Australia — the land of dreamy beaches, incredible fauna and flora, the stargazers destination, and endless bureaucracy. Indeed, the country is deeply entrenched in fairness and balance (note sarcasm) — but is it fair? Australia’s neutral underbelly is not a democratic virtue. Australia’s two major parties project adversarial theater, but converge on several fundamental issues — deeply enmeshed with mining and energy giants, to banks and developers. This bipartisan consensus is a form of neutrality: an agreed set of economic and policy settings that remain largely unchallenged no matter who wins office.
Few areas show elite consensus better than Australia’s approach to fossil fuels. Successive governments may differ in climate rhetoric, but both Labor and Coalition governments have supported expanding coal and gas. Political donation data reveals the extent of this bipartisan wooing. In just one year (2021–22), the Labor, Liberal, and National parties combined received $241 million in donations from coal and gas corporations and their lobby groups. In 2023-24, 85 per cent of a total $166 million in donations went to the two major parties, with Anthony Pratt and Gina Rinehart leading the helm for Labor and Liberal respectively.
Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd recounted how three global mining giants ran an all-out campaign to kill his 2010 mining super-profits tax, pouring $22 million into lobbying and advertising that ultimately helped topple Rudd from power. By 2017, mining companies spent over $540 million through peak lobby groups to influence Australian governments, an investment that paid off in weakened regulations and tax breaks. The ‘resource curse’ in Australia is less about geology than politics: voters may demand climate action or tax justice, but a well-funded mineral lobby can ensure those mandates are quietly shelved.
It is routine for big resource companies to hedge their bets with donations to each major party, ensuring access and influence regardless of who is in power. The return on investment is obvious: both major parties have blessed projects like Woodside’s Scarborough gas field (dubbed a ‘carbon bomb’ by activists) and the opening of new coal basins. Labor’s recent ‘gas strategy’, for instance, doubles down on gas as a long-term pillar of Australia’s energy — a plan climate groups condemned as a betrayal of Australia’s climate commitments. While Labor couches it in transitional language, the Liberals openly push for more fossil fuel use. The end result is the same: Australia remains one of the world’s largest fossil fuel exporters, with policies friendly to industry. Neutralising dissent on this — whether by sidelining climate protesters or by co-opting the debate with technocratic talk of ‘balance’ in emissions policy — has been critical to preserving that arrangement.
Big money leads to no real change, from maintaining regressive tax cuts for the rich to approving new fossil fuel projects, policies that benefit donors sail through with bipartisan ease. For instance, both parties remain committed to Stage 3 income tax cuts, a $254 billion package that “overwhelmingly benefits high-income earners”. Despite public outcry, both Labor and Coalition governments have been loath to seriously regulate political donations or introduce real-time transparency — tellingly, their recent “reform” deal still allows individual donations up to $50,000 and delays spending caps until 2028. The charade of campaign finance reform shows how the fox and henhouse have merged: those in power craft rules to preserve their financial advantages, all while trumpeting the integrity of Australian democracy.
The system is so opaque that up to 85 per cent of political donations can be hidden. That means the public often doesn’t even know which companies or tycoons are bankrolling the major parties, nor how deeply those funders shape policy. What we do know is telling: mining magnate Gina Rinehart, for example, has been the Coalition’s second-largest disclosed donor, funneling $500,000 via her company in one year. Rinehart’s influence was evident when the Coalition vehemently opposed Labor’s modest industrial relations reforms in 2023 — reforms she personally lobbied against, and which would have curbed practices that allow mining companies to underpay workers.
Corporate donors give money to both major parties. This isn’t about ideological alignment — it’s about ensuring access and influence no matter who is in power. By supporting both sides, corporations encourage a kind of neutrality in policymaking: a refusal to challenge the status quo too deeply. Radical reform — whether it’s on taxation, labour rights, or environmental regulation — threatens profit margins i.e. encouraging bipartisan consensus helps maintain regulatory inertia, where nothing major changes.
Even on Indigenous issues, ostensibly about rights and recognition, corporate interests loom. Many big resource companies publicly supported the Voice (seeing constitutional stability as good for business), but behind the scenes, none were probably too upset by a return to “business as usual” after its defeat. Resource development on Indigenous land — from mining in the Pilbara to fracking in the NT’s Beetaloo Basin — enjoys bipartisan political backing, often over Indigenous objections.
When Rio Tinto infamously blew up the Juukan Gorge sacred caves in 2020, there was widespread condemnation, yet legislation to strengthen cultural heritage protection has stalled. Why? Mining lobby pressure on both state and federal levels. In the Northern Territory, a controversial gas project at Middle Arm, Darwin, received $1.5 billion in federal funding branded as a “sustainable development” — even though documents showed it is primarily a petrochemical and Liquefied Natural Gas export hub. Both major parties supported this under the neutral language of jobs and development, effectively sidelining Indigenous environmental concerns in the area.
