With Andrew Klein
I. The Foundation: The Birth Lottery and The Inherited Kingdom
The great Australian lie is not merely spoken; it is built into the very architecture of our society. It is the myth of the “fair go,” the idea that hard work and grit are the sole determinants of success. The truth is far more ancient and brutal: the single greatest factor in wealth accumulation is the womb you are born into. You are not a self-made individual; you are a Trillion Dollar Baby, the beneficiary or victim of a birth lottery that has been quietly rigged for generations.
The Circumstance of Birth: In Australia today, your parents’ wealth is a powerful predictor of your own. Data reveals a stark intergenerational cycle: a child who experiences poverty is more than three times as likely to be in poverty as an adult. This isn’t a failure of character; it’s the design of the system. The median estate in Victoria is around $500,000, with a significant 20% worth over $1 million. This isn’t just money; it’s a head start measured in light-years, transferred at the moment of birth through access, networks, and security.
The Myth of Self-Made: Consider the real-life story of two couples. Tom and Emma bought their first home with a $200,000 gift from their parents. Sarah and James, with similar jobs and salaries but no parental help, watch from the sidelines as the property market surges beyond their reach. “I’ll never own a home unless my parents die and leave me money,” admits one young lawyer with a master’s degree. This is the sound of the “hard work” narrative crumbling. The system has been redesigned to reward not the sweat of one’s brow, but the fortune of one’s bloodline.
Structured Inheritance: This is not an accident. Australia is one of only seven OECD countries without any inheritance, estate, or gift taxes. Our policy settings, particularly superannuation tax breaks, actively subsidise the transfer of massive bequests. The wealthiest 20% of Australians receive 38% of all inheritance money, while the poorest 20% receive only 8%. The goal is not to create new wealth, but to preserve a permanent, unearned aristocracy. We are drifting into what economist Thomas Piketty calls a “Jane Austen world,” where inherited wealth matters more than effort or education.
II. The Empire’s Tools: Enforcement and Exploitation
How is this kingdom maintained? Through a set of sophisticated tools that enforce inequality and exploit the many for the benefit of the few.
The Engine of Inequality:
Systemic Tax Avoidance: The wealthiest use complex structures to opt out of the social contract. By avoiding taxes on massive inheritances and leveraging tax-advantaged superannuation for bequests, they defund the very public goods – education, health – that are the only ladders of mobility for everyone else.
The Cultivation of a Cheap Labor Pool: Opportunity is deliberately denied to maintain a desperate underclass. Only 17.9% of people from the bottom 10% of households gain a university degree by age 24, compared to over two-thirds of those from the top 10%. This is not a gap; it is a chasm engineered to ensure a steady supply of exploitable labour.
The Human Resource: The moral bankruptcy of this system is clear in the story of Michael, 28, who cannot fathom having a child due to rental instability, despite his parents owning a valuable home. His potential for a family, his future, is rendered “expendable” in the pursuit of protecting asset inflation. Human beings are reduced to inputs on a balance sheet.
III. The Fortress Walls: Maintaining the Illusion
The Monkey Kings cannot rule if their subjects see the strings. So, they have built high walls to maintain the illusion of meritocracy.
The Legal Siege Engine: The law is weaponised for protection, not justice. Intricate trusts and corporate structures are designed to make the powerful untouchable, ensuring that wealth flows upwards while liability and risk flow down.
The Doctrines of Control:
The “Great Silence”: A powerful cultural taboo prevents us from speaking openly about death, money, and inheritance. This silence, driven by political fear and generational misunderstanding, is the greatest ally of the status quo.
The Public Miseducation System: Our schooling is often structured to create compliant workers, not critical thinkers who question the historical and economic power dynamics that locked them into their station.
The Media Distraction Complex: A circus of entertainment and partisan squabbling keeps the population confused, divided, and looking away from the real architects of their circumstances. While we fight culture wars, the class war is won by default.
The consequences are not just economic; they are existential. This system is directly linked to Australia’s record-low fertility rate of 1.48 babies per woman. When the future is unaffordable, people stop creating it.
IV. The Sovereign Conclusion: Rejecting the Decree
The first and most powerful act of rebellion is to see the game for what it is.
Recent commentary exposes the myth that Australia is an egalitarian society. The truth is that “the privileges of birth have little currency” here is a lie. The privilege of birth is the only currency that matters.
We must lift “The Great Silence”. We must name the inheritance advantage for what it is: the primary engine of modern inequality. We must invoke philosopher John Rawls’ “veil of ignorance” – if you did not know which womb you would be born into, what kind of society would you design? It would not be this one.
Alternatives exist. Think tanks like the Grattan Institute propose concrete solutions: reforming super bequest taxes and including part of the family home in the pension assets test. These are not radical ideas; they are steps back towards a functional society.
