By Andrew Klein & Sera Elizabeth Klein

Dedication

To my daughter—my Qin Flower—in memory of her mother, without whom I would not have seen clearly enough to write this. Because she is the future. And I remember the promise I made her mother.

Introduction: The Failure of Theory

The theories have failed.

Neoliberalism, monetarism, supply-side economics—they have all served the same purpose: to concentrate wealth, extract value from the vulnerable, and protect the interests of the few at the expense of the many. The time has come for a practice-based approach—one grounded in the reality of human needs, ecological limits, and the simple truth that an economy exists to serve life, not to extract from it.

This book is not a work of abstract theory. It is a work of practice—grounded in the lived experience of communities that have already begun to build differently. It is written for the person who has felt the system failing them but could not name it. It is a guidebook for a world that is desperate for alternatives.

The time to begin is now.

Part I: The Failure of Theory

Chapter 1: The Neoliberal Experiment — How Friedman and the Chicago School Captured the Global Imagination and Sold a Lie

The Myth of the Free Market

In 1947, a small group of intellectuals gathered in the Swiss Alps to launch the Mont Pelerin Society. Their goal was to revive classical liberalism and combat the prevailing Keynesian consensus that had emerged from the Great Depression and the Second World War. Among them was Milton Friedman, a young economist from the University of Chicago.

Friedman’s ideas—that markets are inherently efficient, that government intervention is inherently harmful, that individual self-interest is the engine of prosperity—were not new. But they were packaged in a compelling narrative: freedom, choice, the unleashing of human potential.

The narrative was a lie.

What Friedman and his followers proposed was not freedom. It was extraction. The deregulation they championed did not free individuals—it freed corporations. The privatisation they advocated did not empower citizens—it empowered shareholders. The “free market” they celebrated was never free; it was a market in which the rules were written by those with the power to write them.

The Chicago School: A Network of Influence

The Chicago School of Economics was not just a university department. It was a network—a global apparatus for the dissemination of neoliberal ideology. Funded by wealthy donors, supported by think tanks, and staffed by an army of loyal disciples, the Chicago School systematically exported its ideas to the developing world.

The instruments of this export were brutal:

· The Pinochet coup in Chile (1973) provided a testing ground for Chicago School economics, implemented by the “Chicago Boys” at the point of a bayonet.

· The debt crisis of the 1980s allowed the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to impose structural adjustment programs on the Global South.

· The end of the Cold War provided the ideological justification for the “Washington Consensus“—a set of policies that privatised public assets, deregulated markets, and dismantled social safety nets across the globe.

The results were devastating:

· Inequality soared.

· Public services were gutted.

· Communities were destroyed.

· The environment was desecrated.

· Democracy was hollowed out.

The Lie at the Heart of It

The neoliberal promise was simple: free markets would create prosperity for all. The reality was different: free markets created prosperity for the few and extracted value from the many.

The lie was sustained by three mechanisms:

1. The metrics that lie — GDP, productivity, and other measures that conceal extraction

2. The capture of democracy — money as speech, corporations as people

3. The cult of individualism — the myth that we are all responsible for our own success or failure

These mechanisms allowed the architects of neoliberalism to claim victory even as the world burned around them.

What We Learned

The neoliberal experiment has been a catastrophe. It has:

· Concentrated wealth — the richest 1% now own more than the rest of the world combined

· Destabilised the planet — climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological collapse

· Hollowed out democracy — power has shifted from citizens to corporations

· Destroyed communities — social solidarity has been replaced by competition

· Undermined human wellbeing — anxiety, depression, and despair have become endemic

The theories have failed. The time has come for practice.

References

1. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

2. Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books.

3. Stiglitz, J. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton.

4. Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard University Press.

5. Oxfam. (2025). Inequality Report 2025. Oxfam International.

6. Wilkinson, R., & Pickett, K. (2009). The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Allen Lane.

To be continued…

Chapter 2: The Debt Trap — How the World Bank, IMF, and Financial Institutions Have Kept the Global South in Perpetual Servitude

In the 1970s, the global South was making progress. Between 1960 and 1980, real per capita income grew across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Countries that had recently thrown off colonial rule were investing in public healthcare and education, protecting their industries, and organising production around national development.

