By David Shoebridge - Greens Senator for NSW
Ninety nine per cent of us share a fundamental common interest. The other 1 per cent know this – they fear we will discover it and mobilise around it. So they’re shamelessly and effectively wielding their wealth to make us fight each other instead of them.
The 1 per cent own a quarter of the entire wealth in Australia. In hard numbers, 20 people hold the same amount of wealth as 3 million other Australians combined. This handful of ultra-wealthy individuals has accumulated such concentrated power they are distorting our politics and economy to their own ends.
They hand private planes to politicians like beers at a barbecue. They meet the prime minister at exclusive, lavish fundraisers, hand over a million dollar donation and then make it back in the next day’s trading.
This is the political struggle of the moment: galvanising the 99 per cent into a people-powered political movement to resist and take back power from the 1 per cent.
Insatiable greed
Obscene wealth, greed and power are driving the world into war, climate collapse and economic chaos. The wars we see live-streamed on our phones and the extreme heat, floods and fires are neither accidental nor isolated. They are symptoms of a system designed by the ultra-wealthy to enrich themselves at our collective expense.
The key problem with greed is that it is insatiable. The ultra-wealthy will not stop – they will keep stoking wars, keep destroying the planet, keep driving people into poverty, if it means they will get just a little bit more. And that leaves us no choice but to respond, for our collective survival.
War is the extreme end goal of this system. Far more than any other activity, war concentrates wealth and sees public funds poured into private arms companies to provide ‘growth opportunity’ for those ready to profit.
Woodside Energy saw a very healthy 30 per cent increase in revenue in the three months after the Iran war began. While most people struggle to pay for fuel, children are killed and cities devastated, Lockheed Martin – the world’s largest arms manufacturer – has a record US$230 billion in outstanding orders for its missiles, bombs and warplanes.
Woodside’s windfall profit, Lockheed Martin’s cash grab, the political pressure from Donald Trump and ruthless self-interest explains why the Australian government stupefyingly backed the illegal US and Israel war on Iran. It also explains AUKUS, explains complicity in Gaza and explains the multi-billion dollar NDIS cuts.
The ultra-wealthy are escalating
The cost of living crisis is biting hard because wages have flatlined while wealth for the 1 per cent keeps compounding. Existing wealth makes money faster than work ever can. Meanwhile, people are choosing between groceries and going to the doctor. Rents are up 80 per cent, which is forcing more and more Australians to sleep rough on our streets.
How did we get here? Decades of privatising public assets, energy, banks, telecoms, insurance, transport, public housing, universities have pushed costs that were once shared onto individual households. Private debt and privatised profits filled the gap the public sector left behind.
The ultra-wealthy know this is unsustainable. But they’re not ceding ground – they’re escalating.
Watching millions of Australians protest the ongoing war in Palestine scared the 1 per cent and their political mates in Labor, the Coalition (and now One Nation). They know a people-powered movement is possible and the ultra-wealthy can be defanged.
That’s why there’s now a major push into the expansion of policing and surveillance powers. Big Tech, with the support of our governments, is building the infrastructure that will enable authoritarian politics.
Platforms optimised for outrage, increasingly aligned with strongman politics, serve power by keeping people isolated, distracted and afraid rather than organised.
AI and datacentres, facial recognition, data retention, coercive questioning powers, private data brokers feeding government agencies are all designed for one purpose: population control.
Corporate profits and state control are both pushing in the same direction to deliver an unprecedented public-private surveillance state. It’s about protecting capital from the increasingly disgruntled 99 per cent.
This is what’s behind the anti-immigration politics of Trump, Farage, Hanson and their wannabe followers in the Coalition and Labor. Your workmate from India wasn’t sitting at the Cabinet table when someone decided to privatise the Commonwealth Bank. Your nurse from the Philippines didn’t vote for public money to be diverted from public schools to weapons. Your neighbours from Nigeria aren’t responsible for gas companies exporting our resources without paying tax, while you’re hounded if you dare slip up on your tax return. The 1 per cent did this, and they want to blame the economic pain we all feel on someone, anyone, but them.
Hope in resistance
But what the ruling class have yet to grasp is that for every encroachment on our rights, for every attempt to suffocate us, creative pathways to resist are found. You cannot muzzle the 99 per cent.
The Free Palestine movement has built a community that crosses class, age, race and religion and is an extraordinary scaffold for social change. That is feeding off other grassroots movements that are increasingly coalescing – from the peace and anti-nuclear movements, to First Nations and climate, and disgruntled workers fighting for better conditions.
Uniting these movements is how we build the critical political mass to challenge and defeat the 1 per cent. Together, they are an incredibly powerful entry point into communities.
Making it clear to communities that our struggles are one and the same, weaving the threads together, is how we build momentum. Inequality is the enemy of peace, inequality feeds off militarisation, and inequality delivers fear and division. Ending this means taking on the 1 per cent and inspiring a mass movement into believing this is possible.
There is real anger with governments and politics right now, and that anger is mixed with a sense of powerlessness and pain. The anger is right, the pain is real, but the powerlessness is wrong.
The 1 per cent want us to lose hope, ignore what binds us together and fight amongst ourselves for the scraps they are willing to let fall from bulging pockets. To help make this happen they are feeding One Nation, like they fed Trump in the US and Farage in the UK, with their anti-immigration, pro-corporate and ‘anti-woke’ policies.
The people’s anger is legitimate and real. People can see a bunch of self-interested politicians washing between parliament and industry, milking the knowledge they got in government for private profit. They can see the mega-rich getting richer while they struggle with rent, insurance and debt.
The 1 per cent also see this anger, so they are funding and pumping the Trojan Horse that is One Nation. They want to point the finger of blame away from themselves and towards migrants. It isn’t even hidden – the money, the access and the coverage is right there in plain sight.
The Left must meet this moment. It must capture and direct the anger, and deliver a clear anti-establishment message of hope, action and change. We need to shout from rooftops that we will tax the super rich, we will throw open the doors of parliament to community and slam the doors shut on grifters. This is the lesson we must learn from the Left’s rise in the US with the Democratic Socialists and in the UK with the Greens. We can beat greed with collective compassion and we can smash hate with hope. And we better get started.
Bloody good, but we need to unite a good chunk of the 99%, not just the 'Left'. The Left now only consists of the Greens, about 12% of the 99% and (sadly) distrusted by the rest. A lot of duopoly voters defecting to One Nation agree with your basic premise - governments are working for the 1%, not us - and One Nation don't own them. Success will come from uniting ordinary Australians.
Well said David and I agree with your assessment Frank that unity shouldn’t be hampered by outmoded labels. There is no Left or Right, rather the vast majority who are decent, hardworking and increasingly despairing. On the other side are the grifters hiding behind totally discredited trickle down Reganomics to justify their pillaging of the common weal. Bring back mutuals and cooperatives and nationalise essential infrastructure. Sweep away the politicians who are complicit with war and corruption. The ballot box is the people’s strength.