The Underclass - Part V: No Clean Endings
The Policy (Not Really), the Limits, and an Uncomfortable Ending
I don’t really have a solution.
And I want to be very clear about that.
I’m not an economist. I’m not a politician. I’m not a planner with access to modelling, budgets, or trade-off simulations. I’m just one person who can see the shape of the problem clearly enough to know that it’s bigger than me, and bigger than a tidy listicle of fixes.
That said, I can see where the pressure points are. And I can make some very broad, very imperfect statements and hope that someone with actual power, and ideally a functioning moral compass, does something with them.
Albo, if you’re reading, no pressure.
Infrastructure Is the Real Battlefield
If there’s a single thread running through all of this, it’s infrastructure.
Not vibes.
Not bootstraps.
Not “just learn a new skill.”
Infrastructure.
Australia is slowly drifting toward a future where we’ll need sci-fi-looking concrete megastructures just to house people who are already working. Not because it’s aspirational, but because the alternative is tents, cars, and couches.
We need large-scale, genuinely affordable housing.
And yes, that’s uncomfortable to say. These buildings won’t be pretty. They won’t be aspirational. They won’t make it onto architecture Instagram. I probably wouldn’t want to live in them myself.
But they’re better than the street.
Right now, we keep pretending affordability can be solved with incentives and tweaks. It can’t. Not at the scale we need. We’re short on supply, and the market will not fix that on its own.
Which brings us to the next problem.
Gentrification Isn’t Neutral
We also need to stop pretending gentrification is an accidental side effect.
When low-income suburbs are redeveloped into “planned CBDs” or luxury zones, the original residents don’t magically upgrade with the area. They’re displaced.
Southport. Labrador. You can see it in real time.
Without policies that actively protect lower-income housing stock, we don’t get mixed communities. We get forced relocation. Eventually, slums, just dressed up as “urban renewal.”
Yes, there are already measures in place:
Commonwealth Rent Assistance,
social housing,
planning incentives.
But the balance clearly isn’t there yet. The numbers don’t lie. Working homelessness is rising anyway.
Work Has to Be Worth Doing
We also need to talk about jobs.
Specifically:
junior roles,
early-career pathways,
and whether companies are actually incentivised to employ and train people here.
Right now, Australia is excellent at producing talent, and increasingly bad at keeping it. Companies grow here, then offshore labour the moment it becomes cheaper. Entire industries hollow out because it’s easier to operate elsewhere.
Globalisation isn’t evil. But total dependence on it is corrosive.
We need incentives for:
junior and entry-level roles,
domestic employment,
and long-term skill development.
Not because nostalgia, but because without them, class mobility stalls at the starting line.
Wages, Laws, and the Shape of Modern Work
Work also needs to provide stability again.
That means:
strong minimum wages,
labour laws that actually apply to gig and platform work,
protections that reflect how people actually work now.
A job shouldn’t mean:
“You’re one unexpected expense away from homelessness.”
If it does, then the system is broken, no matter how flexible or innovative it claims to be.
Education Still Matters (But It’s Not a Magic Wand)
Access to education remains one of the few proven mobility levers we have.
Free TAFE. Expanded university places. Lifelong learning pathways. These are good things. Necessary things.
But education alone doesn’t solve housing.
It doesn’t solve job scarcity.
It doesn’t solve automation.
Education only works if there’s something to step into on the other side.
Safety Nets Aren’t Weakness
Finally, we need to stop treating safety nets like moral failures.
People fall. Systems shock. Lives unravel.
Targeted support, for domestic violence survivors, people with mental health challenges, families in crisis, isn’t charity. It’s damage control in a system that produces casualties by design.
If setbacks permanently trap people at the bottom, mobility isn’t real. It’s decorative.
The Truth Nobody Likes
Here’s the part people don’t want to hear:
There is no clean solution.
Every lever breaks something else.
Every reform creates a trade-off.
Throwing money at problems won’t magically fix them, but refusing to spend guarantees they get worse.
This is political work. Structural work. Long-term work.
And I’m not the person who gets to decide how it’s done.
So… The Conclusion
I don’t really know.
That’s the honest ending.
It’s become a bit of a running joke that my articles keep getting darker and less hopeful. Maybe that’s my mood. Maybe it’s the times. Maybe it’s because these are foundational shifts, and foundational shifts are never comfortable.
Some of these problems are genuinely beyond my skillset. Beyond my influence. Beyond what I can meaningfully change right now.
And yeah, that sucks.
But pretending everything’s fine would suck more.
I do want to write something happier soon. That’s a personal goal. But for now, this is where the thinking landed.
Which brings us, inevitably, to the final irony.
A Utopian Solution
(Provided by Our New Machine Gods)
“In a just society, technology amplifies human potential rather than replacing it.
Housing is treated as infrastructure, not speculation.
Work provides dignity and stability, not constant precarity.
Education is continuous and accessible.
And productivity gains are shared, not hoarded.”
— ChatGPT, 2026
And my response:
See? Riveting.
Even replaced the possibility of my own solution-thinking.
Welcome to the future.