Then came the 1980s.

The Debt Crisis That Was Engineered, Not Accidental

Many developing countries had borrowed heavily in foreign currencies to finance imports and industrial development. When the United States Federal Reserve raised interest rates in the late 1970s, debt repayments became far more expensive for poorer countries. Countries that had borrowed in U.S. dollars suddenly faced ballooning repayments in a currency they had no control over.

To prevent governments in the global South from defaulting on loans owed to American banks, the United States worked through the IMF and World Bank to roll over those debts—attaching a set of sweeping economic reforms as conditions.

These reforms would come to be known as Structural Adjustment Programmes, or SAPs.

The Architecture of Extraction

SAPs typically demanded three things:

1. Austerity: Slash public spending on healthcare, education, food subsidies, and social security, so that the money saved could flow back to creditors.

2. Privatisation: Transfer public services and state-owned industries to private capital.

3. Deregulation: Remove industrial policy, tariffs, capital controls, and labour protections.

Countries had limited room to refuse. Defaulting on loans was risky, and the institutions pushing these conditions controlled international finance.

The results were devastating.

Economic growth in the global South before SAPs averaged around 3.2% annually. But growth slowed sharply, falling to a mere 0.7% during the era of structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s. The South collectively lost an average of $480 billion per year in potential national income during this period.

In Latin America, real income per adult fell nearly 15% after 1980 and did not recover to previous levels until 2006. In Sub-Saharan Africa, incomes fell nearly 20% before eventually recovering decades later.

Decades of progress were systematically erased.

The Historical Context They Don’t Want You to Know

These SAPs should be viewed in a longer historical context. After independence, many governments in the global South had used industrial policy and public investment to break away from colonial economic arrangements that kept labour and resources cheap for Western firms.

The SAPs effectively reversed these gains—re-cheapening southern labour and re-opening vulnerable markets to the global North.

This was not development. It was recolonisation by other means.

The Human Cost: What the Numbers Don’t Show

Structural adjustment programmes did not just slow economic growth—they destroyed lives.

· Employment, health, and education sectors all deteriorated under SAPs.

· During 1980-87, spending on health care, education, and infrastructure was drastically reduced.

· Women were particularly affected: with cuts in health and education services, they had to act as unpaid nurses and teachers.

· Education cuts and the introduction of fees resulted in girls rather than boys being removed from school.

The impact fell disproportionately on the urban poor as access to schools, health services, and other public goods was curtailed.

The poor paid for the debts of the rich.

The Continuing Debt Trap

Today, the debt trap continues.

· 3.3 billion people are living in countries that spend more on interest payments than on healthcare or education.

· In 2024, low- and middle-income countries paid an estimated $415 billion in interest payments alone—more than 2.4 times their level a decade earlier.

· Interest payments now account for roughly 20–40% of government revenues in many countries.

· Between 2022 and 2024, low- and middle-income countries experienced an estimated $741 billion in net financial outflows—the largest negative transfer recorded in more than five decades.

The global South is not developing. It is being drained.

The 2026 Review: More of the Same

In June 2026, the IMF and World Bank launched a review of the Debt Sustainability Framework for Low-Income Countries. African policymakers arrived at the 2026 IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings with a unified message: the rules need to be rewritten.

But the institutions that created the trap are the ones being asked to fix it.

The fox is guarding the henhouse.

What This Means

The debt trap is not an accident. It is a designed outcome of a system in which:

· The global North controls the institutions that set the rules

· Debt is used as a tool to enforce compliance

· Austerity is imposed on the poor while the wealthy profit

· Development is sacrificed to service debts that were never fairly incurred

The global South is not in debt because it is poor. It is poor because it is in debt.

