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, writesJames 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 dont bail. That a fair go isnt a marketing slogan its a moral obligation.

Hold that word in mind the next time theReserve Bankraises 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.

Australias debate around tax reform challengesa system that hasdriven inequality and locked a generation out of housing.

The men who died at Gallipoli and on the Western Front shearers, labourers, clerks, teachers didnt 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; were 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 wascostpushenergy shocks, COVID-fractured supply chains and corporations using the inflationary cover to expand profit margins. TheACCC documented it. Supermarkets, energy retailers and insurers prices rose well beyond what cost increases justified.Shareholdersbanked the difference.Interest ratesfix none of this. Higher rates do not make petrol cheaper. They do not constrain a supermarkets pricing power.

What they do with ruthless precision istransfer moneyfrom debtors to creditors. From mortgage holders to banks. From working Australians to the assetowners.

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

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

Labors original sin

The architecture of workingclass disadvantage in modern Australia was not built primarily byJohn HowardorTony Abbott. It was built byHawke and KeatingLabor governments while the union movement rolled over.

ThePrices and Incomes Accordhad 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.

Economic inequality in Australia is the worst it's been in 20 years if the goal is to improve living standards, our leaders should be addressing it.

Financial deregulationhanded structural power to capital markets. The shift fromcentralised to enterprise bargainingdestroyed the coordination that had kept wages moving with productivity. Workers wereatomisednegotiating 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 costpush inflation coordinated wages policy, windfall taxes, price oversight, strategic industrial policy are precisely the tools the postKeating 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 isnt even bothering to negotiate.

AI is not a future disruption. Its 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 ofjob lossby 2030 from AI.Around 28 per cent of Australian workers areexposed to generative AIin 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.

The real danger of artificial intelligence is not the code itself, but the economic system driving its deployment.

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 postwar welfare state, who believed the sacrifices of war had purchased something genuinely shared, would find this settlement incomprehensible. He did not surviveTobrukso that a San Francisco corporation could automate his grandchildrens 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 introducedbinding AI regulation. Serious economists are debatingAI productivity leviesto fund retraining and expanded safety nets.Media unions haveurged an AI tax on businessesthat 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 genuineindustrylevel 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.

Thats not radical. Its what societies that take mateship seriously actually look like not a sentiment on an Anzac Day program, but a set of institutions with teeth.

Awindfall taxon inflation profiteers, recycled to struggling households. AnAI productivity levyon companies automating away jobs. Mandatory worker consultation before AI deployment. Restoredindustry 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 didnt 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.

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