The Cost of Living Crisis: A Manufactured Struggle in a System Designed for Inequality

You’re Not Broken - The System Is

Across suburban enclaves and inner-city stretches alike - from Dickson to Darwin - the narrative repeats itself with monotonous cruelty. Workers rise before dawn, stitching together part-time jobs like patchwork quilts, scrambling to manage school drop-offs and childcare, only to return home with barely enough left over to fill a pantry or a petrol tank. Rents soar beyond reach. Groceries, once mundane necessities, are now measured luxuries. Basic healthcare becomes an unreachable aspiration.

This isn’t merely exhausting. It is systemic violence masquerading as economic policy. People do what they’ve been told is right - work hard, pay taxes, follow the rules - and yet they slip further behind. Beneath the surface, there is an unmistakable recognition growing: the game is rigged. Your suffering isn’t incidental - it’s embedded in the system.

And the uncomfortable truth? You’re right.

The Engine Behind Your Struggles: An Economic Order Built for Accumulation, Not Equity

While the average family contorts itself to make ends meet, corporate oligarchs consolidate power. Coles and Woolworths - duopoly architects of Australia’s food economy - post record profits amidst spiraling prices. These conglomerates, with direct access to policy makers, gut their own labour force while blaming “supply chain challenges,” a euphemism for price-fixing and exploitation.

Meanwhile, the banking sector, bailed out by taxpayers during the GFC, now repays the public by extracting wealth through rising interest rates, driving mortgage stress to historic levels. This is not market failure. It’s market design.

The corporate tax system is a masterclass in legalised looting. One-third of Australia’s largest companies pay no tax. None. They are shielded by offshore havens, shell entities, and accounting alchemy - tools of a global class war waged by the rich against everyone else.

And bipartisan politics? Complicit.

Labor and Liberal: The Two Wings of the Corporate State

Labor and the Liberals are less adversaries than subsidiaries of the same economic apparatus. Both promise relief but deliver deregulation, fossil fuel expansion, and fiscal gifts to the already wealthy. Labor’s rubber-stamping of new coal and gas projects, its deference to supermarket monopolies, and its endorsement of $176 billion in tax cuts to wealthy landlords - all betray the working class.

Peter Dutton’s alternative is more of the same, cloaked in nationalist rhetoric: tax cuts for corporations, fantasy energy projects that won’t serve the public, and deeper servility to finance and resource conglomerates.

These parties are not neutral actors. They are sponsored agents of corporate capital - subservient to the donor class whose investment ensures political compliance.

What Could Be: An Economic System That Serves People, Not Profits

The Greens pose a deviation from orthodoxy - not radical, but rational. In one of the wealthiest nations on earth, the basics - shelter, food, care, dignity - should not be contested terrain. Their platform is not revolutionary; it’s remedial. It seeks to make billionaires contribute to the society they exploit.

Their plan:

• Tax obscene profits.
• Criminalise corporate price gouging.
• Freeze rents.
• Break the banking stranglehold on housing.
• Cut executive excess while raising public welfare.

Public revenue, reclaimed from corporate evasion, would fund universal dental care, early childhood education, mental health support, and decarbonisation.

This is not charity. It is justice.

What’s at Stake: Democracy or Plutocracy

The cost-of-living crisis is not an accident. It’s the logical conclusion of a political economy built to extract, not serve. It continues because those in power benefit from your despair.

Only the Greens, free from corporate influence, pose a meaningful rupture in the cycle of managed decline. A vote for them is not utopian—it’s a strategic intervention against elite rule.

You have a choice. Not just between parties—but between resignation and resistance.

If you want change, vote for it.