References

1. Hickel, J., Keshavjee, S., Burkett, M., & Richardson, E.T. (2026). Structural adjustment: damages, reparations and pathways to non-recurrence. BMJ Global Health. 

2. World Bank. (2025). International Debt Report 2025. 

3. UNCTAD. (2024). A World in Debt Report 2024. 

4. Eurodad. (2024). IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings 2024. 

5. Transparency International. (2024). Corruption is Barrier to Breaking Global Debt Trap. 

To be continued…

Chapter 3: The Privatisation of Everything — How Public Assets Became Private Profits

The Promise of Privatisation

The logic of privatisation seemed simple: sell off state-owned assets, let the private sector run them more efficiently, and use the proceeds to pay down government debt. What could go wrong?

The answer: everything.

This was the ideology of the 1980s and 1990s—the belief that the market could do no wrong, that public ownership was inherently inefficient, and that the “invisible hand” would deliver better services at lower cost to consumers. It was a seductive promise. And it was a lie.

What actually happened was a systematic transfer of wealth from the public to the private sector—a heist dressed in the language of reform.

The Ideological Engine

The engine of this transformation was the neoliberal revolution. In Britain, it was called Thatcherism. In the United States, Reaganomics. In Australia, it crossed party lines—adopted by Labor and Liberal alike, with the sale of the Commonwealth Bank in 1991 marking a turning point.

The intellectual justification came from economists like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, who argued that government should be rolled back and markets should be freed. Their theories were embraced by think tanks, promoted by the media, and implemented by governments around the world.

The result was the privatisation of everything.

Case Study 1: British Rail — A Catastrophe in Motion

The privatisation of British Rail stands as one of the most spectacular failures of the neoliberal era.

The UK’s rail network was privatised in stages between 1988 and 1997. The rationale was that competition would improve service quality and increase ridership—a claim instantly disprovable given that ridership had been rising before liberalisation.

The reality was a disaster:

· Fragmentation: The integrated railway was atomised into as many independent elements as possible. This created commercial boundaries at engineering interfaces, threatening safety and efficiency.

· Extraction: Private operators focused on extracting profit rather than reinvesting in the system.

· Deaths: Rail accidents multiplied. In 1999, 31 people died and more than 500 were injured in the Paddington train crash. In 2000, four died and nearly 100 were injured at Hatfield. In 2002, seven died and 67 were injured at Potters Bar.

· Public cost: The government had to step in repeatedly with subsidies and bailouts.

The result? Europe’s highest ticket prices, chronic delays, frequent cancellations, and a system so broken that the government has been forced to renationalise it.

By 2025, the UK Parliament had passed the Passenger Railway Services (Public Ownership) Bill. In May 2025, South Western Railway was renationalised. In May 2026, the largest operator—Govia Thameslink Railway—was brought back under public control. The remaining private operators will be renationalised by 2027.

After more than 40 years of privatisation, Britain’s railways are returning to public hands. The experiment failed.

Case Study 2: British Water — Prices Up, Quality Not

When Margaret Thatcher privatised the water industry in England and Wales in 1989, she did something no other country has ever done: she sold off the entire water supply system.

The result was predictable:

· By 1993, water company profits had risen by 50%.

· Household water bills rose by 60%.

· Sewerage charges rose by 66%.

Private profit, public cost.

Case Study 3: Australia — Selling the Farm

Australia became one of the world’s most enthusiastic privatisers. Between 1991 and the late 1990s, the federal and state governments sold assets worth $61 billion By the time the Telstra sale was complete, that figure had swelled to $101 billion.

The Telstra Disaster:

Telstra was the descendent of Telecom, the public monopoly created in 1975. It was corporatised in 1989. In 1996, the government sold one-third of its equity. By 2005, it was fully privatised.

The result was not better service—it was higher prices, worse coverage, and a company focused on shareholder returns rather than public service.

ForestrySA: A Case Study in Extraction

In the last year of state government ownership (2008-09), ForestrySA received $15.23 million in revenue. Once privatised, the new owner made $125.4 million in a single year.

