Australians are being locked into a poorer quality of life.

What are we doing wrong and how can we reverse the decline?

This is the fourth article in a series of five about ACFP’s recently released report on The State of Australia 2025. View the first article here.

ACFP’s recently released report on The State of Australia 2025 is a unique report in that it looks not just at recent trends in improvement or decline of our quality of life, but also at what we might be able to expect for our future wellbeing and security if we persist with the policy choices our governments have favoured over recent decades.

In relation to our prospects for a better future, the report has identified dozens of policy choices that have been made during the last two parliaments that are baking in a decline in our quality of life. Some of these choices look harmless and even beneficial, at least in the short term, but they will not secure a better future for us in the longer term. Isolating these choices – and reversing the most harmful ones – will significantly improve the nation’s chances of heading off future social, environmental, economic and democratic decline.

The report shows, for instance, that during the 46^th and 47^th parliaments at least 29 policy choices were made by governments that might appear to offer the possibility of improvements in our current living standards; but the reality is that they will actually lead to a reversal of our prospects for wellbeing, safety and security in the long run. These policies that look positive on the surface but are destined to fail – indeed they have already been proven to fail – are collated in the Overview section of The State of Australia 2025 report under the heading of “Longer term outlook trends – negative and positive.” Another 69 negative outlook trends have been identified throughout the report.

What this means is that the report has identified almost 100 policies and practices that Australia and its governments have been following that have not worked well as yet and will not work well for us in the longer term if we persist with them. Detailed evidence for these results is provided in Chapters 7 to 10 of the report.

Here’s just four examples of policies that might look good but can’t work.

A typical example of one of these policies with a negative outlook trend arises from the government’s commitment to a 43% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and its simultaneous adoption of a multi-year budget of total carbon emissions notionally permissible between 2021 and 2030 of 4,381 Mt CO₂-e. On the surface this looks like an improvement on the former government’s refusal to set a reasonable short term carbon emissions reduction target – and it is. But the carbon budget the government has allowed itself is far too big to contain heating to below 2^o Celsius, let alone 1.5^o as per Australia’s signed commitment under the Paris Agreement.

The 2030 emissions reduction target and the adopted carbon budget mean that Australia is unlikely to achieve net zero carbon emissions before the year 2056 at the earliest, by which time we will have emitted at least 8,147 Mt CO₂-e from 2022 onwards, more than double what Australia should allow itself to emit if we still expect to contain heating – which is after all the entire point of adopting the target and budget for emissions in the first place. The whole thing is self-defeating from the outset, particularly when it is combined with other policies which subsidise fossil fuels and grant approvals for more coal and gas extraction. It equates to an assumption by the Albanese government that travel on a path to much greater than 1.8 degrees of heating is in Australia’s interests. Economically, it is a disaster waiting to happen. If we persist with this policy and support other countries in similar poor behaviour, we are likely to blunder into planetary heating well above 3 degrees, which is an existential threat to our species and all others.

A second example of a policy that might look good in the short term but is selling out our future quality of life is in the area of aged care policy. Here the Labor government has introduced some positive reforms by way of a new Aged Care Act 2024. This has been marketed as a “rights-based” law defining rights for those admitted as clients into the aged care system. However, the Act offered only limited rights to access the system in the first place and encoded no obligation on the government to provide access or to ensure sufficient aged care services are even available in line with need and demand. This is the equivalent of notionally conferring a human right but exonerating governments from any obligation to observe it.

A major flaw in the new Act is its tacit but nevertheless extensive reliance on the private sector to meet consumer needs. A further failure in the legislation was that it ensured no proceedings could be taken against the government or private providers for breach of rights. In effect, the Aged Care Act 2024 exonerates the government from its obligations to the people of Australia under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). No comeback at law will be possible when aged Australians are denied access or are ill-treated within the system.

In the longer term, as a direct result of the new Aged Care Act, Australians cannot be sure that aged care services will be there for them when they reach old age at all. They may have some greater degree of surety that if they’re lucky enough to get into the system they may get some reasonable care, but they will be dependent on the good graces of those private providers who were found during the Royal Commission on Aged Care to be by far the worst abusers of clients. Getting into the system may not be lucky for them at all. The Aged Care Act 2024 bakes in the potential for aged care system and service failure.

A third example of a policy that looks good at first glance but isn’t when more scrutiny is applied, arises with the current government’s Future Made in Australia initiative.

The FMIA has been marketed as an economic plan that will transition Australia to a net zero economy and it may help diversify Australia’s industrial base a little; but it is actually geared to defeat the purpose of establishing a net zero economy. This is because it proposes expenditure of $22.7 billion on skills development and renewable energy projects – which is good – but devotes more than twice that amount ($50.3 billion) to implement the 2024 National Defence Strategy to upgrade the capacity of Australia’s defence forces for military aggression rather than defence. None of that latter investment would increase economic resilience, self-sufficiency, productive industrialisation, or progress towards a net zero emissions economy because defence industries contribute significantly to carbon emissions and they divert scarce human capital and natural resources away from the production of essentials and from vital services. The FMIA is more likely than not to weaken the economy in the face of climate change, cruel our chances of mitigating planetary heating, and at the same time expose Australia unnecessarily to a greater risk of war.

It is likely, though, that one of the most significant risks for our future arises from a fourth example of the sort of policies that might look good but are not – and that is the neoliberal policy of small government. Successive federal governments, through a program of privatisation of public goods, assets and services, have unnecessarily restricted government sector participation in the national economy for at least two decades. And while the federal government during the period of the 47^th parliament has increased public sector spending – which is good because that spending is on services for Australians – it has nevertheless continued along the same old neoliberal track by refusing to properly review the National Competition Policy.

