There always wealrh rw-distribution, it's just many people seem to favor it going up rather then to the people doing the work.

Keynes opined we'd all be working 15hrs a week by 2000 as we'd shared productivity equitably but we didn't and now inequality is worse then it's ever been.

The country is broken, homeless keeps keeps increasing, housing is embarrassingly expensive, greed and stupidty are celebrated and poltioxans reflecting that elected to ensure it continues, climate change is becoming more devastating all because we've decided that competing against each other under a neo liberal winners/losers system is better the the system of a cooperative model. It will keep getting worse and it will break.

They live in a bubble that has no connect with life for the average battler or any fair-minded business operator. All they can and do, is pit the hard-pressed battler against business.

Now if we had energy the aforementioned could afford, there'd be some point to fair, negotiated, win. win outcomes.

Wherever one buys a good or a service, there's an energy component and a tax built in.

A loaf of bread has over forty different taxes built into the retail checkout price.

Starting with the seed merchant, the transport operator, the farmer, the fuel bill for all the aforementioned, and the power to fire the ovens, mill the flour, with all the energy components included. Plus, a cascading GST and fuel excise. Business licence and registration.

And I've missed quite a few. Like the transport operators tax liabilities, taking the flour to the baker and the transport operator's tax liabilities delivering the bread to the supermarket/corner store.

Not to mention the personal tax, GST and fuel excise paid by the workers in the aforementioned food chain. All hard pressed by their current energy bill!

If they had very affordable energy and it's doable, then most of the financial pressure on the average worker and business operator would simply go away.

Moreover, genuine tax reform would lift much of the cascading and passed on pressure. Affordable energy coupled to tax reform, like a bracket creep free, flat tax of 25%, would have the high-tech manufacturers of the world queuing to gain entry.

The financial boon of our current energy products and raw mineral sales should be building a sovereign wealth fund not used to subsidise cost of living pressures, created almost solely by current energy bills. Massively larger than the wages bill.

We could make lithium batteries here and process our rare earths, smelt and weld titanium if we but had affordable energy. Ditto desalination and pumping sanitised effluent into our arid inland.

All off the table because of Loopy Labor's disconnect from reality.
Alan B.

Before the insanity of the current individualism and dog eat dog competition. We had cooperative capitalism and a period of unprecedented post war prosperity. And co-ops stood almost alone, as the only, private enterprise, free market business model the largely survived the Great Depression, mostly intact. Keynes was right, but we threw out the baby with the bathwater, in an economic sense when the conservative ideologs won power with a litany of non-core promises followed by a huge lift in deficit spending.
Alan B.

WTF?

I think it is the author who has gone loopy.

In an effort to support his view on the opposition to “ Right to Disconnect” he adds two personal anecdotes.

Both reflect totally unreasonable demands on him by his employer.

Both are prime examples of why why there is a need to disconnect.

His wondering about how a young journalist (let's show the youngsters how tough we had it) would cope with driving their pregnant wife through a cyclone to report on said cyclone?

I hope they would laugh down the line at such a moronic request.

In both his anecdotal examples the author refers to his boss as "God" and dutifully capitulates to his demands.

This article sounds like a satire piece from the "Shovel".

But who really runs Australia and benefits from the real power that they exercise?
This book describes the situation http://gameofmates.com/about

Read an item today of a proposed tax on recycling companies.
The companies intend to pass the tax straight onto their customers.
The council's garbo s etc so up go your rates.
It has a negative effect, people may just dump their plastic etc.