the impersonal outcomes of abstract mathematics. Spaceships and mega yachts are available for sale because ambitious narcissists can divert resources away from genuine need and conscientious citizens to playthings for themselves. They just need to find a way to claim a surfeit of the magic numbers.

In this way, money has separated access to resources from any contribution to the common good. So convinced are we of the authority of money to decide human destiny that terrible people can accumulate more than they could ever use, while wonderful people wither and die for want of basic needs in abundance. Money has quite literally become our god, and suspiciously like some gods of old, it is both jealous and fickle. And this applies not merely to individuals but to whole nations.

Today we create injustice on an industrial scale. Our governments routinely decline to provide adequate housing, care and public medicine for millions of citizens, although historically these have proven essential for a civilised modern society, because there supposedly aren’t enough of the magic numbers. Yet tens of billions are instantly available for nuclear submarines[10], fossil fuel subsidies[11], and tax cuts for the rich[12], with little evidence of any widespread benefit.

Defenders of the status quo will sometimes say: “We can’t have everything, we must prioritise”. But why do we so often prioritise the desires of a tiny portion of the population? The moment we give up trying to justify the system, even that icon of credulousness – Blind Freddy – can see it’s rigged. Widespread homelessness, poverty and femicide simply attract less of our god’s favour than the profits and indulgences of the global plutocracy and the military hardware which projects their power.

This anomaly also reveals something significant about the way people think money works.

The Money Story

Since the 1980s, the propaganda about money has become increasingly paranoid and Randian. This proposes that money is ‘made’ by capitalists and from there finds its way to employees and shareholders. The government – a kind of useless, vestigial parasite – then steals a portion of that money as taxes and squanders it on red tape, inefficiency, and unproductive people, depriving righteous capitalists of some of the carbon-intensive opulence which might otherwise trickle down onto the rest of us.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, governments are so wasteful they can never steal enough to pay for their caprices, so they also borrow money, unconscionably burdening future generations with debt.

Like all good stories, there are some grains of truth in it; governments are notoriously incompetent, especially in this time, largely thanks, it must be said, to interference from capitalists; but the story is mostly baloney.

There is one source of Australian dollars, which is the Reserve Bank of Australia. And this entity is wholly owned by the Commonwealth of Australia; in other words, my fellow Australians and me. The federal government, an entity we also employ, can, if it chooses, simply spend new money on the things we need without incurring any debt at all, provided it can source labour, materials and expertise within our borders. The fact that it hesitates to use this unique and remarkable ability gives us a clue as to what is going on behind the press releases.

In practice, many new Australian dollars are created by commercial banks as they lend money they don’t have. The reason they can do this, whereas you and I cannot, is that new money is available to them ‘on tap’ at the RBA. And unlike the RBA, but exactly like the majority of Australia’s large companies, these banks are mostly foreign owned, the biggest shareholders being the hedge funds Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street[13].

Randian capitalists argue that a system of private banks lending competitively for productive enterprise contributes to fiscal probity. And in a different world it might. But the highly concentrated Australian banking sector effectively neutralises competition[14]. And much productive enterprise is inherently risky, so banks prefer not to lend for it, provided there are safer options in high demand.

One of these is lending to corporations to buy back their shares in order to inflate returns on equity. This clever device allows shareholders and senior execs to pay themselves extra without achieving anything practical. In fact, the banks do it themselves[15]. Once you’re operating in the world of imaginary numbers, you can invent imaginative ways of magnifying them. Then you can use your bigger numbers to demand more of the real things the world produces. We call this ‘the global financial system’.

Helpfully, speculative risk gets absorbed by the large institutional investors who are gambling with the super contributions of ordinary Australians. And those institutions are largely owned by the same people as the banks. As the 2008 global financial crisis demonstrated[16], they get paid whether the rest of us win or lose.

But their favourite asset is real estate, because the condition of Australian housing is so dire that people will sell their organs before they default on their mortgages. And this is where the racket becomes especially lucrative.

