After more than a century of Federation and countless social experiments, you’d think Australia would have learned from the mother country how not to wreck an economy or an immigration system. Yet here we are in 2025, shackled to laws and institutions that guarantee only one thing: the slow, grinding slide down the global economic ladder.
Australia has slipped from 5th in the OECD for GDP per capita in the 1970s to around 16th today. Productivity growth has just marked its worst year since the 1970s, and real household disposable income has fallen back to 2008 levels. The RBA admits Australians have endured the sharpest income collapse in the OECD over the past two years — down 8 per cent, while most others rose. And thanks to our Senate, even if we woke up tomorrow and wanted to legislate away the anchors holding us back, there’s no way out. The upper house is a permanent veto machine, uninterested in cutting loose the dead hand of government.
Back in the old mother country, the UK’s story looks eerily familiar. Growth is anaemic, public debt sits at 95–96 per cent of GDP, and household incomes are still 3.5 per cent below pre-pandemic levels and falling. The once-sacred National Health System is groaning under a 7.3 million patient backlog, with thousands more being added by the endless stream of boats landing at Dover. The UK has slipped from 4th in the OECD for GDP per capita in the 1970s to around 20th today. Its productivity growth has stalled, and the country’s global competitiveness has eroded, now ranking well behind emerging economies. These issues are compounding the strain on an already overstretched welfare system, with the working class feeling the pinch more than ever.
So, what went wrong with the UK and Australian political systems that both countries are now on a slow downward path to economic ruin? Let’s go through the list of policy failures, starting with the cult of climate change and the race to net zero. Both countries, in their infinite wisdom, drank the carbon-neutral Kool-Aid and made the fatal mistake of legislating targets into law — something that smart countries like Russia, China, India, and the United States refused to do.
Britain hard-wired net zero into its economy back in 2019, when they should have been throwing it out the window along with the EU. Australia followed suit in 2022 with a legislated 43 per cent cut by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Both economies have made their export backbones hostage to climate policy: Britain throttling North Sea oil and gas, Australia strangling coal and LNG — even though LNG alone earned us $220 billion last year. Despite all the talk of the wind and sun being free — a notion as naive as claiming horsepower pulled by horses is free energy — the reality of economics has seen energy bills surge, industries fold, and both nations pushed to dream of “green hydrogen” and “green steel.” These fantasies rely on cheap power, but the dream has turned into a nightmare of new transmission lines criss-crossing our rural landscapes along with growing numbers of failing industries.
On industrial relations, Australia has already rewound the clock to 1974. Multi-employer bargaining, union vetoes, mandatory consultation — all the productivity handbrakes are back. In the UK, 1974 was the start of the downward run to the era of the Winter of Discontent.
After those dark days and the light of the Thatcher reform years the UK has again shackled itself with stagnant productivity, a minimum wage now over £11.44 an hour, and workforce participation at its weakest since the 1990s, largely due to millions being on long-term sickness claims. The result? Both countries have priced themselves out of competitiveness: Australia by boasting the world’s highest minimum wage at $24.10 an hour and offering a permanent escape from work by claiming disability. Different paths, same dead end — higher costs, lower productivity, and no easy way back.
Both countries are sick, almost terminally so. Australia’s NDIS already costs $42 billion a year, nearly 10 per cent of federal spending, and Treasury projects it will almost double to $90 billion by 2034 — rising at about 13 per cent a year, far faster than GDP. In the UK, the NHS is swallowing £180 billion annually, close to 10 per cent of GDP, yet waiting lists are stuck at 7.3 million and climbing. Different schemes, same outcome: endless demand, long waiting lists, declining results. Both are fiscal sinkholes — politically untouchable, financially unsustainable, and a huge magnet for migrants.
On immigration, both Australia and the UK seem locked in a race to atone for their past by diluting their national identities. In 2023, Australia set a record with 518,000 net arrivals — the fastest per-capita growth in the OECD. But rather than using our reputation as a wealthy, free, liberal democracy to attract the best and brightest who can contribute meaningfully, we seem intent on importing the weakest, the illiterate, and those who not only fail to reflect our values but actively despise them — all while many can’t even speak English.
The UK has followed a similar path, but since Labour’s election, immigration numbers have been kept high, with 50,000 mostly Muslim men arriving via fast boats. The result is a nation overwhelmed by unsustainable pressures: soaring rents, overwhelmed services, and an underclass that strains the welfare system. In the UK, the Labour government has learned little from their left-wing cousins down under, Gillard and Rudd, who failed to stop the boats. The lesson from Howard was for all to see but even Boris Johnson failed to follow the example and impose the UK’s version of the desert island solution. The Tories lacked the courage to send their refugees off to the Falklands to enjoy a life of British hospitality in a tent in the South Atlantic.
