WeRise · Pillar 4
Economy and Work
Reclaiming the profits for those who really create them.
Economy and Work brings together fair taxation, manufacturing and community ownership. It asks who creates prosperity, who shares in it, and how the rules can support useful work, productive businesses and the communities around them.
What Economy and Work covers
Economy and Work is about the rules that decide who keeps the wealth a country creates together: how the tax system treats wages, profits and resources; whether Australia still makes things; and whether the people who do the work can also own a share of it.
The question is not whether wealth should be created. It should. The question is who gets to keep it, and who wrote the rules that decide.
Consider a small manufacturer deciding whether to buy equipment and train an apprentice. Tax rules, access to finance, energy costs and the ability to find customers all enter the decision. The people doing the work have their own questions about wages, security and a voice in the business. This pillar asks us to consider those interests together, rather than treating a successful business and a secure worker as competing ambitions.
Fair rules are not the enemy of prosperity. They are its foundation.
How Australia has seen the economy and work
For much of the twentieth century, Australia's economic arrangements combined tariffs protecting local industry, centralised wage setting and a strong public role in essential services. These arrangements were not equally open to everyone. The White Australia policy and other forms of exclusion belong in that history too. Looking back means examining both the protections people valued and the people those protections left out.
From the 1980s that model was taken apart. The dollar was floated in 1983, tariffs fell, and public enterprises such as the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas were sold. The economy grew and opened to the world. Holden ended its Australian manufacturing operations in October 2017. That closure remains a reference point in debates about local industrial capability.
Whether that trade was worth it, and for whom, is still one of the country's central arguments.
Economy and Work in everyday life
Today the questions are practical as well as political: what can a wage buy, how should the tax burden be shared, and which goods should Australia be able to make? A household budget, a small business deciding whether to invest, and a community considering its future can all bring different answers to the same economic debate.
There is also interest in older ideas: making things here, and ownership models such as co-operatives, where members own the business. Ownership alone does not settle questions of good management, fair conditions or long-term viability. Those still need careful design and scrutiny.
A town considering a community-owned service faces another set of choices. Who can become a member? How are decisions made? Who carries a loss, and what happens to a surplus? These are useful questions even before anyone proposes a particular structure. The point is to make ownership understandable, so people can judge the opportunities and responsibilities for themselves. This is an illustrative situation, not a claim about a named project.
Why the Economy and Work policies belong together
Tax, manufacturing and community ownership share one question: does the economy serve the people in it, or do the people serve the economy? Tax decides what a society can afford. Manufacturing decides what it can make for itself. Ownership decides who benefits when things go well.
Change one and the others shift. A fairer tax system can fund new industry, and new industry can be owned, in part, by the communities around it.
Start with Tax and Corporate Reform for the rules governing revenue and accountability. Manufacturing considers the capacity to produce useful goods. Co-operatives and Community Ownership explores who can hold a stake and participate in decisions. Read together, they invite a broader test of economic policy: does a proposal support worthwhile activity, share responsibilities fairly and leave communities with choices they can sustain?
The Common Wealth is not nostalgia. It is a reckoning.
The policies in this pillar
Three ideas, one economy. Pick the one you care about.
Tax and Corporate Reform
Whose Economy Is It?
Who really pays for the country, and who quietly does not?
Read the Tax and Corporate Reform policy →Manufacturing
Built Here, Built Well
What happens to a nation that forgets how to make things?
Read the Manufacturing policy →Co-operatives and Community Ownership
Built Together
What if the people who used a business also owned it?
Read the Co-operatives and Community Ownership policy →
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Last reviewed 9 October 2026 · Published by Atlas Media