Australia and the West have experienced, hand over fist, improvements in GDP and living standards since we moved our manufacturing and resource extraction overseas*.
Even as the working class got sold out**, living standards improved across the board. The rich got richer and so did the middle class - with most Australians joining the middle class, during and, since the post-war era.
We were getting a good deal on our imports, taking more from poorer countries (Global South) than we gave in return, but that has been coming to an end.
The Global North (the First World) has monopolised trade with the Global South, by Capital and demand but also coercion and regime change, which ensured a good deal. But with the rise of the BRIX and China’s Belt and Road initiative, the Global South has more opportunity for equal exchange of goods and services.
While the IMF used third world debt to influence policy change, allowing Western Capital to buy up and exploit industry, Chinese banks are forgiving debts and negotiating mutually beneficial agreements (to the benefit of China).
While Western Capital built limited infrastructure to extract a specific resource, China is investing in not just general infrastructure but education and the creation of a local workforce.
The Global South are trading with each other. They have more options, trade is more competitive - we get less of a deal.
Where previously Australia could afford to give Corporations absurd profits and still have money for the people, this will be less and less possible. Australia needs to re-embrace the policies of the post-war era, which ensured a dignified life, and roll back the last 50 years of neoliberal policy built for an age which no longer exists.
* Not just in the neoliberal era, but all the way back to the start of colonial expansion.
** With manufacturing moving overseas and the denationalisation by various Liberal -and some Labor- governments.
*** consent manufacturing became harder to enforce
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/trade-and-globalization
[4] https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/10.1142/S2377740023500173
CC SA NC
The cost of living won’t fall unless we have a recession, a biiiiiig one, with massive unheard of deflation of like 25-30% to get prices back to where they should be.
The government won’t let that happen though, and they’d rather create a shitload more inflation by printing money and opening the immigration floodgates even more.
I think you’ll find that historically recessions/depressions allow the rich to get richer, as they can buy the assets cheaply that the poor have to sell off to stay alive.
Unless you have a house, and cash and liquid assets now to let you live at least 10 years with no income, you won’t last through what you wish for.
To be fair, if you’re already on unemployment, queuing up for bread isn’t much of a change. It’s the middle class who do have to sell of their homes that lose the most. If you already have nothing to lose, then nothing changes.
Exactly. So, they become poor.
I’m roughly defining anyone who ‘owns a house, and cash and liquid assets now to let you live at least 10 years with no income’ as who could survive financially, and anyone without that - welcome to the poor club.
You know who the winners are.
Why wish for that?
I don’t care if the rich get richer if that’s what it takes for the price of living to get better.
Like I said, it won’t happen anyway - the government won’t let it, and that’s why the cost of living is never going to get better.
Interesting. How does it help if the price of living improves, but you have no home, no job wnd you spent your assets on ‘cheap’ food and rent?
Do you think that … everyone that isn’t rich…just loses their job in a recession?
No, but I have empathy for those that will suffer the most.
I sure hope they open up immigration; there are thousands of trans people in the US who need somewhere safe to live, and we’ve boundless plains to share.
Hmu