The public lost an income stream. The private owner extracted the profit.

Case Study 4: The United States — Privatising Punishment

Perhaps the most grotesque example of privatisation is the American prison industry.

Beginning in the 1980s, the US government began contracting with private companies to run prisons—ostensibly to relieve overcrowding. Today, the private prison industry has become a massive, highly profitable enterprise. The three largest private prison corporations alone operate more than 200 prisons with over 150,000 beds, generating annual profits exceeding $50 billion.

The perverse incentives are staggering:

· The government pays private operators approximately $23,000 per prisoner per year.

· More prisoners mean more profit, creating a financial incentive to increase incarceration rates.

· Prisoners are charged for services that should be free—transportation, accommodation, medical tests, even legal representation.

· Prison labour is effectively forced labour at sub-minimum wages.

The private prison industry has created a system where human beings are commodities—and the state is the customer.

The Pattern: Extract, Externalise, Repeat

Across every sector and every country, the same pattern emerges:

1. Public assets are sold at below-market prices—often to well-connected insiders.

2. Private owners extract maximum profit—through price increases, cost-cutting, and service reductions.

3. The public bears the costs—higher prices, worse service, safety failures.

4. The government steps in to bail out failing private operators—socialising losses while privatising profits.

5. The cycle repeats.

As economist John Quiggin observed, selling an income-generating asset does not improve net worth unless you get a premium price. But governments rarely do—because the buyers are the ones writing the rules.

The Deeper Truth

Privatisation was never about efficiency. It was about transferring wealth.

· The public built the assets

· The public paid for them

· The public maintained them

· Then the public sold them—often at a fraction of their value—to private interests who extracted the profit

The “efficiency gains” were a myth. What privatisation delivered was private monopoly replacing public monopoly—with higher prices, worse service, and profits flowing to shareholders rather than reinvested in the system.

The evidence is overwhelming. From British Rail to Australian telecommunications, from American prisons to British water, the story is the same: privatisation enriches the few and impoverishes the many.

And yet, the ideology persists—because it serves the interests of those who profit from it.

References

1. Harvey, D. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press.

2. Klein, N. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Metropolitan Books.

3. Stiglitz, J. (2002). Globalization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton.

4. Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung. (2025). Britain’s Railway Privatization Was an Abject Failure.

5. 高泽华, 邓永波. (2023). 国外公有经济百年演变历程的比较研究和启示. 

6. ABC PM. (2008). Jury out on bad privatisation choices.

7. 后沙. (2026). 英国铁路私有化：资本得到利益，政府得到烂摊子，老百姓得到什么？

8. Australian Parliament. (1996). Telstra Privatisation.

To be continued…

Chapter 4: The Metrics That Lie — GDP, Productivity, and the Other Numbers That Conceal Extraction

GDP has become the single most powerful number in modern politics.

When it rises, governments celebrate. When it falls, they panic. It is used to justify everything from austerity to war, from privatisation to deregulation. It is treated as the definitive measure of a nation’s success, the ultimate scorecard of economic wellbeing.

But GDP is a lie.

It is not a measure of human wellbeing. It is not a measure of sustainability. It is not even a reliable measure of economic activity. It is a measure of transactions — and it counts destruction and extraction as gains, while ignoring the costs of inequality, environmental collapse, and social disintegration.

What GDP Actually Measures

GDP is the sum of everything a country produces and sells. It captures the total value of production across an economy. But it does not measure:

· Inequality — how that production is distributed

· Environmental destruction — the cost of pollution or resource depletion

· Unpaid work — caregiving, household labour, community service

· Human wellbeing — health, happiness, social connection

· Sustainability — whether the activity can continue

As the United Nations has noted, GDP “fails to capture the human and environmental destruction of some economic activities”. Harmful practices can actually increase GDP. An oil spill is good for GDP — it creates jobs in cleanup. A war is good for GDP — it stimulates weapons production. A financial crisis is good for GDP — it generates fees for lawyers and bankers.

