Mateship for sale: The economic betrayal of working Australia

Mateship is being hollowed out as decades of policy, corporate power and now AI shift wealth from Australian workers to those who own the system, writes James Stekhoven.

MATESHIP. The word Australians reach for when they want to describe something essential about who we are. The understanding that when things get brutal, you don’t bail. That a fair go isn’t a marketing slogan — it’s a moral obligation.

Hold that word in mind the next time the Reserve Bank raises rates while supermarkets post record profits. Or when a technology company quietly replaces a hundred workers with software and books the savings as shareholder return.

Because what has been done to Australian workers over the past four decades is not just bad economics; it's a betrayal of mateship.

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The men who died at Gallipoli and on the Western Front – shearers, labourers, clerks, teachers – didn’t die for the landlord class. They died hoping that Australia was building something worth defending. A society where working people had dignity, security and a genuine share of the country they were asked to give their lives for.

That inheritance is being liquidated. Quietly. In the language of economic necessity.

The inflation con

Inflation has surged since 2021; we’re told the medicine is interest rate rises. Cool demand, bring prices down. Difficult but necessary.

What went unexplained is that the inflation Australians experienced was not caused by excess demand. It was cost‑push — energy shocks, COVID-fractured supply chains and corporations using the inflationary cover to expand profit margins. The ACCC documented it. Supermarkets, energy retailers and insurers — prices rose well beyond what cost increases justified. Shareholders banked the difference. Interest rates fix none of this. Higher rates do not make petrol cheaper. They do not constrain a supermarket’s pricing power.

What they do – with ruthless precision – is transfer money from debtors to creditors. From mortgage holders to banks. From working Australians to the asset‑owners.

Then those higher rates fed back into inflation itself. Landlords passed mortgage increases to renters. Rents have risen far faster than wages. Businesses passed financing costs to customers. The medication worsened the illness and workers were told to be grateful.

A digger from Pozières would have had a word for that arrangement. It would not have been polite.

Labor’s original sin

The architecture of working‑class disadvantage in modern Australia was not built primarily by John Howard or Tony Abbott. It was built by Hawke and Keating – Labor governments – while the union movement rolled over.

The Prices and Incomes Accord had a genuine intent. Workers accepted real wage restraint in exchange for the social wage — Medicare, superannuation and a seat at the table. But the second half of the compact was hollowed out.

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Financial deregulation handed structural power to capital markets. The shift from centralised to enterprise bargaining destroyed the coordination that had kept wages moving with productivity. Workers were atomised — negotiating alone against employers with vastly superior resources. Pattern bargaining was dismantled.

By 1996, the scaffolding for three decades of wage stagnation was firmly in place.

Workers surrendered their most powerful collective weapon and received superannuation in partial exchange. The swindle would have embarrassed a Gallipoli quartermaster.

The tools that actually address cost‑push inflation – coordinated wages policy, windfall taxes, price oversight, strategic industrial policy – are precisely the tools the post‑Keating settlement rendered politically illegitimate. Having dismantled the institutions, the only lever left is held by unelected central bankers whose entire professional formation was within finance.

Mateship, as economic policy, is apparently inefficient.

The AI grab

If the Accord was the first great structural transfer from labour to capital in modern Australia, artificial intelligence is the second. And this time, the Government isn’t even bothering to negotiate.

AI is not a future disruption. It’s arrived. Legal assistants, journalists, accountants, administrators, radiographers — cognitive work across the entire income spectrum is being automated at a pace that dwarfs previous technological waves.

One in three Australian workers is at risk of job loss by 2030 from AI. Around 28 per cent of Australian workers are exposed to generative AI in significant parts of their tasks. Earlier automation targeted the factory floor. This wave is coming for the desk, the clinic, the newsroom and the courtroom.

The economics are simple and brutal. When AI does the work previously done by people, the productivity gain again flows to shareholders. The worker gains uncertainty. There is no automatic redistribution. No sharing mechanism exists unless the Government creates one. And the Albanese Government, like every Anglosphere government facing this question, has chosen comfortable inaction.

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What we have instead is language. Voluntary ethics frameworks. Responsible AI principles. Ministerial working groups. Meanwhile, American technology companies, most paying negligible Australian tax, extract productivity gains from the Australian economy on an extraordinary scale, repatriate the profits and are warmly applauded for their innovation.

A returned serviceman who fought for full employment and the post‑war welfare state, who believed the sacrifices of war had purchased something genuinely shared, would find this settlement incomprehensible. He did not survive Tobruk so that a San Francisco corporation could automate his grandchildren’s jobs, pay no meaningful tax on the gains and face zero obligation to the community whose labour and infrastructure made those gains possible.

The EU has introduced binding AI regulation. Serious economists are debating AI productivity levies to fund retraining and expanded safety nets. Media unions have urged an AI tax on businesses that replace workers. In Australia, the idea barely surfaces. The technology lobby and a political culture that has spent 40 years treating market intervention as sin have produced a void where policy should be.

This is not neutrality. It is a choice. Shareholders over workers. Silicon Valley over Shepparton.

What mateship would actually require

Societies that manage disruption best build institutions of coordination — unions with genuine industry‑level power, employers obligated to bargain in good faith, governments willing to use fiscal tools so no one absorbs the full pain while someone else captures all the gain.

That’s not radical. It’s what societies that take mateship seriously actually look like — not a sentiment on an Anzac Day program, but a set of institutions with teeth.

A windfall tax on inflation profiteers, recycled to struggling households. An AI productivity levy on companies automating away jobs. Mandatory worker consultation before AI deployment. Restored industry bargaining. Capital taxed at rates reflecting its actual social contribution.

Important memories are invoked every April to sell us a story about who we are. But those diggers didn’t fight for a society where every technological windfall flows to the top end of town while workers are told to reskill at their own expense.

They fought for something more generous than that.

We should start acting like it. Lest we forget.