This policy continues to downgrade the potential for public sector involvement in markets. In other words, it downgrades the Australian taxpayers’ participation in their own economy and by weakening that, it reduces the capacity of the taxpayer-owned public sector to act as an effective and essential brake on the excesses arising from monopolistic and other anti-competitive activity by the private sector.

The combination of very poor competition policies and a range of unfair taxation policies, if persisted with, can only add to the country’s economic decline. It can have no other result. In 2025, the Australian government remains over-reliant on the private sector to deliver programs for the public good – this is especially evident in housing – and it is not protecting taxpayer investments in Australia by maintaining public ownership and operation of essential services and infrastructure. This neoliberal approach has resulted in decades of lost returns for the public, declines in the quality of services, particularly in aged care and housing, and exorbitant price increases, especially for electricity and health cover.

These are just a few of the many examples of where, during the 46^th and 47^th parliaments, governments attempted some incremental and temporary changes but not the necessary systemic change. Some of the incremental changes made during the 47^th parliament provide a temporary benefit, but few if any will be long lasting and overall they amount to little more than small tweaks of already failed systems.

So can we reverse this decline and how?

The State of Australia 2025 shows that the answer to this question is Yes – we can still reverse the decline, although not if we keep doing the things that haven’t been working and – importantly – not if we continue to succumb to the divisive tactics and undemocratic practices of the political parties that have held government over the last twenty years.

Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world. It has all the resources – human, natural and financial – that it needs to deliver not just a good but an excellent quality of life for every single Australian. And yet, successive governments have chosen not to, and have opted instead for policies that are known to have caused growth in poverty, inequality, and poor health.

The data and information in The State of Australia 2025 report shed light on a multiplicity of very poor and indeed unnecessary policy decisions over recent decades. In general, these failures reflect:

• incompetence, conflicts of interest and short-sightedness in a succession of governments; and

• an unwillingness by the two major political parties to work together with the rest of the parliament in the interests of all Australians.

The lack of respect for the parliament and parliamentary democratic process by both Labor and Coalition governments is most evident in recent decisions regarding human rights law reform and war powers reform - or to put that more clearly, it is evident in the refusal to have any reform at all to grant human rights to Australians and to allow the parliaments they elect to oversee and approve decisions on entry into war. This is a serious issue of attitudinal immaturity in both the major political parties that must be overcome if we are to be able to reverse the current very evident direction of travel away from a future of wellbeing and security. It amounts to a bipartisan program to consolidate power in the executive government and as far away from the people and their parliament as possible. It is contemptuous of the elected parliament and entirely undemocratic. It is Trumpian.

The detrimental effect of this short-sighted high-handedness in decisions on policy can be most easily discerned by scanning Chapter 12 of The State of Australia 2025. This chapter describes the nation’s progress over the current decade in relation to the top twenty most urgent issues – the issues we need to resolve by 2030 or as soon as possible thereafter if we expect to secure our future wellbeing. Building on that, it highlights the areas where we have the most capacity to reverse our fortunes if we work together as a nation and – perhaps most importantly – if our governments desist from their usual divisive tactics and work together with the rest of the parliament.

The evidence is that the areas where we are likely to have the most capacity to reverse current trends of decline and improve expected outcomes are in relation to:

• growing inequality,

• loss of rights, open governance and transparency,

• exclusion from participation in our own democracy,

• unethical governance,

• economic decline,

• inertia in decarbonisation,

• loss of social cohesion,

• and declining wellbeing and happiness.

These are all areas where policy choices are still largely within our control. We are still free to make the necessary better choices to reverse our poor trends of performance in these areas. Matters there are not yet completely out of hand. They are very close to being (if not already) out of hand in other areas, such as climate change. Nevertheless, there is capacity – human and financial – to restore and secure our wellbeing by abandoning a number of failed policies in the areas I’ve just cited and replacing them with policies which obviously arc towards fulfilment of our longer term aims.

This will involve rejecting neoliberalism and establishing instead a system with fair competition between the public and private sectors, fair taxation, universal income and services security, and a facility that gives Australians a greater say in how their taxes are raised and spent. This is in no way beyond the capacity of Australians.

The most important first step

The key to a successful reversal of fortunes, however, is likely to reside first and foremost in Australia’s capacity to strengthen its institutions of democracy and our ethics in using those institutions. That is core to our chances of a better life. Our capacity to build a true democracy of political equals, including by building a new Constitution that accords a reasonable share of power to the people of Australia, is fundamental to whether we will find ourselves able to compose a happy answer to the question many are asking since the election of another Trump government in America, and that question is: Can Australia avoid the sort of democratic and social decline so evident in America in the age of Trump?

Readers wishing to explore more about how a program of reform to build a democratic constitution for Australia can significantly improve our chances of securing our wellbeing and social cohesion can scan the resources available on ACFP’s webpage on a National Collaborative Constitutional Convention. This program is in its infancy but it has more potential than almost any other reform to secure a future of safety, freedom, rights and prosperity for all Australians.

In the next and final article in this series about The State of Australia 2025 I’ll describe some aspects of the sort of future we can expect if we and our governments persist with failed policies and refuse to undertake systemic reform. It is not a happy prospect but I’ll also expand on what we can do to give ourselves the best chance of reversing that fate.

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