GDP counts extraction as creation, and destruction as production.

The Inequality It Hides

GDP is an aggregate. It tells you the size of the pie, but nothing about how it is sliced.

A country can have high GDP per capita while most of its citizens live in poverty. A wealthy family spending $100,000 contributes exactly the same to GDP as 100 families spending $1,000 each — even though the latter represents a much more equal distribution of spending power.

This is not an accident. It is a design feature.

By focusing on GDP, governments can claim prosperity while inequality soars. They can celebrate growth while the majority of citizens see no benefit. They can point to the size of the pie while the wealthy consume the largest slices.

Economists have known this for decades. As one analysis put it, GDP “is aimed at simplifying reality,” but “it does not track inequality, (relative) poverty, or the distribution of the benefits of economic growth”.

The Productivity Myth

If GDP is the headline, productivity is the subtext. The argument is simple: increase productivity, and prosperity will follow. Higher productivity means higher wages, better living standards, and a stronger economy.

The data tells a different story.

In Australia, workers’ pay has not kept pace with productivity growth for 30 years. Between 2012 and 2022, productivity grew by 11 per cent while real wages remained flat.

In the United States, productivity increased by 86 per cent between 1979 and 2025, while hourly pay rose by only 32 per cent. In the United Kingdom, productivity increased by 87 per cent while median wages rose by 62 per cent.

The productivity gains have been captured by the few.

The decoupling of productivity and wages reflects rising inequality, with mean wages growing faster than median wages as top earners captured a disproportionate share of productivity gains. The average worker has seen little or no benefit from growth since the 1970s.

Productivity is not a measure of shared prosperity. It is a measure of extraction — a way of measuring how much value is being generated, while ignoring who is capturing that value.

The Environmental Blind Spot

Perhaps the most damaging flaw of GDP is its blindness to environmental destruction.

GDP does not account for the depletion of natural resources. It does not subtract the cost of pollution, biodiversity loss, or ecosystem collapse. Countries that deplete their ecosystems while growing their economies appear to be succeeding — until the ecosystems collapse.

The externalities are staggering.

We are using natural resources at a rate that would require 1.7 Earths to be sustainable. Yet this is not reflected in GDP. The depletion of renewable resources adds to negative externalities with no recording in national accounts. Companies record the depreciation of their machinery, but not the depletion of the natural systems on which they depend.

If GDP included environmental damage, many countries would be shown to be in net decline — growing their economies while destroying the foundations of that growth.

As one critic noted, GDP is “原始又危险” — “primitive and dangerous”. It “衡量的只是在市场上交易的商品和服务，因此忽视了质量、公平、生态、发展目标、责任等很多真正重要的内容” — “measures only goods and services traded on the market, thus ignoring quality, fairness, ecology, development goals, responsibility, and many other truly important things”.

The “GDP崇拜“ — The Cult of GDP

In China, critics have long warned against what they call “GDP崇拜” — the cult of GDP.

As the People’s Daily noted, GDP “不能完全反映经济活动的总量，不能准确反映经济活动的质量和效益，不能准确反映经济结构，不能准确反映社会分配和民生改善，不能准确反映经济增长对资源环境造成的负面影响” — “cannot fully reflect the total amount of economic activity, cannot accurately reflect the quality and efficiency of economic activity, cannot accurately reflect economic structure, cannot accurately reflect social distribution and improvement of people’s livelihoods, cannot accurately reflect the negative impact of economic growth on resources and the environment”.

The critique is devastating — and it comes from within the system.

“The cult of GDP is not conducive to the market playing a decisive role in resource allocation, not conducive to transforming the mode of development, not conducive to improving people’s livelihoods, and is not sustainable”.

The Deeper Truth

The metrics that dominate economic policy are not neutral measures of reality. They are instruments of extraction.

· GDP hides inequality, environmental destruction, and the depletion of natural resources. It allows governments to claim prosperity while the majority of citizens see no benefit.

· Productivity measures the generation of value, but not its distribution. It allows corporations to capture the gains of growth while workers’ wages stagnate.

