The Common Wealth
Reclaiming the profits for those who really create them.
Every dollar of profit generated in this country was created by someone’s labour, on someone’s land, using infrastructure someone’s taxes built, in a society someone’s community sustains.
The question is not whether wealth should be created. It should. The question is who gets to keep it, and whether the rules that determine that answer were written by the people affected or by the people who benefit.
In Australia right now, the rules were largely written by the latter. The Common Wealth is about changing that.
What 'The Common Wealth' Actually Means
It doesn’t mean everyone earns the same. It doesn’t mean nobody can build a successful business or accumulate wealth through genuine effort and innovation. It doesn’t mean the government runs everything.
It means the rules are fair. That corporations pay their share. That workers are genuinely protected. That the gains of productivity flow to the people who produced them, not exclusively to the people who owned the machine.
For most of Australia’s postwar history, we had something closer to this. Strong unions. Protected industries. Public ownership of essential services. A tax system that genuinely redistributed. We called it the Australian Settlement, and while it was imperfect, it produced one of the most equal societies in the developed world.
Then we dismantled it. Piece by piece, decade by decade, in the name of efficiency and global competitiveness. The efficiency went to the shareholders. The global competitiveness hollowed out the regions. And the people who did the dismantling retired on indexed pensions while the people who lost their jobs figured out the gig economy.
The Common Wealth is not nostalgia. It is a reckoning.
The Cost We Don't Talk About
When the economy extracts more than it returns, the people at the bottom feel it first. But eventually everyone feels it.
$11 Billion — annual subsidies paid by Australian taxpayers to fossil fuel companies — among the most profitable industries on Earth.
Australia Institute 2023
Corporate welfare is the welfare nobody talks about. While billions are spent debating whether unemployed Australians deserve $55 a day, $11 billion flows annually to companies posting record profits, in the form of fuel tax credits, royalty concessions, and accelerated depreciation allowances.
This is not a market. This is a managed transfer of public wealth to private hands, dressed up as economic policy. The same politicians who demand welfare recipients prove their need sign off on fossil fuel subsidies without a second thought.
30% — The proportion of Australia’s largest companies that paid zero corporate tax in 2021-22.
ATO Corporate Tax Transparency Report 2023
Nearly one in three of Australia’s largest corporations paid no corporate tax in a given year. Not because they weren’t profitable, but because the rules allow them not to. Subsidiary structures, transfer pricing, thin capitalisation, the tools of tax minimisation are legal, sophisticated, and entirely inaccessible to the small businesses and workers paying their full share.
The tax system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed, by the people who benefit from it.
$1 — In royalties received by Australia for every $8 of profit extracted by mining companies from publicly owned mineral resources.
Australia’s minerals belong to all Australians. The land, the iron ore, the lithium, the coal, these are public assets accumulated over geological time. We lease the right to extract them. And we charge a fraction of what comparable nations charge for the same privilege.
Norway takes 78% of petroleum profits through its sovereign wealth fund model. Australia takes roughly 13% through royalties and corporate tax, when those taxes are actually paid. The difference is not economic necessity. It is a political choice.
$40 Billion — In superannuation tax concessions annually, with the majority flowing to the wealthiest 20% of Australians.
Source: Grattan Institute 2023
Superannuation tax concessions were designed to encourage retirement saving. They have become one of Australia’s largest and most regressive tax expenditures, delivering the greatest benefits to those who need them least.
A person earning $50,000 receives modest super tax concessions. A person earning $500,000 receives concessions worth many times more, subsidised by the same tax system that funds schools, hospitals, and welfare. This is not an accident. It is a design choice that has never been seriously revisited because the people who benefit from it are also the people with the most political influence.
61% The increase in CEO pay at Australia’s top 100 companies between 2012 and 2022. Wage growth for workers in the same period: 27%.
Source: Australian Council of Superannuation Investors 2023
Productivity gains in the Australian economy over the past decade have not been shared equally. They have flowed disproportionately to capital to shareholders, to executives, to the owners of assets. Workers have received a declining share of the economic output they produce.
This is not the natural order of things. It is the result of deliberate policy, weakened unions, casualised workforces, suppressed wage growth, and a political environment in which the interests of capital are consistently prioritised over the interests of labour.
We are not proposing to spend more. We are proposing to spend differently. Earlier. Smarter. On causes rather than consequences.
Prevention is not idealism. It is arithmetic.
Corporate Responsibility & Tax
Woolworths, Coles, Rio Tinto — Record Profits
Soverign Manufacturing Capability
During Covid
Cooperative Economy
300 Worker Cooperatives in Australia
The Argument We Are Making
The Common Wealth is not an argument against success, profit, or private enterprise. It is an argument about the conditions under which all three operate — and who gets to set those conditions.
Right now, the conditions are set by those with the most to gain from keeping them as they are. Corporate tax avoidance is legal because the corporations being taxed helped write the tax laws. Mining royalties are low because the mining companies lobby hard to keep them low. Wages are suppressed because the balance of power between workers and employers has been systematically shifted over forty years of deliberate policy.
None of this is natural. None of it is inevitable. All of it is a choice.
Public ownership where it makes sense. Cooperative ownership where that makes sense. Private enterprise where that makes sense. The best tool for the job — judged by outcomes for people, not ideology for its own sake.
An economy that works for everyone isn’t a utopia. It’s a policy decision.
We aren’t asking you to take our word for it. The evidence behind Foundations of Dignity comes from the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS), the Productivity Commission, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, and the World Health Organization.