WeRise · Pillar 4
Economy & Work
Reclaiming the profits for those who really create them.
Every dollar of profit made in this country was created by someone's labour, on someone's land, using infrastructure someone's taxes built.
What Economy & Work covers
Economy & 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.
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 ran on what was later called the Australian Settlement: tariffs that protected local industry, a court that set wages, and a strong public role in essential services. It was imperfect. It rested in part on the White Australia policy and shut many people out. But it shared the gains of growth widely among those it included.
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. In 2017 the last car built in Australia rolled off the line.
Whether that trade was worth it, and for whom, is still one of the country's central arguments.
How it is seen now
Today the debate is about who carries the load. Workers see wages struggling to keep pace with prices and profits. Governments see a tax base leaning heavily on income tax. The pandemic showed how much the country relies on supply chains it does not control.
There is also fresh interest in older ideas: making things here again, and ownership models such as co-operatives and mutuals, where the people who use a business also own it.
Why these 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.
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 & Corporate Reform
Whose Economy Is It?
Who really pays for the country, and who quietly does not?
Read the Tax & 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 & Community Ownership
Built Together
What if the people who used a business also owned it?
Read the Co-operatives & Community Ownership policy →
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Last reviewed 9 October 2026 · Published by Atlas Media