The ongoing housing policy fiasco (which brings to question the standard of economics degrees) is another example of maintaining ‘neutral’ reform. During his time as Prime Minister from 1996 to 2007, John Howard introduced a series of tax reforms that quietly reshaped the Australian housing market. Most notably, in 1999, his government brought in a 50 per cent discount on capital gains tax (CGT) for individuals. This meant that if you sold an asset like property after holding it for at least 12 months, only half the profit would be taxed. In simple terms, the longer you sit on a property, the more you stand to gain — and pay less tax doing so.
At the same time, Howard reinforced negative gearing, a policy that lets property investors deduct rental losses from their taxable income. So even if your rental income didn’t cover your mortgage, you could claim that shortfall as a tax break. Together, these policies transformed housing into a powerful wealth-generating asset — especially for higher-income earners. While not an official policy, they created the perfect conditions for what’s now referred to as land banking, where developers or investors hold onto land or homes, wait for prices to peak, and then sell or rent them out.
The long-term impact was a tightening grip on housing affordability. These incentives drove up demand and property prices while doing little to directly boost supply. First-home buyers found themselves increasingly locked out of the market, while investors enjoyed generous tax concessions.
Despite widespread criticism, neither major party has repealed these core policies. Labor floated plans to limit negative gearing and reduce the CGT discount in the 2016 and 2019 elections but dropped them after losing both contests. The Albanese government, elected in 2022, has kept these tax structures in place. Similarly, Howard-era rules that allow self-managed super funds (SMSFs) to borrow for property investment remain unchanged; as of 2024, SMSFs hold over $135 billion in real estate.
Scott Morrison, first as Treasurer and later as PM, also avoided touching these pillars of Australia’s investment landscape. Although he once acknowledged concerns about “excesses” in negative gearing, no significant reforms were made under his leadership. Instead, Morrison introduced narrower tweaks: in 2017, he limited depreciation deductions for second-hand properties to curb aggressive tax write-offs, and in 2021, expanded SMSFs to allow up to six members — further encouraging property pooling through superannuation.
Now, both parties are proposing housing policies that do not address any of this, instead coming up with ‘solutions’ that will propound the crisis further down the line (Duttons’ in particular, but this isn’t the article for that discussion).
In short, the tax rules that helped turn property into an investment class rather than a social good have not only endured across governments — they’ve been structurally reinforced. What began as investment incentives under Howard have helped fuel speculative behaviour and worsening inequality in the housing market, with neither party willing to dismantle the system.
Democratic rituals like Parliamentary Question Time, committee hearings, and press conferences are theatrics of accountability. In reality, governments with a majority often ram through decisions without consensus, and election promises are routinely broken or watered down (with minimal consequences beyond some media scolding). Scandals erupt — for instance over misuse of public funds, conflicts of interest — but usually fade with a resignation or two. Very rarely are politicians individually held to account in a legal sense. The “sports rorts” affair, the Robodebt scheme, and other episodes showed a pattern: months of revelations, a flurry of outrage, then a return to business. Voters might punish a government at the next poll, yet the incoming leaders tend to be from the same establishment class, often reversing a few of their predecessors’ policies. This cycle can feel like a ritual cleansing without systemic change. Even the Voice referendum itself can be seen as a kind of symbolic exercise: a grand democratic event (the first referendum in decades) that in the end changed nothing material for Indigenous people — but affirmed the power of majority sentiment over minority rights.
Some commentators argued the referendum served to legitimize the status quo, because once the people said “No”, the implication was that justice had been served procedurally, regardless of the substantive issue of Indigenous disadvantage. In short, the motions of democracy are carried out diligently, but the substance of democracy — meaningful choices, responsiveness to citizen demands, equitable representation — is lacking.
In Australian politics, the neutral middle ground is heavily policed — and it happens to align with corporate and elite interests. Major party consensus on key economic settings (low corporate tax, high resource extraction, limited redistribution) is rarely broken. Those who challenge it — whether Green MPs calling out coal and gas, or independents pushing for gambling reform — are painted as fringe or irresponsible. Meanwhile, voters are assured that the system is balanced and moderate, producing sensible centrist policies.
The truth is that on issues like climate action, wealth inequality, or First Nations justice, the center in parliament is well to the right of public opinion. Neutrality in the form of bipartisan agreement has meant slow progress and watered-down reforms. It’s telling that when the Labor government did establish a National Anti-Corruption Commission in 2023, it implicated dozens of former officials — a sign of how unaccountable and opaque the “business-as-usual” consensus had become. Corporate capture thrives in an environment where dissent is muted and both sides appear to the public as simply two variations of one ideology.
This is where the myth of neutrality collapses. Far from a moral high ground, neutrality often preserves an elite consensus. It creates false equivalence between reform and regression, real change and cosmetic tweaks. It ensures the political center remains well to the right of public opinion — on climate, inequality, Indigenous justice.
When neutrality is wielded as balance, it becomes the shield for authority. It tells voters that moderation is stability, even when the system is unjust. Democracy becomes a performance — a stage-managed ritual rather than a responsive institution.
But no, Australia’s democratic institutions are not collapsing. Elections will continue. Debates will happen. But they will occur within carefully policed boundaries — where power remains undisturbed and neutrality is weaponised to delegitimise challenge. Neutrality, when absolutised, becomes the side of inertia.