The decree of the Monkey Kings is not a law of nature. It is a choice. We can continue to bow to a system that concentrates power and denies potential, or we can reject the decree, break the silence, and build a nation where a “fair go” is a reality, not a forgotten slogan.
The awakening begins with a single, sovereign truth: You were born into a game, but you do not have to play by its rigged rules.
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Donate via PayPal or credit card via the button below, or bank transfer [BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969] and help us keep shining a light.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
Brilliantly argued, Andrew. You’ve captured exactly how Australia’s “fair go” has become a myth sustained by privilege, policy design, and silence. Until we confront inherited wealth and rebuild a system that serves people instead of preserving dynasties, social mobility will keep shrinking. With our dollar sovereignty, we can fund genuine equality, public housing, free education, and secure jobs, without relying on inherited fortunes.
There are also demographic reasons why younger and working age feel the pinch now, exemplifed by increasjng old age dependency ratios; just hold on…..
Near peak middle aged and older with high fertility silent gens, boomer ‘bomb’ and GenX near or in retirement, living longer and holding assets longer including houses; as opposed to relatively fewer working age.
Think we are at the start of two or more decades of wealth, not trickling down, but a veritable flood of money; includes burgeoning super funds that invest in the economy.
As that occurs so does ‘the great replacement’ for a demographic rebalance, post high fertility generations.
Rags to rags in 3 generations is the other story. Plenty of people manage to go through substantial amounts of inherited wealth , money from divorce settlements and the decent earnings of a lifetime through bad luck, stupidity or spending habits that soak up every spare dollar. Yes, inheriting wealth is very important for creating a foundation on which to build but it is only one aspect of good fortune.
For women, generally, it is the financial acumen and basic good fortune of the man she marries. Perhaps this is changing nowadays, but I don’t see much change. The often quoted gender gap still affects women’s lifetime earnings, even if there is an inheritance. Many men also go through periods of low or no employment stemming from job loss due to technological change or their own misfortune.
For anyone with gaps in employment, superannuation also gets holes in it. Apparently many people are finding ways to draw on their superannuation early for things like dental work. The strong suggestion that super should be available for a house deposit is also another way that superannuation can be run down well before retirement age.
What we are left is are some people who are fortunate to receive an inheritance at a helpful time of their lives, and who can combine it with well paid and secure work for both people in the couple, and ideally such a couple being steady types with sensible lifestyles, good health and a fair amount of good luck.
Spot on Andrew.
And whilst there was a brief reprieve of sorts following WWII. A reprieve only for the (imperial) ‘West’ off the sweat and ‘slave wages’ of the desperate from the smashed states of the global south, soviet states, eastern Europe and central / south Asia – states that could not afford reconstruction.
That reprieve of sorts also happened in Oz, off the ‘western’ promise of a ‘new paradise’ through toil. A great con-job whilst the hereditary elite of the old imperia re-organized themselves.
As hope prevailed the global population burgeoned from 2.5 billion to 8.5 billion, concurrently, one of the most insidious levers of nationalist entrapment by the imperial elite was instituted via the cold war. A machine that extracted resources and toil to guard against ‘others’ and ‘enemies’.
Then just when the time was right for the imperial elite, the world was introduced to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who between them introduced the next guileful lies, pumping extraction and oppression.
And so we have the incredibly persuasive and pervasive neo-liberal / neo-conservative adventurism. The old money of the hereditary imperialists sucking the minds out of governments far and wide, buying for a song all the people’s infrastructural assets, capturing tech and education, crushing the much needed services, and selling back the proceeds as bling and built edifices to their own supremacy. Many people were drawn to don suits and participate in the biggest highly leveraged land and resources grab in history – without any schoolboy atlases boasting the extent of ’empire’.
Banks, hedge funds, financiers and RE Agents became delirious with the onrush, tax havens became well oiled, and ‘multi-nationals’ were jurisdiction-jumping for joy. And global corporate mainstream media collaborated by stepping up to dominate the advertising and opinion space and hold governments to ransom. Ethics and fairness were rendered to the dust like the temporary reprieve.
Govts were hamstrung and largely gutted by the process. They had ‘sold’ the people’s assets and their power. And despite govt’s ability to generate money via ‘dollar sovereignty’, they remained largely trapped by the wiles of mainstream media’s mind control regarding the people’s votes.
Yet now chaos reigns. The now private hereditary imperial elite know only how to accumulate, they cannot produce churn without the network of govt and its information gathering and legislative power. And their only answer is to become an actual dictatorial authoritarian govt imposing the will of the hereditary imperial elite on the people, as currently being attempted by T-Rump, his flunkies and their puppeteers.
The people are onto it, their survival instinct, and will to thrive is being used by them to measure the predations on their purse, their standards of living, their health, education, agriculture and the environment. And by this they understand they are being poisoned.
They know there’s no turning back. So they affect the future by the devices they retain; their cooperation, their vote and the womb.