Inflation

Operating an ATM for foreign investors isn’t the only service the RBA performs. According to the widely accepted story of ‘the economy’, the worst fate which can befall a country is ‘inflation’ – a decrease in the parity of its imaginary numbers with the real things it consumes.

Neoliberal economists foretell of empty shelves and wheelbarrow loads of useless cash, if we should ever be so foolish as to reward contributors properly or spend public money on essential services. It’s as if the postwar boom never happened. And luckily for the propagandists, many contemporary Australians weren’t there to remember it. Moreover, if hardship is required to fight ‘inflation’ it obviously can’t be left to elected representatives, whose resolve may be weakened by sympathy for their constituents; so we’ve outsourced it to the RBA.

Supposedly, the RBA controls ‘inflation’ by raising the cash rate for the money it lends to the banks. The banks increase the interest payments owed by borrowers, who then have less to spend, reducing demand and causing prices to fall.

This logic assumes that ‘inflation’ occurs when demand exceeds supply. So what is it that we’re short of in Australia? It isn’t land, food, energy, raw materials, people or expertise. In fact, it’s hard to find much of primary importance that we don’t have plenty of.

It’s true that a pandemic or geopolitical conflict can cause disruption to global supply chains. Whatever we source at a distance is therefore at risk. It would be better if we obtained more basic needs locally rather than via extended distribution networks running on imported oil. And in 2023 we had cause to rue the decline we have allowed in local manufactures, which were once the output of the productive enterprise the banks don’t like to lend to. But cars and appliances are not everyday purchases for most Australians. And rising energy cost alone can’t explain the doubling of checkout tallies.

If you ask the business lobby, which the media do constantly on our behalf, they’ll point accusingly at workers. Legend has it workers are extorting hefty wage rises from employers. But it’s obvious to most workers that if rising wages are to blame they must be someone else’s – the bankers and fund managers perhaps. Because overall, wages have lagged prices for many years.

If we turn instead to the statistics, a different picture emerges. Floods, fires and militant fruit pickers might play havoc with the price of lettuce temporarily, but a more lasting factor is the rabbit who’s been left in charge of it[17]. A weakening of competition and regulation has offered a free hand to the other large, mostly-foreign-owned companies which dominate our economy to raise prices and increase their profits under cover of supply shocks. Despite being stacked with business insiders, the RBA’s own November 2023 meeting minutes included veiled acknowledgement of this fact[18].

The most obvious shortage of supply in Australia is with imaginary numbers, in the hands of those who need them most, and at the discretion of the people who produce them.

The Real World

If, like me, you were a child of peripatetic parents, you may have traversed rural Australia from an early age. And then you’ll know ‘the bush’ has changed a lot. You can, for example, obtain a decent coffee today even in remote places where a taciturn shop assistant would once have reached for a rusty can of International Roast. But in other ways, the spirits disinterred by global capital have been less benevolent.

Over a century ago, rural Australia began to empty, as agriculture was mechanised, and small family farms consolidated. Some towns declined. Others learned to reinvigorate themselves. As roads were sealed, and car ownership and leisure time increased, scenic splendour, harvest festivals and championships in pastimes like go-kart racing and square dancing became potential sources of tourist dollars. The most idyllic locations adapted to aging populations and the services they require, with kids leaving for the cities and tree changers moving in. In other places, expansion of mining brought waves of FIFO workers and visiting consultants who needed to be sheltered and fed temporarily.

These transformations offer testimony to the adaptability of rural communities. But constant buffeting from global forces isn’t conducive to intergenerational stability and social cohesion. The ‘two-speed’ economy of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, which now characterises Australia in general, is often conspicuous in the smaller setting of the rural town.

In towns which support mining, energy or Big Ag, the sectors run by multinationals, it can be hard to find accommodation, and if you do, you may pay more at a shabby old motel than you would at a fine hotel in a major European city. And if you look out your window at daybreak, you may see on either side of you a row of gleaming white utes bearing corporate logos. The motel proprietor will likely be grinning ear to ear, as will the publican and some restauranteurs. But walking the streets, you may sense a pall hanging over much of the town, as the shuffling poor who have little value in the new globalised economy frequent the liquor marts and takeaways.

