The Gilded Age: glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. That’s how Mark Twain described the late 19th century in America.
America at the time, like Australia now, experienced rapid economic growth, but dramatic concentrations in wealth correlated with increasing poverty and inequality. During the Gilded Age, the wealthiest 2% of American households owned more than a third of the nation’s wealth, the top 10% owned roughly three-quarters of it, while the bottom 40% had no wealth at all (Steve Fraser, 2015).
In Australia today, wealth is shared just as unequally. The richest 10% of households hold almost half of all wealth (46%), while the majority of Australians (60%) possess only 17%. Almost 15% of Australians live below the poverty line after taking housing costs into account — that is 3.3 million people in poverty, more than 750,000 being children.
Our nation’s wealth is being used to camouflage the modern adaptation of the poorhouse; people unable to support themselves struggling to survive, only this time without any guarantee of shelter. A struggle often framed in terms of economic burden, not human suffering.
Budget speeches replete with references to “cost-of-living relief” and “resilience” will do nothing to change our nation’s economic or social trajectory if the government does not make a conscious decision to lift people out of poverty. This non-inflationary investment in the real economy may extend Australia’s golden era a little longer, but will it be enough?
The Gilded Age was a time of rapid economic growth, with key industries demanding access to an unskilled labour force, which saw an influx of millions of migrants. Care industries in Australia are reconstructing this scenario, driving demand for low-paid, unskilled work. Outsourced government care services depend on imported care workers. The only real difference with Australia’s Gilded Age is that essential workers are predominantly women.
Then and now, captains of industry are publicly lauded while privately feasting on unskilled and migrant workers, making long hours and stagnant wages the norm. In both countries, corruption and graft infiltrated politics, with too many politicians catering to business interests over the needs of their constituency.
As with America at the time, yellow journalism has flourished in Australia — the insipid, captured, fourth estate that elevates sensationalism above science, above facts, above reality. All the while, topics such as poverty barely last a news cycle.
Sensationalism sells. And by extension the lurid details of corruption will sell. As the federal integrity commission exposes the vices of political elites, will our overly concentrated mainstream media be swayed? Will the voices of the muckrakers contest the prominence of yellow journalism in Australia as it did at the turn of the 20th century in America?
The end of the Gilded Age started with widespread discontent over rampant income inequality and corruption — but gathered momentum only when panic hit the middle class about what it could lose.
As we sit atop a housing market overburdened with debt, the servicing cost of which continues to rise, the one thing the middle class has been conditioned to seek (a ruse so that the rich can hoard it in greater numbers) — capital — could ultimately be what brings us undone.
The partisan stalemate in the latter part of 19th century America created a leadership void in which people created their own political solutions — including political movements and grassroots organisations — which led to shorter workdays, graduated income tax and government ownership of commodities.
With single women over 60 the most likely to live in poverty, will the oppressed in Australia today vote to repeat the sweeping economic and social reforms of the progressive era?
Just like Roosevelt sought to rebalance the value of people over the value of corporations, it seems Australia needs leaders brave enough to make a square deal with we, the people.
Perhaps Australia’s revolution is just a teal T-shirt away.
Is Australia’s middle class ready to revolt? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
