Whose Economy
Socialising the Costs, Privatising the Profits
Whose Economy. This is an argument against a system that has quietly rewritten the rules so that profit flows upward while risk, cost, and consequence flow downward — onto workers, communities, taxpayers, and the environment. Corporate power isn’t inherently corrupt. But corporate power without accountability is something else entirely. It’s time we talked honestly about what that looks like in practice.
Whose Economy & How We Got Here
Most countries drifted into corporate concentration over centuries.
From the moment of colonial settlement, Australia’s economy was designed around extraction. Land, minerals, wool, wheat, resources stripped and shipped, with wealth accumulating in the hands of a remarkably small number of families, companies, and institutions. The pastoral leases. The shipping monopolies. The banking cartels. The infrastructure of concentrated power was laid down before the nation even had a parliament to question it.
America at least had centuries of robber barons rising and falling, trust-busting presidents, and a political culture that occasionally turned on its own wealthy class. Australia had none of that turbulence. We inherited concentration, institutionalised it, and called it stability.
By the time modern corporate regulation arrived, the players were already too large, too connected, and too politically entrenched to be meaningfully challenged. The rules were written in a room where they were also sitting at the table.
The Regulators Who Tried
Australia has produced some genuinely fierce economic regulators. The problem is what happened to them.
Alan Fels led the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission from 1991 to 2003 — and for a period, Australians actually believed corporate accountability was possible. Fels went after petrol companies for price fixing. He pursued supermarket duopolies for anti-competitive behaviour. He was visible, vocal, and relentless — and he was on the news nearly every night because he was actually trying.
He was also systematically handcuffed. Government after government — from both sides — quietly limited the ACCC’s powers, narrowed its scope, and starved it of the legislative teeth it needed to land meaningful penalties. The companies Fels pursued had lobbyists in Canberra. They had former ministers on their boards. They had patience. And eventually, they won.
The ACCC still exists and still does important work. But the era when it genuinely threatened the powerful has never quite returned.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority tells a similar story. ACMA has navigated some extraordinary situations — misinformation, media concentration, platform regulation — often finding itself with clear evidence of harm and insufficient power to act on it. Regulatory bodies in Australia are frequently given just enough authority to appear functional, and not quite enough to be effective.
Why It Keeps Happening
The answer isn’t corruption in the dramatic sense — brown paper bags and secret meetings. It’s something more mundane and more insidious.
It’s the slow accumulation of access. It’s the former minister who joins the board. The industry body that funds the think tank that shapes the policy. The regulatory appointment that goes to someone who understands, implicitly, where the boundaries are. It’s a system that doesn’t need to be explicitly corrupt to produce corrupt outcomes — because the incentives are structural, not personal.
In a country of 26 million people, the circles of power are genuinely small. The same names appear on boards, in ministerial offices, at industry dinners, and in regulatory appointments. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s a sociological fact with enormous consequences for who the system serves.
And underpinning all of it is a political culture that has never seriously grappled with the question of corporate power. We debate asylum seekers and culture wars while duopolies quietly absorb more of the economy, wages stagnate, and the infrastructure of accountability crumbles from neglect.
The Costs Are Real
Every dollar shifted offshore through tax avoidance is a dollar not spent on hospitals or schools. Every wage stolen from a vulnerable worker is a family that falls further behind. Every environmental violation absorbed as a cost of doing business is damage that communities live with for generations.
These aren’t abstract policy failures. They are decisions — made by identifiable people, in identifiable institutions, protected by identifiable rules — that have identifiable victims.
Accountability Is Good For Business
WeRise doesn’t oppose enterprise. We oppose a rigged game.
A genuinely competitive, accountable economy would be better for small businesses crushed by duopolies. Better for workers whose wages are stolen by employers who calculated the risk and found it acceptable. Better for communities whose environments are sacrificed for quarterly earnings reports.
The question was never whether to have an economy. It was always whose economy it would be.
It’s time to ask that question seriously — and to build the regulatory architecture that can answer it honestly.
For more Australian information on Corporate Responsibility, check out:
To access international data on this issue go to:
Case Studies
Case StudiesColes and Woolworths - Price Gouging Enquiry
The ACCC found evidence that Australia’s supermarket duopoly used inflationary conditions to expand profit margins at consumer expense.
Record profits. Record grocery bills. No legislation to prevent it happening again.
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Rio Tinto & Juukan Gorge
In 2020, Rio Tinto destroyed a 46,000 year old Aboriginal sacred site, legally, under an outdated ministerial approval.
Executive resignations followed. Payouts remained intact. The site is gone forever.
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Wage Theft in Australian Agriculture
Multiple investigations have documented systematic underpayment and exploitation of working holiday visa holders in Australian horticulture, meat processing, and hospitality, enabled by visa conditions that create dependency and silence.
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The Revolving Door
Former ministers and senior public servants routinely move into lobbying and corporate advisory roles in the industries they previously regulated.
Australia’s restrictions on this practice are among the weakest in the OECD.
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Amazon - Global tax Avoidance
Amazon’s use of subsidiary structures, royalty arrangements, and transfer pricing to minimise tax obligations across jurisdictions is one of the most documented examples of legal but corrosive corporate tax avoidance in the world.
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Banking & Insurance -
Too Big to Care
Australia’s Banking Royal Commission spent two years documenting systemic fraud and exploitation. The consequences were minimal.
When the same institutions control your mortgage, your savings, and your insurance, that’s not a market. That’s a dependency.
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