Two decades ago, when I was a corporate highflier, a form letter from my credit card company invited me to join a new fund, minimum ten thousand dollars, which they predicted would be very lucrative. The fund invested in two types of enterprise – luxury goods and services for the rich, and survival alternatives like junk food, cheap toys and payday loans for the poor.

If I’d joined, my imaginary numbers would have grown substantially. But it would be even harder now to face the forlorn dilapidation which creeps across Australia’s towns and suburbs. From small remote outposts to inner city sanctums like Potts Point, expensive boutiques supplying wealthy professionals, in-demand tradespeople, tourists, retirees and Airbnb owners, punctuate the empty shopfronts and makeshift homeless shelters of a lost general prosperity.

Our Imaginary Solution

It's unlikely anyone will stop the corporate price-gouging and profit-taking which contribute to rising prices. The big corporations have escaped competitive pressure. The major political parties won’t put their campaign donations and post-ministerial careers at risk with regulatory reform or reduced exposure to global markets for essential needs like energy. And the RBA can’t prevent price hikes simply by raising the cash rate.

When affluent people must pay more for essentials, they can economise on other spending. And for some, those higher prices will be offset by extra dividends on their investments.

The people who would forego some of the food, energy and essential services supplied by the price gougers are the poor, as well as others for whom rent or a mortgage consumes a greater portion of income. But before reduced demand can induce price discounts, someone else usually steps in to help. We have no recent history of widespread poverty and are therefore reluctant to accept it.

Even after decades of victim-bashing in the plutocrat press[19], the determinedly magnanimous Australian public still expects the government to provide support to the unemployed, the aged, disabled people, and low-income families. And as this has gradually shrunk in proportion to need, the burden has been picked up by the charities, employing some of our expanding pool of low wage workers to call on compassionate people like themselves to personally assist the even less fortunate. People aren’t going hungry because mortgagers are buying all the food. It’s a lack of purchasing power which is depriving them. The charities can help with that. Rate rises cannot.

If cash-strapped people consume less of something, it’s likely to be discretionary items, the kind which add to quality of life, such as the haircuts and dentistry the RBA governor used for target practice in 2023[20]. It’s those businesses which come under pressure from a rate rise, not the price gougers.

When borrowers are workers, they will probably spend less with those businesses. But when the businesses are the borrowers, they may need to charge more for goods and services. When the borrowers are landlords, rents may rise. And when the landlords let premises to the businesses, upward price pressure compounds.

“But wait”, I hear someone say, “isn’t raising rates supposed to cause a fall in prices?” Perhaps the relationship between interest rates, prices, and ‘inflation’ isn’t as simple as we’ve been led to believe.

The Neoliberal Shell Game

The actual effects of interest rate manipulation most closely resemble those of the fiscal policy strategy Richard Denniss calls “the right-wing ratchet”[21]. In fact, these are really the two revolving hands in a shell game intended to relieve working people of their earnings. While the neoliberals at the RBA 'target' moderate inflation, neoliberal governments 'target' a modest budget surplus.

If a budget surplus was really something we needed, the current formula of tax cuts in the good times and cuts to programs in the hard times might be sufficient. And to a cursory reflection on government finance, the kind encouraged in the neoliberal media, this might sound sensible. But the result in practice is not a more prosperous nation; that's just the marketing copy. What occurs is a transfer of existing services to the profit-making private sector. As the government’s capacity to provide them gradually diminishes, ordinary folk must buy essential services from the investor class who, coincidentally, also benefit most from the tax cuts.

Just as tax cuts and privatisation weaken governments, fluctuating interest rates can disable ordinary citizens. And they’re especially effective in a country like Australia where basic needs have been turned into a fight for survival. Perpetually rising house prices make home ownership ever more difficult to attain. But, with a rental shortage spreading housing insecurity and exploitation by landlords, low rates entice desperate people into large, long-term home loans. Subsequent rate rises load them up with debt repayments. The result is a reduction of their capacity to obtain services for themselves.