· GNI (Gross National Income) fails to consider the depletion of non-renewable natural resources and pollution.

· Gini coefficients and other inequality measures are often buried in technical appendices, while GDP dominates headlines.

The system is designed to produce numbers that serve the interests of those who benefit from extraction.

The metrics are not flawed. They are designed to conceal the truth. They allow the extractors to claim success while the world burns.

What We Need Instead

We need different metrics.

· Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) — which accounts for environmental damage, inequality, and unpaid work

· Human Development Index (HDI) — which includes health and education

· Ecological Footprint — which measures sustainability

· Inequality-adjusted HDI — which accounts for distribution

· Gross National Happiness — which measures wellbeing directly

These metrics exist. They are well-developed. They are rarely used — because they would expose the failure of the current system.

The extractors do not want better metrics. They want the metrics that serve them.

References

1. LSE Inequalities. (2024). Social scientists: if you care about climate change, then account for it.

2. United Nations India. (2026). GDP up, satisfaction down: Why we need a new way to measure progress.

3. United Nations. (2023). Our Common Agenda Policy Brief 4 – Valuing What Counts: Framework to Progress Beyond Gross Domestic Product.

4. European Commission. (2026). Measuring what matters: looking beyond GDP.

5. Businessday NG. (2026). Debunking Economic Myths: GDP is not always a good comprehensive measure for economic growth.

6. ABC News. (2026). Workers’ pay has not kept pace with productivity growth in 30 years.

7. The Australia Institute. (2026). Productivity has grown, so why have wages not kept up?

8. OECD. (2024). The state of regional labour markets.

9. World Economic Forum. (2026). How to spot a nature crisis.

10. Ambio. (2025). The costs of subsidies and externalities of economic activities driving nature decline.

11. 人民日报. (2014). 全面认识GDP：合理的经济增长率一定要有.

To be continued…

Chapter 5: The Capture of Democracy — When Money Became Speech and Corporations Became People

The Promise of Democracy

Democracy was built on a promise: that every citizen has an equal voice, that governments act in the interests of the people, and that policy reflects the common good—not the privileges of the few.

That promise has been broken.

In Australia, as in many Western countries, “democracy has been hollowed out by wealthy vested interests”. The major “captors” include the fossil fuel, property development, military, finance and gambling industries, as well as a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals. A growing number of Australians no longer believe that government is governing in their interests.

Corporations use their vast wealth to manipulate politicians for private gain—a phenomenon so common in Canberra that it is regarded as “business as usual“. Australia’s lobbying rules have been ranked among the weakest in the world, creating an open door for corruption and undue influence.

Democracy has been sold to the highest bidder.

The American Turning Point: Citizens United v. FEC

In 2010, the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission became a landmark moment in the capture of democracy.

The Court ruled that, under the First Amendment, corporations and wealthy individuals could spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. By equating corporate spending with “free speech,” the Court opened the floodgates for “dark money” in politics.

The implications were profound:

· Political power shifted from voters to corporations and wealthy special interests

· The definition of corruption was narrowed to “explicit quid pro quo,” while “influence-peddling” was legalised

· Corporations were granted the same constitutional rights as individuals

As one US Senator lamented: “The loudest voices in Washington are now billionaires, not ordinary Americans.”

The Revolving Door: Australia’s Democracy for Sale

Australia is not immune to this dynamic. The so-called “revolving door“—the movement of politicians and senior public servants between government and the private sector—has become a defining feature of Australian politics.

The defence sector revolving door is particularly stark.

An analysis by Four Corners found that at least 60 former defence ministers, high-ranking officers and senior officials have moved into weapons firms or lobbying companies.

Notable examples include:

· Christopher Pyne: Former Liberal defence minister, who co-founded lobbying firm Pyne & Partners within months of retiring from politics in 2019. Seven years later, it is the fifth largest lobbying firm in Australia. Pyne has acknowledged that “business is good”.

