We tend not to notice how far we have sunk. Australia is not in good shape. We need an unflinching assessment of our situation, and also to know we can fix it. [Published in The Canberra Times, 11 Jan 2024 – or so I’m told.]

The price of housing is absurdly high, and now rents are soaring too. Both problems reflect a little-noticed banking dysfunction, among other factors. Inequality has increased dramatically, the result of deliberate neoliberal policies that favour the rich. Insecurity of employment and income has also risen dramatically, also by design.

Many people are scrimping essentials to pay the mortgage. Many are losing that struggle and are homeless. We imprison our children—kids as young as ten. How did we come to this?

Backyards are disappearing, not because of uppity blackfellas but because of developers and very high immigration rates. Few were willing to note out loud how our unemployment rate dropped markedly when the pandemic closed the immigration gates. Now, at the behest of big business, immigration and unemployment are pushing back up along with rents and city congestion. Bush is paved over for new suburbs, unspoilt beaches we knew as kids are under high-rise.

The rich don’t stimulate the economy, they speculate, push up property prices and buy expensive trinkets. Too many parasites leave the economy anaemic. Neoliberalism has been an economic failure and a social disaster.

Battlers can see the fat cats purring, resentment builds and scapegoats are attacked. We are divided and conflicted. Desperate people will look for desperate solutions. Trump says he’ll smash the system, Dutton copies him and fascism is on the rise around the world. We’ve been here before.

There is a treadmill and there are not enough jobs, by design. If you slacken you can fall off and be replaced. Even the bosses have to keep performing, always striving for more: more stuff, more resources used, more pollution dumped. We have built a machine that is consuming the world, literally. We must find the off switch before it kills us.

There is a way through. For four decades we’ve been urged or required to be selfish and competitive and our physical and mental health have suffered. But people are innately cooperative. We are highly social. We need to feel we belong and are valued, and we thrive when we do.

History may seem to teach us we are irredeemably selfish and violent, but that is the history of mass societies. Did you know the earliest Middle Eastern cities were not hierarchical, nor patriarchal? We are built to live in small, cooperative communities. Our innate social responses only work when we can look others in the eye.

Even with strangers we have the choice of whether to allow ourselves to be driven by fear or to presume the other person is a human being just like us, to invite a connection, to act from love. Gandhi, Jesus, Mandela showed us the way. Love and fear cannot coexist. The world needs more of that love just now.

We are still a wealthy society, but the wealth is misdirected. We can afford to take proper care of our old folks and the disadvantaged. That’s what caring people do. We can afford to educate our kids in public schools, like we used to. We can afford to help struggling kids instead of caging them.

If we raise the minimum wage by fifty percent or more people will have more to spend and the economy will be stimulated. A recent Nobel prize was awarded for showing that it works in the real world. In the postwar decades last century unemployment was below 2%, wages rose steadily, the economy grew rapidly and many people were able to afford a house and a car for the first time. By now we have enough, but we need to see the wealth is shared around more fairly.

We need to get serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The government is still approving mines and obstructing progress, despite its window dressing.

We know how to grow food while building the soil, so it holds more water and more carbon as well. We are learning how to use fire to keep the forests healthy and stop the megafires.

The startling truth is that most of the ideas by which we have been governed are wrong. My new book A New Australia: Discarding Delusions and Organising for the Wellbeing of All (Betternature Books, 2023) takes a broad and deep look at our situation, and who we are, and outlines a practical path to a much better future.

We can learn to live within the biosphere again. Our quality of life will immediately start to improve if we go about it sensibly. We need to take back control and get on with it.