Why would a sovereign nation do this? And the answer to that question is, of course, that it wouldn’t. The custodians of our sovereignty have been lured away from the national interest into assisting their friends and benefactors in big business with a harvesting operation. They have allowed economic complexity and local self-sufficiency to wane as borrowers work extra hours in casual jobs and side hustles, cut back on leisure, and turn to the charities for help so they can pay for mortgages and formerly public services now obtained at premium prices from well-connected local operators and profit-raking multinationals. And our politicians conceal these disappearing beans under the fast-revolving shells of fiscal and monetary policy.

If a distressed part of the population spends less, less often and on different items and cheaper alternatives, the balance of goods and services in the ‘basket’ used by the Bureau of Statistics to calculate the Consumer Price Index will change, as will the purchase price data it collects[22]. 'Inflation' may very likely fall and the technocrats shout "Hooray!". But this doesn’t mean ‘the economy’ has become stronger or fairer.

What makes a lower quality of life worth cheering for? It may appear to the statistician that millions of people simply changed their preferences; but in fact, they sacrificed spending they enjoyed for spending they couldn't avoid.

The 'we're-all-in-this-together' CPI obscures the very different experiences of rich and poor. The skyrocketing cost of food may be offset by the relatively stable price of Louis Vuitton luggage, but such harms and benefits are not spread evenly. And 'inflation' measures only the change in prices, so once higher profits are locked in, they become invisible again.

Similarly, the casualties of job losses and business closures who choose early retirement, join the gig economy or pick up a low wage job with one of the price gougers won’t appear as unemployed. And for politicians looking to prove their credentials with GDP growth, population increase from immigration does the trick, even as much of the existing population becomes poorer.

There are, however, some winners from all this. The people who receive windfall dividends from increased corporate profits, such as wealthy retirees, can spend big at the hairdresser or dentist if they please, as Alan Kohler’s graphs reveal[23]. It probably wouldn’t occur to them there’s anything suspect about collecting extra passive income while fishing or playing golf when the country is in a per capita recession. Most would have no idea that’s the case, nor what it means. “How good is Australia,” they may say to themselves, somewhat mystified by young family members who don’t share their enthusiasm.

They certainly wouldn’t want to hear their present good fortune is subsidised by their children and grandchildren. So think tanks and shock jocks spread nonsense about ‘avocado toast’ and ‘lifestyle choices’ to help them feel justified and discourage them from voting for policy reform. They are the biggest voting bloc, they don’t like change, and prefer the major parties, but lean towards the LNP[24].

And while the fiscal and monetary hands revolve, and the beans inexorably disappear, the hatemongering billionaire media invite the disadvantaged to ponder which other disadvantaged group might have robbed them.

This is how we ‘solve’ problems in Australia now. Major party policies move imaginary numbers from people who could really use them to people who simply favour the status quo. Their loyalty at the polling booth ensures an even bigger tranche of imaginary numbers flows to the global plutocracy who use some of them to pay the major parties’ bills and proselytise. Suffering in the real world continues to worsen. But because our key performance indicators are aggregates which keep the devil hidden in the detail, everything looks hunky dory in the Canberra bubble.

The Truth About Money

When an autostereogram is viewed the right way, a three-dimensional figure such as a dinosaur emerges from what at first seems to be an unintelligible array of pixels. If you keep studying the pattern, the brain reorganises it, making the hidden image appear. And so it is with our monetary system. The dinosaur isn’t visible until suddenly he is.

The world of money appears to most of us as an endless stream of infinitesimal pixels of work, shopping, saving, investment and loan repayment. And the picture we hope will eventually emerge is one of security and abundance. But in fact that is never the case. Not for the poor, and not for the rich either, for the simple reason that security and abundance are not the picture hidden in the money pixels. It isn’t that money doesn’t matter; but its purpose is different.

Even the ‘winners’ I know worry about money and for good reason. History shows that those imaginary numbers can disappear or lose their value rapidly. For millions of us it’s already happening. And this makes the ‘winners’ nervous too, if they have any sense at all.