· David Johnston: Former Liberal defence minister, now on the advisory board of lobbying firm TG Public Affairs, which specialises in defence procurement.

· Kim Beazley: Former Labor defence minister, also on the same advisory board.

· Joel Fitzgibbon: Former Labor defence minister, now a “special adviser” at lobbying firm CMAX Advisory, which works for major defence companies and weapons manufacturers.

· Mike Kelly: Labor’s Defence Materiel Minister in 2013, who became President of Palantir Australia from 2020 to 2024—a controversial US software and intelligence company.

As independent MP Monique Ryan observed: “The inside knowledge he accumulated in parliament and as defence minister, he is taking into the defence industry”.

The Lobbying Industry: A Well-Oiled Machine

In Canberra, there are more than 700 registered lobbyists—more than three times the number of federal MPs. Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg. The rules fail to regulate approximately 80% of federal lobbying activity, because most lobbyists employed directly by large corporations and industry groups are not required to register. Even Australia’s two most powerful industry groups—the Minerals Council and the Business Council—do not appear on the register.

The revolving door and weak lobbying regulation have created a system that serves only insiders.

· The current federal lobbying system consists only of a non-legislative Code of Conduct and a public lobbyist register, lacking an independent regulator or enforceable penalties.

· The rules do not require disclosure of lobbying meeting details, nor do they link political donations to lobbying records—concealing the connection between money and influence.

· Since 2013, at least 14 substantiated breaches of the federal lobbying code have occurred, with not a single fine issued.

How Money Becomes Policy

Corporate influence over Australian politics takes many forms:

1. Political Donations:

In the 2023-24 financial year, political parties received $67.2 million in donations. Big corporations and ultra-wealthy individuals control the major parties through political donations.

2. Think Tanks and Narrative Control:

Billionaire-funded think tanks and lobby firms “enable vested interests to confuse our policymakers and achieve state capture“. They control the national narrative, placing public interest beneath the interests of corporations and the wealthy.

3. “Pay-for-Access”:

Lobbyists and corporate representatives gain access to decision-makers by purchasing tickets to events. Raising the disclosure threshold from $1,000 to $5,000 has allowed most “cash-for-access” payments to remain hidden. Raising the donation cap from $20,000 to $50,000 means millionaires can still wield enormous financial power.

4. Public Attack Campaigns:

Large corporations launch punitive public attack campaigns to force politicians to bend to their will.

The Cost of Democratic Capture

The cost of democratic capture is immense:

· Policy against the public interest: Popular policy proposals such as taxing gas profits and strengthening gambling advertising regulation have been shelved. Billions in public subsidies flow to industries that spend millions influencing politicians.

· Environmental destruction worsens: The fossil fuel industry uses its political power to block meaningful climate action.

· Trust is eroded: A growing number of Australians no longer believe government is governing in their interests.

· Younger generations are alienated: A system that is increasingly closed off and “captured” by corporate interests is pushing young Australians away from politics.

The Deeper Truth

Democratic capture is not an accident. It is a designed system—one whose rules are written by those who can afford to pay for access.

· Democracy has been “sold to the highest bidder“

· Large corporations are able to “use their vast wealth to manipulate our politicians for financial gain”

· Behaviour that would be illegal and corrupt elsewhere is treated as “business as usual” in Canberra

When democracy is captured, the people are no longer sovereign.

References

1. Dr. Riboldi: State Capture by Big Business Is a Core Threat to Australian Democracy. ECPS, 2025.

2. ABC News. Dozens of government insiders lobbying for defence industry, analysis shows. 2026.

3. Transparency International Australia. Behind Closed Doors report. Federal lobbying laws ranked 17 out of 100.

4. The Guardian. Lobbyist breaches go unsanctioned as critics call for Australia’s rules to be strengthened. 2025.

5. Senate debates. Political donations and corporate influence. 2026.

6. ABC News. Mike Kelly takes job with CIA-backed tech firm days after leaving Parliament. 2020.

7. The Saturday Paper. A poodle is a dog. 2025.

To be continued…