On housing, both countries are hell-bent on making our youth reliant on the state as renters rather than homeowners. In Sydney, the average rent for a three-bedroom unit is $4,000 per month, while in London it’s $4,500, which is insane when both cities have land to spare. Don’t want to rent in the big global cities? Decide to move to Perth or Manchester, only to find the rent is still hefty — $3,250 and $3,687 respectively. These prices are pushing young people to stay at home because they can’t afford home ownership.
Want to buy? Well, back in 2000, the median Australian house price was around $169,000. Today, it has exploded to $925,000 — a more than 440 per cent increase in under a quarter of a century, one of the fastest rises in the developed world. In the UK, their average dog box house cost about £84,000 in 2000. Today it is £286,000 — a rise of 240 per cent, still massive, but slower than Australia’s turbo-charged property inflation.
Britain, however, is on the same treadmill, but with the added complication of refugees being put up in five-star hotels, while working-class Brits are stuck in overcrowded slums, straight out of the TV show The Bill. This scenario underscores the dire situation facing young people in both countries — renting for life, priced out of ownership, and saddled with the burdens of government policies that make home ownership increasingly out of reach.
On skills, both governments talk endlessly about “future jobs” and “upskilling,” but apprenticeships are falling off a cliff. In Australia, commencements peaked at 376,000 in 2012. By 2019, they had collapsed to around 160,000 — the lowest in two decades. Even with a pandemic bump, the trend is grim. Today, fewer than 2 per cent of school leavers move directly into a trade apprenticeship, down from 1 in 5 back in the 1980s. Industry warns we’ll be short half a million skilled workers across construction, mechanics, and electrical trades by 2030.
The UK’s story is the same. In 2016–17, apprenticeship starts stood at 494,000. By 2021–22, they had fallen to 337,000 — down 30 per cent in five years. Starts for under-19s have been hit hardest, falling nearly 45 per cent since the apprenticeship levy was introduced. Whole industries are left relying on migrant labour, legal and illegal, with no qualifications. Different systems, same hollowing out.
At university level, both countries have effectively sold their higher education systems to the world, making our universities delude themselves they are more prestigious while locking our home grown kids into overcrowded classes filled with foreign students who can barely speak English. These students often have one goal: passing the migration test between shifts driving Uber. Meanwhile, the Aussie and British students are left to handle the group assignments. This has created a situation where our educational institutions have become magnets for international students, but at the expense of the quality of education for local youth.
We delude ourselves we are global players when all we have become are magnets to attract the male youth from failed or illiberal states who simply want access to our welfare systems and cash jobs while keeping their TVs tuned not to local cricket or football, but to influencers who rail against Western values.
While the developing world flocks to the UK and Australia to enjoy the cradle-to-grave welfare state without picking up a trowel or spanner, our brightest kids — armed with keyboards and coding skills — are heading straight to the airport, seeking to escape the slow decline and mounting cost-of-living pressures of dying economies and cultures.
For younger Australians and Britons alike, the U.S. has become the new destination of choice. Despite all the wailing from the green left that Trump is the devil incarnate and the America has gone to the dogs the siren call of the USA still offers what neither Canberra nor Westminster can: scale, high wages, venture capital, and a sense of opportunity. Our best and brightest are heading offshore and the number of Brits heading west dwarfs those still heading to New Holland. If current trends continue, the next ‘brain drain’ won’t be between Britain and Australia — it’ll be out of both, across the Pacific.
And finally, both Australia and the UK seem to view their farmers as part of the solution to their fiscal irresponsibility. They are actively targeting what they deem the rural aristocracy, deserving of land taxes to fund the endless demands of the welfare state and the none English-speaking welfare recipients. In Australia, under Labor’s proposed superannuation tax, farmers who have invested their life’s work into rural properties will be unfairly hit, with their farmland being treated as just another asset in a portfolio. Meanwhile, the UK is not far behind, with the government taxing farm inheritance by adding 20 per cent to inheritance tax on family farms, pushing these properties into the hands of foreign owners.
But there is one major difference between the two countries. As bad as Britain looks, they at least have an escape hatch. Their House of Lords can delay but not veto. Under the Parliament Acts, a determined Commons majority can push through reform in a single Parliament. They’re always just one Thatcher-grade majority away from ripping up the script. Australia? We’re locked in. The Senate ensures no rollback of the Climate Change Act, no industrial relations reset, no rethink of migration, no NDIS fix, no solution to the housing, training, or university systems. Deadlock and drift are guaranteed.
Britain can still turn if it dares. We can only watch as the Senate debates and dismisses every reform idea the Libs and Nats put up — that is, if the Coalition even have any ideas of their own.
Yes, both nations are tumbling down the same economic rabbit hole — net zero, mass migration, debt and welfare sinkholes, declining living standards. The difference is Britain could, if it chose, pull itself back up. Australia can’t. We’ve legislated ourselves into decline, and unlike the mother country, there’s no way out.