Despite the fact that my fellow Australians and I have ultimate authority, via the federal government, over the production, distribution and allocation of Australian dollars, what happens in our country with our money is largely determined by a different, more select group of people, many of whom are not even Australian and may not know or care about us in the slightest.

With political donations and relentless messaging delivered via media, think tanks, lobby groups and economics and business faculties – the other entities it owns, funds or sponsors – the global plutocracy is able to keep our government’s hands bound firmly behind its back. Taxation is diverted from elite sources such as wealth, corporate profits and capital gains to the wages ordinary contributors depend on. And government spending forsakes general needs like career opportunities, affordable housing and quality services for elite purposes such as industry subsidies, private schools and lucrative contracts. States are enormously powerful. So the smart money doesn’t fight them, it captures them.

Peter Costello’s claim that the federal budget needs to be balanced just like a household’s was more than a lie, it was one of those ‘big’ lies Adolf Hitler recognised are the most effective. When combined with another ‘big’ lie that public services are inherently wasteful and should therefore be minimised, it promulgated the perfect combination of scepticism in the ability of governments to help ordinary people and mistrust in any politician making the attempt. All that needed to be added was one final ‘big’ lie, courtesy of that ancient autocrat Phillip II of Macedon, that one person’s gain is inevitably another’s loss, and we became helpless as a polity, consumed by confected animosities, while the country was stolen all over again, this time from both its settler occupiers and its ancient custodians still awaiting restitution for original dispossession.

There is no practical impediment to our government simply marshalling our own resources to provide for our needs. What stops them is fear and confusion instilled in the voting public by the plutocracy.

This wouldn’t be possible if enough of us saw what’s really in the money pixels. Money isn’t the source of security and abundance. They occur naturally, with or without money, when strong human communities nurture productive endeavours while taking care of the land, forests, rivers, oceans, plants, animals and people they depend on. Although money is imaginary, these other factors are very real. Getting the two mixed up is the fast track to collapse.

Something is already terribly wrong when a lack of imaginary numbers can prevent actual available resources from answering genuine human need. Yet that happens every day in Australia. As we allow our precious national assets to be degraded or appropriated by private and especially foreign interests, the real exchange value of our imaginary numbers declines, regardless of what ‘inflation’ says. Any ‘jobs and growth’ we obtain from extraction evaporate as soon as it’s complete. And this ought to help us focus on the figure hiding in the pixels.

Among all the fictions about money, its popular origin story is perhaps the most instructive. This claims that money appeared sometime in the distant past as a substitute for bartering between individuals. Hard evidence is scant. But the story is implausible, despite what bankers might prefer, because unmodernised people don’t organise themselves as individuals in markets, but as interdependent groups strengthening mutuality with gifting.

David Graeber demonstrated that even the first agrarian empires used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods long before money existed[25]. And these look much more like the kind of institutional arrangements which might emerge from aggregations of local gifting economies.

According to Michael Hudson, the evidence shows that archaic economies created money as a means of paying debts, mainly to Mesopotamia’s palaces and temples[26]. It wasn’t long before raising taxes became a way for rulers to commandeer the resources needed for wars and building projects. Subjects obliged to pay the emperor in his coin needed to obtain it first, so they used it to trade with one another. And those who accumulated money could also use it to sequester resources and bind others with debts previously constituted by other means. It’s here the dinosaur comes into view.

Money subordinates our value as contributors to the structures of power we live within. It’s the perfect instrument of power because the forces which control our access to resources can remain ‘invisible’ even as they shape our every waking moment. Whatever we think of the emperor's new clothes, we’re still getting outfits from his tailor. Money is the means of our subservience, the fabric of a collective illusion supporting a hierarchy of domination.

How should we feel, then, about the plan to completely digitise currency and eliminate cash[27]? How might our vaunted individuality and freedom be affected when our access to survival needs is entirely at the mercy of some numbers in the cloud[28]? Doesn’t that plan make it clear what money really is?

But it’s hardly the root of all evil. That root lies much deeper than the branches and stems of power which money helps to conceal. That is something we will investigate in future essays.

