Australia’s fraying social fabric isn’t being torn apart by culture wars or extremism alone, but by a deepening inequality that no royal commission can paper over, writes Dr Bronwyn Kelly.
PRIME MINISTER Anthony Albanese is rightly concerned about social cohesion in Australia. He would have been right to be concerned even before the Bondi murders because, as the Scanlon Foundation has shown, the Australian Index of Social Cohesion has been declining for more than 15 years.
This index was set at 100 based on surveys of Australians in its first year (2007), but it’s gradually dropped and is now stuck down at 78. Australia has a significantly less cohesive society than it did at the start of the century.
The 2025 Scanlon survey was taken before the Bondi murders, so we might expect that next year’s survey will not show an improvement in our cohesion as a society, especially if the newly announced Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion creates an occasion for more divisive stirring by the conservative news media — stirring which instead of building cohesion is very likely to continue pitting people against each other based on ethnicity, culture and religion.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t have a royal commission or some other form of inquiry into antisemitism, or into any other form of racial hatred, for that matter. But to the extent that the Commission and the divisive media hoopla it will attract will divert attention away from what the Scanlon Foundation has identified as the underlying cause of social fractures, we should be concerned.
As the Scanlon Foundation says:
‘Financial circumstances remain the most important factor associated with social cohesion.’
What they mean by that is that what pits people against each other is inequality and each person’s sense that they are worth less than someone else. And to the extent that there has been a very significant growth in poverty and inequality – particularly wealth inequality and democratic inequality – in Australia under the neoliberal form of economic management that has prevailed in the 21st Century, we should not expect much in the way of remedy for that from the Royal Commission.
We might expect that it will leave the underlying causes of lost social cohesion largely untouched, absorbed as it will be in examining little more than a few symptoms of the growing breakdown.
The Commission’s terms of reference seek recommendations for strengthening social cohesion, but the focus is on countering the spread of ideologically and religiously motivated extremism in Australia, rather than addressing the inequality and social fracturing that arise from an unfair economy, which is the main antecedent cause of fractures in society.
Australia now has an unfair economy. It’s possible to map the decline in our social cohesion and wellbeing in close parallel with the rise of neoliberalism in Australia. This has been shown in the latest report by Australian Community Futures Planning, The State of Australia 2025 and in my latest book, The Public Interest Economy: the path to wellbeing, security and sustainable consumption in a democratised Australian economy.
As more and more of the services that are vital for our wellbeing have been privatised, and as equality and sufficiency of access to those essentials have declined, social cohesion has declined in lockstep.
And as the security of our incomes has been impacted by the excessive reliance on the sort of economy now favoured by Anthony Albanese – a “private sector economy” and one which places conditions on access to welfare payments, as though equality of access to the essentials of life is not necessary for our safety and wellbeing – again, social cohesion has declined in lockstep.
The coincidence is so marked and persistent that it has to be accorded the status of direct correlation and causality. Neoliberalism has caused Australians to suffer a loss of fairness in their society, especially in opportunity, in taxation and in democratic equality.
Neoliberalism’s now 30-year period of reign in our economic paradigms is proof that a government can’t bring a society together by locking people out of it. It can’t build cohesion by systemically embedding inequality and insufficiency of access to essential services and opportunities for employment.
To rob any person of the dignity that can only be provided by that access, to set them aside, to cast them into poverty – as this government now does for more than 3.7 million Australians – is to create the bedrock conditions for continual growth in social unrest, for resentment, for hatred and for violence. Call it too simplistic, but insecurity of income is where it all starts.
This is not something that can be dealt with by a royal commission. The causes of antisemitism will not be dealt with by adjustments of policing and security agencies, as seems to be the expectation of the Government in its terms of reference. Policing and security crackdowns, especially on free speech, are much more likely to make people restive and rebellious than they are to create harmony.
But a decline in social cohesion itself is not an intractable or irreversible problem if a government looks to its real causes. The current reigning economic paradigm of neoliberalism is not the only culprit in Australia’s fall into homegrown terrorism since 2019, when an Australian murdered 51 Islamic people in Christchurch; but it is a crucial one, creating fertile ground for any other agents of social discontent, fracture and violence.
The effects of neoliberalism can, however, be reversed if we democratise the economy and my new book offers Australians the practical tools they need to do this. It offers them a rationale and an easy plan for essential reforms of macroeconomic policy and governance, and it also offers them processes they can use to democratise their economy, so that their influence in economic decisions can be increased. These reforms are vital to social cohesion.
It might be surmised that Anthony Albanese knew that a royal commission would be ineffective in stemming the social breakdown that has been experienced now in Australia, and this would explain and reasonably justify his initial reluctance to establish one. But the fact remains that dealing only with the symptoms of social breakdown is no substitute for dealing with its systemic causes.
The Public Interest Economy, however, offers Anthony Albanese something that a royal commission cannot. His job would be much easier if he took note of the final proposal in the book for establishing an Australian Public Interest Collaboration. Find out all about this program of collaboration to enable all Australians to secure their future in Chapter 6 of the book.
Read more about The Public Interest Economy on Substack here.
Dr Bronwyn Kelly is the Founder of Australian Community Futures Planning (ACFP). She specialises in long-term integrated planning for Australia’s society, environment, economy and democracy, and in systems of governance for nation-states.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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