Cost of living and inequality

Labor and Liberals both rule for the rich—passing tax cuts for billionaires and big corporations while calling for ‘wage constraint’ from the workers that create all their wealth.

In recent decades we’ve seen a massive transfer of wealth from workers and the poor to super-rich, with inequality growing year on year. In 1974, Australian workers received 55.9 percent of GDP in wages. Today it's 47.9 percent. If that share increased back to 1974 levels, it would mean workers would, collectively, be $220 billion better off (more than $15,000 per employee, per year).

Supermarkets, banks, property investors and developers are making a killing, helped by government policies that reward them for their greed. Meanwhile, increasing numbers struggle just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.

Workers who organise in unions and collectively withdraw their labour in pursuit of better wages and conditions face massive fines. Yet the supermarket giants get away with jacking up prices endlessly and developers can withhold much needed housing stock for years to prop up prices and get at most a slap on the wrist.

Victorian Socialists stand for workers and the poor, and for turning around the one-sided class war that Labor and the Liberals have been waging against us for decades.

What we think

1. Australia is among the richest countries on Earth, with enough wealth to ensure everyone has a decent life. The problem is, that wealth is currently hoarded by a tiny minority at the top. 
2. The basis of all profit in capitalist society is theft: the labour of workers (including the labour involved in ‘social reproduction’ in the domestic sphere), is the source of all wealth, yet a large portion of that is appropriated by the parasitic capitalist class via exploitation.
3. The burden of taxation should overwhelmingly fall on big business and the rich, rather than workers. Such tax should be seen not as an imposition on productive members of society but as the return of a portion of wealth stolen from workers by the capitalist class.

We'll fight to

1. Crack down on profiteering by supermarkets, energy companies and other big corporations:
   1. Put price caps on essential grocery items and force the supermarket giants to offer an ‘essentials’ basket of goods at a set, low price.
   2. Introduce an immediate annual price cap on electricity and gas bills for two years based on their average 2022 prices.
   3. Renationalise the Commonwealth Bank with a charter mandating that it offer owner-occupier home loans at below market rates.
2. Impose a five-year freeze on rent increases and cap subsequent increases at whichever is lower, at the time, out of the Consumer Price Index and the Wage Price Index.
3. Increase taxes on big corporations and the super-rich, and crack-down on rampant tax avoidance:
   1. Impose a 10 percent wealth tax on billionaires and a 10 percent tax on assets owned by foreign billionaires in Australia.
   2. Impose a 90 percent marginal tax rate on all personal income over $300,000 pa.
   3. Increase company tax to 50 percent.
   4. Establish stringent laws that impose jail time for those who try to hide wealth offshore.
   5. Abolish the GST, a regressive tax that hits lower income earners hardest.
4. End government funding of elite private schools, tax breaks for property investors, and all other ways that public money is being used to benefit the wealthiest and entrench inequality.
5. Ditch anti-strike laws and all other restrictions on workers’ ability to organise and fight for better wages and conditions at work.
6. Increase the minimum wage to $30 per hour (currently $24.10).
7. Lift all welfare payments to a minimum of $1,500 per fortnight and abolish all punitive bureaucratic requirements imposed on recipients.