[1] Poirot, L. and Sulc, B. A. (2023), “60 Weird Laws Around the World”, Far and Wide, Jul 17.

[2] Santiago H. (2019), “WIFE CARRYING WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP IN FINLAND”, Big In Finland, Aug 14.

[3] Anglicare Australia (2023) Rental Affordability Snapshot. Essential Workers Report. Special Release.

[4] Australian Government, 2023 Skills Priority List: Key Findings Report.

[5] Naidoo, Y; valentine, k; and Adamson, E (2022) Australian experiences of poverty: risk precarity and uncertainty during COVID-19 Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) and UNSW Sydney.

[6] Hawking, T. (2020), “The Australian welfare system has always been needlessly cruel. Now it’s punishing half the country”, The Guardian, Mar 25.

[7] Morton, R, (2023), “Australia’s welfare agency at risk of collapse”, The Saturday Paper, Sep 23.

[8] O'Sullivan, S., McGann, M., & Considine M, (2021), Buying and Selling the Poor: Inside Australia’s privatised welfare-to-work market, AU, Sydney University Press.

[9] Kelly, C. (2023), “‘How do you live?’ Australia’s rental crisis is pricing low-income workers out of a home”, The Guardian, Aug 14.

[10] Patrick, R. (2023), ‘Rex Patrick on AUKUS submarines: “an astonishingly bad deal”’, Michael West Media, Apr 14.

[11] Campbell, R., Morison, L., Verstegen, P., Harrington, M., Adhikari, A., Scicluna, K., Simpson, E., and Anderson, L.. (2023), Fossil fuel subsidies in Australia 2023, The Australia Institute.

[12] Martin, P. (2023), “We could make most Australians richer and still save billions — it's not too late to fix the stage 3 tax cuts”, abc.net.au, Nov 15.

[13] Butler, P. (2023), “Aussie Banks Owned By Vanguard & BlackRock”, Journey to a Better life, Jul 25.

[14] Medcraft, G. (2023), “The banking oligopoly feels ‘safe’, but it’s bad for customers”, Australian Financial Review, Apr 23.

[15] Yeates, C. (2021), “Bank share buyback bonanza shows lack of growth options”, The Sydney Morning Herald, Aug 30.

[16] Gruber, J. (2023), “Why bank bailouts may be making the financial system more fragile”, Morningstar, Mar 29.

[17] Ziffer, D. (2023), “The profit crisis is the inflation-driving pressure we don't talk about”, abc.net.au, Nov 15.

[18] Dyer, G. and Keane, B. (2023), “Amid its anti-worker screed, the RBA admits businesses are driving inflation”. Crikey, Nov 22.

[19] Hutchens, G. (2021), “The phrase 'dole bludger' emerged in the 1970s, and it's still serving its political purpose”, abc.net.au, May 30.

[20] Chung, F. (2023), “‘Ridiculous’: RBA governor Michele Bullock slammed for blaming inflation on haircuts and dentist trips”, news.com.au, Nov 23.

[21] Denniss, R. (2018), “Why Australia's business community only cares about budget deficits sometimes”, The Sydney Morning Herald, Feb 23.

[22] Reserve Bank of Australia (2023), Inflation and its Measurement.

[23] Kohler, A. (2023), “The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Mess and How to Fix It”, The Quarterly Essay, Nov.

[24] Giuliano, C. (2023), “Voting patterns by generation at federal elections since 2001”, Parliament of Australia, Mar 28.

[25] Graeber, D. (2011), Debt: The First 5,000 Years, US, Melville House.

[26] Hudson, M. (2018), “Palatial Credit: Origins of Money and Interest”, michael-hudson.com, Apr 6.

[27] Heath, N., Heaton, L., and Fennell, M. (2023), “Australia's transition to a cashless society raises concerns about financial exclusion, privacy and safety”, abc.net.au, Aug 23.

[28] Fung, K. (2022), “Banks Have Begun Freezing Accounts Linked to Trucker Protest”, Newsweek, Feb 18.